A Galway priest has said that Ireland’s missionaries working in developing countries have made themselves redundant by their own success. Writing in The Connaught Telegraph newspaper, Fr Pádraig Standún said the 20th century was “a century of mission in which many missionary orders were founded, flourished and eventually declined, but not before much of the purpose for which they were founded was fulfilled”.
“There is a sense in which Church missions have made themselves redundant by their very success,” he wrote this week in his weekly column.
Fr Standún said that not long ago, most cardinals, bishops and priests in Africa were white. But now, he continued, white clergy were “a rare sight” and most had been replaced by locals.
He said that charges made in the past that missions were a branch of a kind of colonial white rule have proven to be untrue. “They only remained involved as long as they were needed”.
This, he said, mirrored the situation in Ireland where schools and hospitals had been run by the religious until there was a sufficiency of trained lay people to take them over.
“Nuns, brothers and priests organised and maintained a school system for more than a hundred years until there were enough lay teachers to replace them”.
“This is natural and healthy progression and it would be mistaken to hanker back to the way things were”.
Fr Standún said that the rise and fall of the relevance of Western European missionaries should be seen as part of a “natural cycle”.
“When I stand in the ruins of an old church or abbey, I do not see those broken walls as a monument to failure so much as a testament to the time they were founded and flourished before going into decline,” he wrote.
“They were part of a natural cycle, the cycle of one thing growing from another, decline and renewal, as we see it in nature”.
Similarly, he said, the success of Church missions as “the powerhouse of the faith” was now moving “from tired white Europe to the vibrant communities of many colours” which were founded by idealistic people who left Ireland to preach the gospel.
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(Source: CIN)