A FEW YEARS ago I got talking to a nun at an Irish Embassy reception
in South Africa.
I decided there and then I was going to write a book
about missionaries.
It seems a bit impulsive now.
Stupid perhaps, given
how unfashionable all things church are these days.
There was never
going to be a publishers’ bidding war over the title.
But this nun
reeled me in.
She told me about her work in crime-ridden neighbourhoods
and prisons, how she counselled young rapists and murderers, how she’d
survived close scrapes down the years and how she planned to live out
the rest of her life – and be buried – in Africa.
I’d had similar
conversations with missionaries elsewhere, but this sprightly, defiantly
upbeat sandal-wearing septuagenarian unsettled and agitated me.
I
realised something quite obvious but also, it seemed to me, profound:
she had once been a young woman with her own hopes and dreams.
Did she
ever want to get married or have a paid career?
Did she really know what
she was getting herself into when she filled out a recruitment coupon
on the back of a missionary newsletter a half-century ago?
Why did she
now speak of Ireland disappointedly?
Thus began my journey into
the world of missionaries. I met dozens of priests and nuns working in
Africa, Asia and South America. I met people who worked alongside them
and people in a position to judge their work objectively. I devoured
literature on the subject.
The aim was not just to write the inside
story of the missionary movement but also to evaluate its legacy and its
contribution to both Ireland and the world.
To my amazement I
discovered that almost every publication on missionaries had been
written by religious congregations themselves and, with the exception of
an (admittedly excellent) 20-year-old title by Edmund M Hogan, a member
of and historian to the Society of African Missions, no general
analysis or history of the subject had been published.
The
information gap was compounded by the fact that Catholic missionary
societies – and there are more than 80 of them in Ireland – act
independently of one another. Each has its own archive and none rates
record-keeping particularly highly when compared with the pressing,
human demands of the field.
There still is, for example, no complete
record of all the missionaries who died in violent circumstances
overseas.
Another obstacle is getting missionaries to speak openly
and honestly. Some are, perhaps understandably, nervous about talking
to the media.
Others are stubbornly humble, regarding self-promotion as
vaguely distasteful.
The result is that missionaries have something of a
twilight existence, usually entering the public consciousness only when
one of them is kidnapped or killed – and even then the publicity is
short-lived.
Just weeks after Fr Michael Sinnott’s 31-day hostage
ordeal ended in the Philippines last year, the 78-year-old Columban
priest declared: “I’m hoping I can now fade into obscurity again; for me
notoriety is worse than captivity.”
So what can I say I discovered?
Motivations
among missionaries are mixed, and there are plenty of contradictions
and flaws to their enterprise.
For all that, missionaries have done the
State some service. For part of the last century they acted as an
informal diplomatic corps for the newly independent Irish Republic; in
more recent years they played a pivotal role in shaping the State’s
overseas- development policy and in giving birth to a number of national
and international aid agencies, as well as spawning a still-vibrant
volunteering tradition in Ireland.
Missionaries also greatly
enhanced Ireland’s international reputation, something that continues to
have practical benefits today.
The telecoms tycoon Denis O’Brien, for
example, describes missionaries as “advance point people” for Irish
companies trying to break into emerging markets.
The advantages are
heightened where members of the local political and business elite went
through Irish mission schools.
“We got most of our licences in the
Caribbean because we were Irish,” says O’Brien.
While Ireland’s
artistic or cultural heritage might open doors in the United States, he
says: “If you take these [developing] countries, they have never heard
of Seamus Heaney. So it’s really because of the work of missionaries . .
. [who] have effectively created unbelievable goodwill towards
Ireland.”
Calculating the impact of the movement is tricky. You
can cite success stories like the Kenyan environmentalist Wangari
Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, who
credits Irish Loreto Sisters with unlocking her passion for both science
and social justice.
“After my education by the nuns,” she says,
“I emerged as a person who believed that society is inherently good and
that people generally act for the best.”
Or you can estimate the
contribution of individual missionaries, such as Sr Cyril Mooney, a Co
Wicklow native whom the Indian government has credited with helping up
to 450,000 people during her time in Kolkata, where she now runs
education, nutrition and microfinance schemes.
But, however you do
the maths, you can only conclude that the legacy of the missionary
movement is significant.
In fact, it is hard to identify a cultural
phenomenon emanating from the State that has had such a profound
international impact.
That said, the movement’s influence is
fading. There are fewer than 2,000 Irish Catholic missionaries today –
down from a height of 7,000 in the mid 1960s – and the average age is
now well over 70.
Those still active have little desire to return to an
Ireland that is somewhat alien and seemingly hostile.
There are
also dark clouds over missionary organisations, including their handling
of the clerical sexual abuse scandals.
A number of former missionaries
have been prosecuted for offences committed in Ireland, and some of them
have admitted to abusing children on postings overseas.
Religious
congregations have shown no appetite for investigating further, and thus
the true scale of abuse in missionary settings can only be speculated
about.
Here, as in other areas, there is a dichotomy between
individual missionaries and the movement to which they belong.
While
some religious congregations have been slow to respond to abuses in
their midst, the same cannot be said for people like Sr Mary Killeen, a
Sister of Mercy from Phibsborough, in Dublin, who has survived death
threats for her exposure of child sexual abusers, including priests, in
Kenya over the past 20 years.
Or Sr Maura O’Donoghue, a Medical
Missionary of Mary from Kilfenora, in Co Clare, who conducted a
groundbreaking inquiry (the findings of which were suppressed by the
Vatican) into priests’ alleged sexual abuse of nuns in more than 20
countries.
Or Fr Shay Cullen, the Columban priest whose charity in the
Philippines tries to rescue children from prostitution.
Ironically,
individuals such as these display the very characteristics that Ireland
has been calling out for in recent times: rugged determination,
optimism and a sense of public duty that appears to be matched only by
their humility.
So I had to reach the surprising conclusion that,
far from being irrelevant, missionaries are especially prescient today.
At a time when our self-confidence is low they remind us, in an unlikely
way, just what we are capable of.
God’s Entrepreneurs: How Irish
Missionaries Tried to Change the World, by Joe Humphreys, is published
by New Island.
The book includes reports by Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, Sarah
MacDonald and Brian O’Connell on missionary work in Brazil, south Sudan
and India
SIC: IT/IE