Life

The foreign missions: Good news for the Church in Ireland today?

The people of Ireland have a long and noble history of going to far-off lands to spread the good news to the missions and work among the most disadvantaged communities, writes Dr Aidan Donaldson.

Dr Aidan Donaldson during work in Zambia
Dr Aidan Donaldson during work in Zambia Dr Aidan Donaldson during work in Zambia

The Irish missionary tradition stretches back 1,500 years to the era of 'saints and scholars' of the golden age of the Celtic Church and is associated with the travels of those such as Colmcille, Columbanus, Aidan of Iona and Brendan the Sailor, all of whom took the exhortation of Jesus in the Great Commission 'to go and spread the good news to the whole world' literally.

And it was not just simply preaching the Word of God that this first explosion of Irish missionaries to go did to the very ends of the then 'known world' - and beyond.

These pergerini pro Christo ('pilgrims for Christ') established monasteries, schools, libraries, centres of learning, hospitals, hospices, shelters for the destitute and whatever else they saw as springing from the Gospel message to 'love one another as I have loved you'.

This tradition did not survive the colonisation of Ireland beginning in the twelfth century and continuing for the following centuries. It was not until the nineteenth century that the Irish tradition of Christian missionary outreach was revived.

The sheer scale of missionary activity over the past decades has been remarkable. It would seem that at one time almost every family in countries such as Ireland had some member or friend `in the missions'.

There still more than 2,000 Irish people in active service in the missions. Their contribution in the areas of healthcare, famine relief, education and (especially since Vatican II) advocacy and justice is a story that should be shared and celebrated.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, more than 25 per cent of healthcare and education provision is provided by Catholic missionary orders.

The self-sacrifice of those who have gone to the missions is almost impossible to comprehend. In their thousands they left their homes and embraced a new and often unknown world. They had to learn new languages and adopt new cultures and different ways of living.

They had to face difficulties and challenges and endure hardship and suffering. Some were imprisoned and many expelled by authorities that feared their work on behalf of the marginalised and voiceless. Some were killed by oppressive regimes and by virtue of working in conflict situations, others by those who saw missionaries as targets for robbery.

Many died due to diseases such as black water fever, yellow fever and malaria. Many more returned home their health destroyed. And yet, despite the cost and self-sacrifice, those in the missions steadfastly continue their work in a spirit of quiet and unaware heroism and love.

It would seem undeniable that the days when the Western Church sent missionaries to the developing world is coming to an end. The average age of a missionary is now over 70 and the religious orders are attracting few new vocations.

The developing world is now providing its own priests and religious and in numbers that any vocations director in the west could only now dream of. Missionaries from the western world are no longer needed - even if they were available as Africa, Latin America and the other regions are now producing their own missionaries who, like the Irish in the recent past, hear the cry of the poor and respond to bring them the Good News and all care associated with that.

This is in marked contradistinction with the dramatic fall in vocations in the developed world. The vocations crisis in the western Church is symptomatic of the crisis in spirituality that the recent decades of secularism, materialism and consumerism have brought about. It now seems that the western world has now become new missionary territory and that it is the people here who need to hear the good news.

Our own marginalised - alienated young people, ex-offenders, older people, victims of substance abuse, the unemployed and others who feel that they are not valued by society - are precisely the same audience whom Jesus addressed in the Sermon on the Mount and told them that they were blessed and that the Kingdom of God was for them.

Some in Ireland today may see the foreign missions as the salvation for the Church with our recent and somewhat dramatic downturn in religious vocations. Some hope that the developing world may provide the priests and religious for the Church in the west. This won't happen as the growth of the Church in the former missions requires all of these new vocations.

The needs of the people in the margins - both spiritual and physical - are great and increasing with the HIV/AIDS pandemic and its accompanying orphan crisis adding yet another layer of pain to the countless millions who are forced to exist in conditions of grinding poverty and deprivation.

Furthermore, looking towards the developing world to provide the 'spiritual personnel' for the western church misses the point entirely; namely that all of us - as followers of the young rabbi from Nazareth - are called to be (in the words of Pope Francis) 'missionary disciples'. To be disciple is to be missionary and to go out into the world from our sacred spaces and to announce the good news and especially the poor, the down-trodden and all others in the margins.

If we do have the courage to take up the challenge of Pope Francis and become 'missionary disciples' and a 'poor Church' as he desires, then the Church in Ireland would indeed be very different to the one we have today and its impact on those who feel unvalued, abandoned, alienated, without hope or otherwise marginalised would be remarkable indeed. At the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in 2012 Fr Peter McVerry's outlined what the good news lived out in society may look like:

"In a community that loves one another, there should be no-one poor, (unless all are poor); there should be no-one homeless, no-one lonely, no-one sick or alone without visitors, no-one in prison who has been abandoned and written off, there should be no-one rejected or marginalised."

If we embrace this opportunity and gift of `reverse mission' there will be a wonderful re-vitalisation of the Churches in the affluent world and the Christian Churches in the west who have contributed so much over many decades to marginalised people in the developing world may well benefit from a rich harvest that has been planted by those such as the Irish missionaries.

Perhaps it is only our engagement with poor and excluded (both globally and locally) that will rescue our society from the shallow values of greed, materialism and individualism. It certainly would be a remarkable and fitting tribute to those generations of people who have performed `ordinary miracles' on a daily basis in the missions if their sacrifice does lead to the renewal of the Church in Ireland today.

:: Dr Aidan Donaldson, who works in the foreign missions in Zambia, is a retired teacher who now works with Catholic schools in Down and Connor.