Martin O'Brien
Aidan Donaldson The Celtic Tiger did more damage to Ireland’s soul than the British did in 800 years, Aidan Donaldson tells Martin O’Brien
You come away from a few hours with Aidan Donaldson uplifted and challenged in equal measure and with a lot of think about.
He says: “The Church has a choice: to keep with the administrative maintenance model of Church that assesses the Catholicity of our people by how many times they go to Mass or to embrace a missionary model based on the radical message of Jesus in the Gospel.”
Missionary disciple (at home and in Africa), social justice activist, Catholic educationalist, intellectual, “adorer of Beethoven”, Celtic supporter and author of five books (the latest inspired by one of his heroes, Pope Francis) he has been an influential figure in the Church, in and beyond his native Belfast and Down and Connor for more than 20 years.
Another hero is St Óscar Romero, “my favourite saint” to whom Aidan Donaldson dedicated his 2012 book Come Follow Me: Recalling the Dangerous Memory of Jesus Christ and the Church Today (Columba) in which he posited that our wounded Church could be renewed by renouncing power and privilege and embracing the radical “dangerous message of Jesus”.
Writing years before the unblocking of Archbishop Romero’s canonisation process by Pope Francis, he described the assassinated archbishop of San Salvador as “prophet, servant of the Church and martyr who remembered the dangerous memory of Jesus”.
We meet in his home in north Belfast, not far from Holy Cross Parish where he was born and went to primary school, and St Malachy’s College where he received his secondary education ahead of his progression to Queen’s University where he graduated in politics and attained a PhD in scholastic philosophy for his research into the Romanian sociologist and philosopher, Lucien Goldmann, that he developed into a book.
Dr Donaldson, aged 63, married to Philomena and the father of three grown up daughters, is a person steeped in the charism of Blessed Edmund Rice and the Christian Brothers and has been the northern bishops’ “go-to person” when it comes to education, being for example the writer of the bishops’ document Proclaiming the Mission: the Distinctive Philosophy and Values of Catholic Education.
A one-time lecturer in scholastic philosophy at Queen’s and at the now defunct St Malachy’s junior seminary in Belfast, he taught religious education for 23 years at St Mary’s Christian Brothers’ Grammar School in the west of the city and also served as chaplain there before assuming his current role as associate consultant to the Catholic Schools Support Service for Down and Connor and a member of the diocese’s missionary leadership team.
Dr Donaldson plays a key leadership role in the Edmund Rice Network and his work with the Christian Brothers’ Developing World Immersion Programme through Project Zambia is highly regarded throughout the network worldwide and the wider Irish missionary movement.
In the course of a conversation in which he cites papal pronouncements on Catholic social teaching with ease, especially the works of Pope Francis, he recalls “two epiphany moments” in Ireland in early middle age that, looking back on it, changed his life and more particularly his sense of his responsibility as a Christian.
And a further two similarly unforgettable moments in Zambia.
The first happened “in 1998 or 1999” when he attended a month-long retreat organised by the Christian Brothers at the Emmaus Centre at Swords and saw and heard Fr Peter McVerry SJ speak for the first time.
He went along thinking that he knew everything about liberation theology because he had read so much “about the God of liberation”.
But he was in for a shock.
“Peter McVerry turned my head upside down. Listening to him I suddenly realised that there was more to being a disciple and to one’s relationship with the poor than I understood from Matthew 25 and ‘I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat’.
“He was saying that it wasn’t that the poor needed us, but that we needed the poor because it is in the poor that we discover God.”
Fr McVerry “had gone beyond liberation theology”.
The second moment came in 2002 when Kevin Burke, his headmaster in St Mary’s CBGS made the seminal decision to establish the St Mary’s Zambia Immersion Programme aka Project Zambia which has resulted inter alia in the building of four schools and an ongoing feeding programme for 85 families or around 400 people in deprived areas around Lusaka.
Aidan wrote a book about the project Encountering God in the Margins – Reflections of a Justice Volunteer (Veritas 2010) and he has been back more than 30 times, most recently for five weeks last summer when he organised a joint missionary outreach programme with Cabrini University, a Catholic seat of learning in Pennsylvania.
He was sceptical about Project Zambia at the start, but it has turned out to be “a wonderful gift” for all involved.
If Project Zambia has transformed Aidan Donaldson two experiences there encapsulate this.
One Sunday in Lusaka after participating in the usual three-hour Mass attended by 2,000 with lots of vibrant singing and dancing, the chair of the parish pastoral council asked him did he receive Communion and if so did he believe in the Real Presence.
When we replied in the affirmative to both questions the man asked him pointedly: “What are you going to do with Jesus? Are you going to keep Him to yourself or are you going to share Him with everyone you meet?”
Aidan says “that hit me for six” because he had gone to Communion so many times without thinking enough about the awesomeness of the Sacrament and “the awesome responsibility” ensuing from receiving it.
“I began to wonder is my faith shallow, do we just obey ritual?
“I have never been able to receive Communion in the same way since. It has completely transformed my understanding of the Eucharist.”
Another experience that lives with Aidan is the day in 2008 when he asked Bro. Jacek Rakowski, a Missionaries of Africa brother from Poland who cares for abused former street children in the Home of Hope rehabilitation centre in Lusaka, how he could help.
“He replied, I want you to look at everyone here and see them as a brother or sister. It would have been easier had he asked me for £10,000.”
Dr Donaldson’s latest book is the best-selling The Beatitudes of Pope Francis – A Manifesto for the Modern Christian (Veritas) which contains penetrating reflections on the six new Beatitudes for the contemporary era promulgated by the Pope in Sweden in 2016, complementing the original Beatitudes proclaimed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.
One reviewer, Dr Gladys Ganiel of Queen’s University described it as “a devotional aid, designed to exhort Christians to see social justice as integral to their faith – and to live that way”.
Aidan is excited by Pope Francis’ repeated message that all the baptised are missionary disciples and agents of evangelisation, is welcoming of his warnings about “pastry shop Catholics” who think that Crosses can be avoided in a world where everything can somehow be as sweet as cake, and energised by the Holy Father’s warnings that spiritual worldliness is a killer.
He echoes one of Pope Francis’ most famous sayings by stating that the Eucharist is not a reward for people who are holy, rather strength or Divine medicine for sinners, because no one is really worthy of the Sacrament.
For Aidan Donaldson, there is no escaping just how hard and challenging it is to take up the Cross and be a follower of Jesus, to get our hands dirty by being side by side with the marginalised and the poor, no talk of “my yoke is easy and my burden is light”.
He elaborates on a chapter in his book Come Follow Me by drawing attention to those who “to protect us from the Gospel message, i.e. renouncing wealth and privilege and feeding and empowering the poor, keep Jesus, God, safe in the tabernacle, accessed only by good people via a very highly clericalised vision of Church”.
He is also critical of the consumerism and individualism that has, he says, taken hold in Ireland, exemplified in people “fighting over things they don’t need on Black Friday”.
Echoing the concerns of those who have said that Ireland has lost her soul, he adds: “The Celtic Tiger did more damage to Ireland than the British did in 800 years.”
Both Aidan and I cannot be but aware that we are meeting in the heart of North Belfast where Aidan grew up and where according to the book Lost Lives 572 human beings were killed during the Troubles, the highest death toll in any location save for West Belfast, where the toll was 698.
How as a young schoolboy did the Troubles impact him, I wonder, remarking to him that he was only a 15-year-old student at St Malachy’s College when a loyalist bomb killed 15 people in McGurk’s bar, a short walk from both his home and his school, in 1971.
“Those were absolutely shocking, dreadful times,” he recalls.
His family then lived in the Cliftonville area “Shankill Butchers territory, and it was very frightening”.
(The Shankill Butchers were a loyalist gang composed mainly of UVF members, who killed at least 23 people between 1975 and 1982).
He tells me that the Troubles directly impacted on his own family. His 17-year-old brother was critically injured when he was stabbed several times in a sectarian attack in his workplace in 1975, in “an early Shankill Butchers-type attack” and was lucky to survive and build a new life in Cork.
That happened in Mackie’s factory where his father, Joe worked as a machinist. He pays tribute to his late father and his mother Alice (nee McLarnon) “devoted Catholics” who “were determined not to allow any bitterness enter into our home”.
Some years later, Aidan himself, had a close shave with loyalist paramilitaries when he was targeted while a student at Queen’s University “where I was a publicly outspoken Catholic on religious and justice issues”.
He recalls he was threatened in the UVF magazine Combat.
One night a Protestant fellow student who studied near to where Aidan himself studied in the department of scholastic philosophy was abducted, had a bag pulled over his head and driven the short distance to the loyalist Annadale flats area.
The Protestant student later told Aidan how he protested that he was a Protestant, producing his student card, and that when one of the gang members pulled the bag from his head he shouted in disappointment “It is not Donaldson” and ejected him from the car and said they would be back for their intended victim.
Aidan recalls: “I have always felt so sorry for the poor guy who was mistaken for me”.
I ask him if the fact that he was spared made him more mindful of his duty, as a Christian, to help others.
“The honest answer is that I have never thought about it like that. I believe that all are called to be missionary disciples and to see and encounter God in others – even those in whom it may seem difficult to see as God’s reflections. The greatest challenge for all of us is contained in the first of Francis’ Beatitudes: ‘Blessed are those who remain faithful while enduring evils inflicted on them by others and forgive them from their heart’.
Dr Donaldson continued: “It is all too natural and easy for us to judge people on what they do and forget to see them as what they are – children of God, created in His image and likeness and our brothers and sister.
“Meeting people like Richard Moore [one of the persons he featured in The Beatitudes of Pope Francis] has been so rewarding and challenging for me. He didn’t just forgive the person who blinded him – he befriended him. That is true Christian discipleship.”
One of his most poignant memories is of helping his PhD supervisor, James Daly, gather up the personal effects of his wife, Miriam Daly, a fellow Queen’s academic, from her office in the university after she was killed by loyalists in 1980.
“It was quite a task to pick up the belongings of someone who was so much alive just the week before.”
Reflecting on what Northern Ireland has been through Dr Donaldson is anxious not to minimise what has been achieved but not to overstate it either bearing in mind that “far worse things” have happened in other parts of the world.
He brings the perspective of a person who has worked with the victims of the genocide in Rwanda and with former child soldiers.
“I think we have learned to live apart peacefully.”
To move on from there presents “a big challenge” for Christians, he says.
But he is anxious to sound realistic.
Recalling that he knows personally Jim Deeds, the Down and Connor parish development worker and Dr Gladys Ganiel, the Queen’s University sociologist of religion as people (like this writer) closely involved in the Four Corners Festival, he salutes initiatives in reconciliation like the festival “which have edge, see difference as a gift, and have a vision of ecumenism that is not reduced to a bland common denominator”.
Dr Donaldson speaks with evident frustration of “the great inability we have to learn from one another” in the North and while he acknowledges the theological differences that Christians have “these differences are not fundamental”.
He adds: “In many ways we can gift to each other.”
Aidan is currently putting the finishing touches to his latest book which is due to be published in September, a biography of Sister Patricia Speight, a member of the Franciscan Missionary Sisters for Africa and a fellow native of north Belfast who has been widely recognised for her fearless missionary work in Kenya over the past 40 years.
Given that the concepts of ‘immersion’ and ‘missionary discipleship’ had recurred frequently in the interview it was fitting that when we finished Aidan invited me to join him in walking the few hundred metres to Rosemount House, a charity close to his heart that provides sheltered accommodation and one to one support for men seeking recovery from alcohol addiction and related mental health issues.
He makes time to visit Rosemount regularly to help as a volunteer support worker and also assists frequently at the Westcourt Social Justice Desk, off the Falls Road, a Christian Brothers’ project that advocates for the homeless.
Who can dispute Aidan Donaldson’s contention that it is such places, wherever in the world, where those in the margins are shown love and support, that the new missionary Church – having consigned the ‘maintenance model’ to history – must always find itself?