Jeremiah in a field of African Grass on the fazenda, using his West Cork farming heritage to work with the people and develop a ranch in rural Brazil. For one West Cork priest, the Church is about people –although a little cement never goes astray, writes Róise McGagh
Fr Jeremiah Donovan began his journey when he joined the Congregation of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1959.
His work took him from West Cork to Goiás in central Brazil. Here he was a founding member of the Anglo Irish missions that brought education and set up parishes in some of the most rural parts of the country.
He now resides, aged 86, in the parish of Mary Immaculate in Inchicore, Dublin. He released a book of his meticulously recorded memoirs in December 2019.
Mixing Mortar with Philosophy is not just the name of Fr Jeremiah’s book but the way he views lay people’s role in the parish. This comes after his experience in a place where the opportunities for people to practice religion came few and far between.
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Jeremiah was born in 1934 and inherited his unusual name from his maternal grandfather. As he grew up in a farm environment in Kilcrohane, West Cork, he gained a lot of practical skills that would be of great use in his work as a missionary. He was sent to Brazil on the first Anglo Irish mission. There was a mission near where they were seeking to go of American oblates, but it was decided by the provincial Fr Pat Mc Donnell that they would establish their own.
“He wanted the Anglo Irish province to exercise their own mission and take on responsibility for our necessities and support.” said Jeremiah, speaking with The Irish Catholic.
Fr Pete Moriarity, who was head of the mission, was reassigned and came back from the Philippines to rejoin the Anglo Irish Oblates. Fr John Cribbin and Fr Ned Barret were the other two who traveled for that initial mission, both very recently finished up in the seminary.
No grudge
Jeremiah had not actually volunteered to go to Brazil, but had told Pat he wouldn’t hold a grudge if he were to be sent. Between the trip and his ordination he had been appointed to Kilburn in London, worked in Ashford in Kent and filled in for the Dean of Belcamp in Dublin.
“I arrived in Brazil on December 2, 1962 and Ned Barret was on the same plane. Pete Moriarty and John Cribbin came by boat and had a terrible journey because it was freight and they stopped at every port,” says Jeremiah while talking of his two-day journey to Materia, Brazil.
Before beginning their mission in March 1963 they spent time in the suburb of Rio de Janeiro, Petropolis, intensively learning the Portuguese language and about South American culture. They also performed some pastoral duties in Sao Paulo.
“It was a fantastic experience to hear words in Portuguese and to understand them,” says Jeremiah, “We learned through our ears like children learn to speak their mother tongue.”
Gerardine, Jeremiah’s niece, who helped him write and edit the book, talked about how it might seem less of a shock now, but in the 1960s, these men were facing an opposite world, not just because of the heat.
“That very dramatic change, not only were they taking on something very different in South American culture but also the Church; there was a chasm opening up between what traditional church was back in Ireland, what South American church was like and the Church itself was changing very fundamentally.”
The changes of Vatican II heavily impacted the work of Jeremiah’s mission”
They happened to arrive in Brazil as the effects of Vatican II were rippling into the everyday practices of Catholicism. Masses were no longer said in Latin or a solely liturgical act, but a celebration that was said facing the audience – no longer facing the altar.
The changes of Vatican II heavily impacted the work of Jeremiah’s mission, for one it established the principle of participation by the laity in the celebration of mass. The mission in Materia was trying to figure out this new balance, and without the close watch of a bishop or deacon, found its own rhythm of heavily involving the people in its running. This was somewhat a necessity due to the low population of priests.
“There was no one to tell us to do anything so we just ploughed our own furrow. We decided who would decide; the people, we’ll listen to the people. We saw what their needs were.
“When they heard a religious congregation was coming into that area, people said ‘wonderful, they will build a collegio, a college for secondary education for our children because there were only five or six people in the whole area who had the opportunity to go second education. There was none near at hand and if there was people would have had to pay for it,” said Jeremiah.
They listened to the people of the area. The mission ended up taking over two primary schools and establishing a secondary school.
Their provincal took over an area the size of Louth within which there were three municipalities. In the time they were there, Materia was moved and became Paranaiguara, the old city being flooded by a hydroelectric dam.
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A lot changed in the 52 years Jeremiah was in Brazil. His book, like Jeremiah, according to Gerardine, is “terribly accurate”. It records all of the places into which the congregation expanded and the parishes that they took under their wing.
Jeremiah and two Sisters of St Joseph from the US made up the team that set up the secondary school. It took them years to get the programme approved by the municipality, but their experience and qualifications in teaching stood to them.
Everyone in the Church is celebrating. Without the priest you can’t have Mass – but you can have a celebration”
“When the first group was prepared for their graduation, we still hadn’t got authorisation,” said Jeremiah. He told of how they were celebrating Mass for the graduation and word came in saying it had finally been approved.
“It wasn’t that they were setting up a religious order school as was in Ireland it was a municipal school, as opposed to being a church school,” said Gerardine explaining that the students did not have to study Religious Education, it was necessary to be provided but no one had to take it. This was very different from any of the religious congregation schools in Ireland at the time.
Jeremiah told of how when he was younger he was 15 miles from the nearest secondary school, there was no public transport and you couldn’t go by bicycle as it was too far.
“So I really appreciated what we were asked to do and that we were paid for doing it. We were really contributing to that for which people had been dreaming of for years.”
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The school was open to everyone, without charge. “That was the biggest grace they could have got from our arrival,” said Jeremiah. “Some of them did go on to train as doctors, as lawyers and as engineers because of the start that we gave.”
The way schools were run was not the only structural difference between Brazil and Ireland. The people were served by traveling priests – often coming around on horseback. They would be in an area and would say they would be back ‘after the rains’. Gerardine said: “It wasn’t like Sunday Mass at 10 o’clock, there wasn’t a church anyway, there weren’t any parish structures.”
This meant that many people trained in theology and would help out with many priestly duties.
“I don’t really think that priests are that necessary, nor deacons if you empower people,” said Jeremiah, “the Bishop has the ability to authorise people to do marriages, do baptisms.
“Everyone in the Church is celebrating. Without the priest you can’t have Mass – but you can have a celebration.” The mission saw its purpose as giving people the training and the language to have their own self led bible groups and celebrations.
“We dropped most of the stuff we learned, and dogma and laws, that wasn’t what was important,” said Jeremiah, “What was important was creativity and helping people to see what they wanted in their own lives.”
Gerardine explained it as: “They were giving people the language and the terminology, it was self actualisation, self realisation.”
The mission received two priests from Ireland every year and expanded to Uberlandia in 1970. Jeremiah moved there, becoming the coordinator of the Anglo Irish province in Brazil. As part of that, they were later granted a ranch, a fazenda, in an area close by. It was over 40 acres and Jeremiah developed and added to it, running it with the skills he had acquired in his youth and in trips back to Ireland over the years.
Baptism can be done by the properly trained persons, Minister of the Word or Minister of the Gospel”
Gerardine explained: “The significance of it was knowledge transfer and skills training to local people within the area because of farming methods he knew of from coming back and forth to Ireland.
“People were working within an area where there was little employment, ultimately it got sold, and the proceeds would have been used for the education of oblates within the South American community there.”
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Jeremiah said he had hoped to end his mission in Brazil and had even required a plot in his local cemetery. He had to move back to Ireland due to ill health: “I’m back here and I’m so limited in my activity I need a wheelchair to get around. I’m very very slow, I have Parkinson’s disease and I have no balance, so I can’t do much.”
This you would never know from the meticulous recordings and the accuracy in every detail of his memoir that he began writing in 2015. Jeremiah wrote most of the book with Gerardine on Google Hangouts, adapting very well to the technology despite having difficulty typing due to his condition.
While he said he is comfortable now back in Ireland, he said he is happy with the person that Brazil turned him into. “I learned from the people more than they learned from me.”
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‘Lay people should be able to perform marriages and baptisms’
Fr Jeremiah Donovan believes that lay people should be far more involved in the running of parishes.
“The Pope says everyone was baptised as a layperson, the deacon the archbishops, the priests and the Faithful, if they want to become clerics they can,” he said pointing out his thoughts that clergy should have no more privilege than the ordinary Catholic: “We were all baptised the same and we all have the same dignity.”
However, Jeremiah thinks that it’s too late in the Irish context, that we may have been looking to a priest to do these things for too long.
Gerardine, Fr Jeremiah’s niece, told The Irish Catholic of how “he would always say, ‘marriage, you don’t need a priest for that, you marry one another’ he used to say to myself and my husband.”
“Baptism can be done by the properly trained persons, Ministers of the Eucharist, Ministers of the Word or Ministers of the Gbospel.
“Confession and the actual consecration was priest led but everything else was wide open, even sermons in church.”
“Sometimes we do have the temptation, if I take over it will happen faster,” said Jeremiah. His philosophy was to help the communities he worked with help themselves. He believes that empowering communities and giving them ownership over their parishes and Faith, creates a more sustainable Church.
In Brazil, Gerardine said, “they were very transparent. Everyone knew what every collection was going to, why, where, when.” Everything was published and the community managed their own tithings. They raised the funds for their own church and built it themselves under the guidance and help of the missionaries.
Fundraising
The church on the front of Jeremiah’s book Mixing Mortar with Philosophy is a symbol. The people came to him and said they wanted to build a church. He seeked permission for them and promised the Oblates it would not cause them debt. Then the community did all their own fundraising.
“There’s ownership, if you’ve raised the money for that bell that window, there’s pride and responsibility,” said Jeremiah: “It helps to keep the Faith alive.” This is where he mixed mortar with philosophy.
His views were influenced by liberation theology, a movement developed mainly by Latin American Roman Catholics, which tries to address the problems of poverty and social injustice as well as spiritual matters.
“That is how they got imbued with that sense of working with the poor,” said Gerardine.
Jeremiah believes that the social system in the world at the minute is mostly immoral: “If you don’t respect the basic humanity of your fellow person you’re in sin.” He says he follows what God would want, for people to help each other.
“Once you’re involved in building churches for people, then we are building Church. A Church of the people of God. I credit Pope Francis with that, he always speaks of the people of God, not the family of God. The people, they are the Church.”