Man on a mission

Born in west Clare, one of eight children, Spiritan priest Fr Martin Kelly CSSp has been national director of World Missions Ireland since January, and seems well qualified for it with over two dozen years on the missions in Ethiopia under his belt.

“Over 40 years I was there for 28 years, one batch of 18 years and one batch of 10 years,” he says.

“In the 18 year period, I had a few different jobs. I started off in a new mission, in quite a remote area – most of the year it was cut off by road and you had to fly in and fly out,” he says, explaining that as there was no real road to the area, with no bridges over rivers there, when the rains came the rivers were impassable.

“Then the next mission I was in was there for 10 years, and that was remoter but the roads were being built as I got there so we had access practically all the year around. Then my third mission was more central, involving being coordinator for the whole group there,” he says.

Attraction

Ethiopia had always had a certain attraction to him, he says. Emperor Haile Selassie, who reigned from 1930 to 1974, and who – like all of Ethiopia’s monarchs – had claimed descent from Solomon of the Queen of Sheba, had been a major international figure, addressing the League of Nations when Eamon de Valera was its chairman, and leading the formation of the Organisation for African Unity. Someone else who raised the country’s profile, albeit in a different way, Fr Martin explains, was Abebe Bikila who won the marathon barefoot at the 1960 Rome Olympics.

“So it was always a bit in the background – there was something appealing about it,” he says, noting that ecumenical aspects of life in the country were an exciting aspect of mission life there.

“As well as that by the time I came to go there, there was already talk of a programme with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church,” he says. “This was already starting, various contacts had been made because the place where we went we were told it was mostly animists but in fact there was a very strong presence of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, so to cut a long story short we started working with them.”

After the initial 18 years in Ethiopia, divided four years in one place, 10 in a second, and four in a third, he came back to Ireland where he worked in formation for the Spiritans and did a few other things, not returning to the missions until 2007.

“The last 10 years were more interesting in ways. Maybe the early years were more exciting because we were doing something new, but the second time round we were continuing something that had been established,” he says.

“We had a very good development programme which was rightly acknowledged by most people who visited as being very good, but what was unique was that we had one mission – where I was for the last 10 years – which was the only mission in the world where you had Roman Catholic and Orthodox of any type working together in a first-evangelisation programme,” he says. “About half a dozen or more Spiritans, maybe more, worked in that programme over about 35 years. It was the only one in the world.”

Unsurprisingly, given how long he spent in Ethiopia, Fr Martin developed a deep appreciation for his hosts.

“I was very impressed by the Ethiopian people of all types. They have about 80 different ethnic groups and over 200 languages. During the time of the famines, the big famines in 1974 and 1985, people saw people who were starving but who had great dignity. This you could see all over the country, different people in different parts of the country with different languages: there was a great dignity, and also a very rich culture, extremely courteous and patient to people.

“They were inspirational that way,” he says.

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Ireland now, it’s regularly observed, is mission territory, and priests from lands where Irish people once ministered and worked on missions are a regular feature of our religious landscape, but it’s sometimes observed that this doesn’t quite work here, that there are cultural difficulties that can cause things to jar. Isn’t it likely that Irish missionaries must likewise have been an awkward fit at times?

“I shudder to think of it,” Fr Martin laughs, before adding that cultural discomfort can be overcome.

“It can, it can. But there are changes of attitude needed all around. People think you can take a priest from India or Kenya or Nigeria or wherever and plant him in a parish in Ireland, whether in the city or in the country, and just leave him there and let him bloom where he is planted, but a lot of work needs to be done for that to work,” he says.

“Most Irish people when they went on the missions had quite a strong intensive orientation course, learning about the history of the country and the culture or the various cultures of the country and the various histories of the different part of it, getting to know the people,” he continues.

“We seem to skip that process here, and I think it’s very unfair on the people coming in: they need to be guided a bit in this regard,” he says, explaining that it’s not enough for people to be able to speak English or even have a certain familiarity with Western culture through television or other media. “That’s quite superficial, I think,” he says.

Allowances need to be made too, he adds, for the fact that priests who come to Ireland from abroad tend not to be speaking their native tongues.

“Irish people are quite spoiled. We have had the privilege of speaking our own language all our lives, most of us,” he says. “Very few of us speak a second language so we don’t appreciate what it’s like for a priest from India or from Africa to come and preach in his second or third or fourth or fifth language. We have to be a bit more patient in that regard. Sometimes people write these priests off very quickly, and say they can’t understand him.”

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Getting used to life in new countries is clearly something Fr Martin thinks matters immensely; since returning to Ireland, he has worked not merely as World Missions Ireland’s national director but has been on the board of Spirasi, one of the more distinctive charitable enterprises in the Irish Church, and one that like so many is not heard of nearly enough.

“I’ve been on the board of Spirasi since I came back from Ethiopia,” Fr Martin says. “Spirasi was set up by the Spiritans about 20 years ago when there were a lot of migrants coming into the country, and they did a needs assessment and came up with this idea of helping these people, many of whom were fleeing from persecution or even imprisonment or that sort of thing.”

As time went on, he says, it focused on two key areas. “One was on helping people to integrate into the country, also by giving classes in English and computers and helping them get to know the system here, but more importantly what it focused on was helping people who were survivors of torture, through providing medical services to them and also providing therapy. It’s the only organisation in Ireland which does this.”

The charity also has an advocacy role, he adds, helping migrants and victims of torture, and fighting on their behalf so they’re not repatriated to a place where they might face persecution or torture.

Admitting that Spirasi is one of the lesser known expressions of today’s Irish Church, one that hardly anyone would be familiar with, Fr Martin says we need to get better at telling our stories.

“We have found that as a congregation that we are lacking that way, the Spiritans. We’re trying to work on that to improve our communications. Even some people within our own congregation don’t know much about Spirasi, even some of our parishes and schools – we haven’t communicated with them well enough. People are astonished when they hear about it,” he says.

“But then it’s a bit of a tendency in Ireland not to show off – we don’t like to show off, but at the same time it’s also made more difficult by the fact that much of the news about the Church is negative or sensational,” he continues. “Spirasi has I’m sure been covered once or twice in the papers, but it’s not inclined to get big headlines because they like more the sensational and the scandalous.”

That the missions still continue for the Irish Church is something else also unlikely to get many headlines nowadays, but Fr Martin is certainly kept busy in his main job as national director of World Missions Ireland, the Irish arm of the Pontifical Missions Society, the Pope’s own official charity for overseas mission.

“It was founded in 1926 by Pope Pius XI. Well, not so much founded as recognised by him –  we have records in the office of minutes that took place back round 1838 or 1839, seven or eight years before the Famine. It was active in some parishes from then on, but it became active in every parish in Ireland since 1926,” he says.

Over the decades the charity’s function has been essentially the same..

“The role hasn’t changed much – it’s basically to raise awareness about the missions and to raise funds, and last year it raised about €1.8million, which was a little bit higher than it was the previous year but not nearly what it was 10 years ago,” he says.

“This money is used in various parts of the world to support dioceses, to support catechists, to build churches, to build clinics, schools, that type of thing. It’s sent directly from Ireland to particular missions, to particular dioceses.

“The decision as to where it goes and the amount that goes is made at any AGM in Rome every May. All the national directors, 120 of them from all over the world, meet together and decide the allocation. Then it goes directly from Dublin to, say, Nairobi, or Lagos or wherever,” he says.

The thinking behind the society is deeply biblical, Fr Martin points out, with roots in both Old and New Testaments.

“The inspiration of it of course is to support the missions, but also I don’t know if you remember how, when St Paul was supporting the Church in Jerusalem, he wrote a letter and he quoted from the Old Testament the story about the Manna in the desert. They collected the Manna each morning, and on the day before the Sabbath they collected for two days. Some people tried to collect extra, to hoard stuff, and it went bad. It was spoiled,” he says.

“So the principle that was put into place there – St Paul used it – was that those who have much should not have too much, and that those who have little should not have too little,” he explains. “Now, I think World Missions Ireland also helps in that way to rectify a little bit of the imbalance that exists between various parts of the world.”

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With Ireland having hosted this year’s World Meeting of Families, it makes sense that this year World Missions Ireland should have adopted for Mission Sunday the theme ‘Christian families are missionary families’, and Fr Martin says the need for all Christians to be missionaries was spelled out by Pope Francis in his Phoenix Park homily this August.

“As members of the living Christ, all the Faithful are duty-bound to cooperate in the expansion and spreading out of his body to bring it to fullness,” Fr Martin explains, “And in the Phoenix Park the Pope said that through the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, each Christian is sent forth to be a missionary; the whole Church is called to be missionaries.

“This is as individuals and families, and I think the focus is on the family this year,” he says.

That we have a missionary task to share the Good News in our own lives was clear from the Pope’s homily, but Fr Martin says that we can also help Ireland’s overseas missionary efforts in two clear ways.

“One is we can help financially, which has gone on in Ireland for the last 100, 150 years. When you think of 50, 70, 100 years ago the full seminaries that were there, the full convents of young people being trained and sent abroad on mission, but all of this was done by money donated by the Irish people,” he says.

Pointing out how money was raised through mission boxes, sales of work, and missionary magazines, he says: “That’s how they supported those people when they were being educated and being trained. And then they continued to support them overseas. Practically every priest and every sister and every brother received money from his or her family, or from the local parish, and that still goes on today in parts of the country.”

While material aid may be the most obviously concrete way of supporting the missions, it’s not the only way of helping, Fr Martin says.

“That is the most concrete way that people can help, but also it has been very much part of Catholic theology that we can help people by praying for them or by offering up whatever illness or aches and pains or crosses we have in our lives – offer them up!”

Even if this sounds old-fashioned, Fr Martin says, it should be obvious that knowledge of being in people’s prayers can make a real difference to them.

“Just being one with them in prayer or one with them in thought, and showing moral support for them” is vital, he says. “Moral support is very important, because if you’re working in a difficult climate, if you’re struggling with the language, if you’re struggling with the culture, if things are not going right, the moral support you get from people in Ireland is very important.”