Ruadhán Jones
Fr Norman Davitt Personal Profile
When Fr Norman Davitt SVD was nine years old – this being back in 1930 – the local parish priest came across him in a field near the Church. “He said, ‘what do you want to be’, I said, ‘I want to be a missionary’,” Fr Davitt explains. “About two years later, he asked me again and said, ‘so you want to be a priest.’ So he took me to his house, gave me a missal and said, ‘now you’re going to Mass every day’.”
When I was in Papua New Guinea, up in the mountains, I was walking for a whole week, going to one place and moving on to another,” he says”
From that moment on, Fr Davitt was set on the path which he still follows today. In less than a year, the Birmingham-born priest will celebrate the 75th anniversary of his ordination and he recently passed a momentous milestone, turning one hundred years old on March 29.
When he was 11 years old, another priest, in a new parish the Davitts had just moved to, sent for young Norman: “He said there’s a man here wants to see you,” Fr Davitt tells The Irish Catholic. “When I got there, he said this is a missionary from China. He’s one of the missionaries looking for students, do you want to go join them? And I said ‘yeah, why not?’. He said, ‘go and get your mum and dad’, which I did, and here I am.”
Fr Davitt went to the minor seminary aged 12 and 14 years later he was ordained to the Society of the Divine Word.
“After I was ordained, I wanted to go to China,” Fr Davitt explains. “But I wasn’t allowed to go because they needed an English teacher in the new college in England. So I was kept at home at England, before I went to India seven years later.
“It was marvellous, I enjoyed it immensely. Again I came home and I was home for a while, I went to visit my dad. When I went to Rome to get my ticket, they said you’re reappointed back to England. So I went back and became a superior there, which I didn’t like. I got out of that eventually and after a few years I went to Papua New Guinea.”
Missions
Fr Davitt worked in parishes on the missions. It was tough work, he says, but rewarding. He enjoyed working with people and getting his hands dirty.
“When I was in Papua New Guinea, up in the mountains, I was walking for a whole week, going to one place and moving on to another,” he says. “I’d visit several different places in a week, heading up and down the mountains. It was a very, very interesting career. What I enjoyed most of all was being with the people, encouraging them, training them, enjoying life with them. God was there all the time, there was no doubt. God was guiding them and pushing it along.”
Born and raised in England, Fr Davitt now lives in the SVD community at Donamon Castle, Co. Roscommon. His connection with Ireland began in 1939, when he was one of the first to join the novitiate in the castle, which the order had purchased that year.
“After, when I came home, I would visit Ireland,” Fr Davitt says. “When I retired from the missions, I went to England, and the provincial said there isn’t much happening here. And I said, come on, we’ve got to do something. Then I came ever to Ireland and I’ve been very happy here. I was very busy up to a few years ago, I was driving, delivering cars up and down the country. I’d be meeting people and talking about things. The last few years I spent helping out in parishes round about. Then I had to retire quietly.”
Fr Davitt celebrated the platinum anniversary – 70 years – of his ordination in 2017”
Fr Davitt continues to say Mass in the community at Donamon Castle, though he doesn’t get out as often anymore. In the 82 years since he first arrived in Ireland, he says it has changed enormously.
“I came back here after my own ordination in about 52, I suppose, and I did vocation work,” Fr Davitt explains. ”The people were wonderful, they were very devout all over the place. But there was a great pressure from the clergy, which I couldn’t understand, the clergy were everything.
“It all changed in the years before my return back from the missions, and it has continued to change dramatically since I came back to Ireland. The Faith is weakening. Some people’s faith remains strong and tremendous, but other people’s faith is gone totally. It’s a strange situation, a bit disturbing in some ways.
“Ireland has become missionary territory, yes, yes. They’re losing faith and losing morality altogether, there’s murdering and killing and all kinds of nonsense going on which wasn’t there before.”
Fr Davitt celebrated the platinum anniversary – 70 years – of his ordination in 2017. He laughs when asked if he’s targeting his 80th anniversary: “I’ve a couple years to go yet. Next year is my 75th.”