REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY MEETING OF THE COLUMBAN MISSIONARIES
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY MEETING OF THE COLUMBAN MISSIONARIES SATURDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER, 2006
Dia dhíobh go léir.
Tá lúcháir mhór orm bheith i bhur measc inniu ag an ócáid speisialta seo agus ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a chur in iúl díbh don fáilte a raibh fíor agus flaithiúil.
Hello everybody.
It is a privilege to join the Columban General Assembly and I am grateful to Fr Tommy Murphy for the invitation and to each of you for the warmth of that welcome. Last year I visited one of your familiar mission fields, the beautiful country of South Korea and while there a former President, Kim Dae Jung gave me a heartfelt message for the Irish people but one which has a special resonance for this audience. He said, ‘I have one important thing to ask you – please tell the people of Ireland thank you for sending us the Columban fathers.’ No words of mine could better describe the extraordinary and powerful impact the Columbans have had on the lives of those they have served across the world.
I was not in the least surprised by his words for I have been privileged throughout my life to have known of the Columbans’ work through my late cousin Fr John Joe McGreevy. Every so often his black hat would appear over my grandparents’ hedge in County Roscommon, he would alight from his bicycle and dressed in the same suit as far as we could tell for all of fifty years, he would tell us about Dalgan Park, about the work of the Columbans and his own work in later years in his beloved Peru. Long after his lay family and friends had retired he, like his confreres, was still living happily and by choice among the poorest of the poor.
Then I met that octogenarian Columban dynamo Fr. PJ McGlinchey, the man who introduced green grass and tractors to Korea and whose legendary farming skills have transformed Cheju island while bringing the gospel along with the cattle feed. He was still driving a tractor up to the week I met him, a fact not fully appreciated or approved of by the colleagues who had fetched him, or themselves, out of several misplaced ditches. But Fr. PJ’s talents and spirit, his achievements, his setbacks, his indomitability and his relentless passion for his mission, are no more and no less than the story of the Columban community itself. You have known times when the price of mission was torture and death and still the work continued and grew across the earth’s continents. You have ministered to human beings who have known the worst pain imaginable from the devastation of Hiroshima to the grinding slums of Lima. From China to the Phillipines and so many far off places you arrived as strangers concerned about the suffering of those you did not know and you made their healing your life’s work. Your service has always been among those on the margins, the spectators at life’s feast, the excluded hoping for crumbs from the tables of the rich. You cared about and fought for their rights, their dignity, their equality, their future. You cared not just for their spiritual wellbeing but for their physical, intellectual and environmental wellbeing too. And when you came home to Dalgan, you went out into Ireland’s parishes ministering where you were needed and bringing the stories of the world’s poor right under our noses, introducing to us our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Your solidarity, support and championing of the neglected and overlooked peoples of our world has changed histories. It has given an eloquent witness to the great commandment to love one another. It has been a hugely important sign of contradiction in a world characterised by comfortable complacency and excess among the well-to-do nations and outrageous unmet basic needs among the poor.
Last year, as I unveiled a sculpture in honour of St Columbanus at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris, I was reminded of the openness of St Columba to the wider world, his joyful curiosity about the people who lived beyond Ireland, beyond Iona. His travels left a trail of faith across Europe and a mark still visible well over a millennium later. “Go ye afar, go teach all nations”. He took that seriously and proved how one man with a mission can impact on a world hungry for leadership and good guidance. In his name you do the same, calling us to recognise our common humanity, our common membership of one global family, our responsibility for one another and the enormous benefits that flow from friendship and mutual care across geography and culture’s big divides.
Many things have changed for you – some things have become easier – travel once a logistical nightmare is now relatively simple and inexpensive. Telling your stories is made easier through all the accessible means of communication which have made a village of this planet. Some of the countries where you once experienced harassment and mistrust have become more open, less dangerous. Citizens of those countries now live here in significant numbers, changing the make-up of Irish society, enriching its cultural diversity and helping shape a very different, a very exciting and hope-filled future. But here in Dalgan these huge buildings which once teemed with enthusiastic young Irish seminarians, now face the rattling emptiness wrought by the vocations famine in this part of the world. Old and ageing men gather to ponder the future and to see if they can intuit the direction it is taking the Columbans, and the Church. They are entitled, you are entitled to reflect on a job well done these many years past and a job still to do. Is there enough justice in the world, enough human freedom, enough human dignity, enough fair play, enough access to education, to health care, to opportunity, to peace, to love. The answer is so obvious it hardly needs to be stated. The journey to a peaceful and prosperous world, a family of harmonious nations has only barely begun. That it has started at all is thanks to those who have championed a value system based on respect for every human being and insistence on their right to a life with dignity. You have long been such a champion and you have a litany of stories to tell of individual broken lives healed, of communities energised to shift attitudes and obstacles to progress, of visible momentum towards a fairer and more fulfilled world.
Had the Columbans not existed, what quiet despair would have inhabited many millions of hearts whose voices were liberated by your confident and determined advocacy? If it seems that the shoulders you need to push the Columban wheels are getting fewer, remember all those hearts and hands of laywomen, men and children who believe what you believe, who live by the same commandments, the same light and whose partnership with you over the decades is precisely what made this order so successful. The times ahead are full of fears for the fearful and full of challenges for the brave. The Columbans are among the bravest of the brave, so at this Assembly we know with certainty that, whatever those challenges are, they will be met with the Columban’s characteristic faith and hope but also with the distilled wisdom of generations of service now the source from which to draw a new imagination, fresh water for the journey ahead.
To all of the participants at the Columban 2006 General Assembly may I offer you my very best wishes for the success of your deliberations and for the realisation of all your aspirations.
Go n-éirí go geal libh. Go raibh maith agaibh.