THIS year is the 80th anniversary of more than the Rising and the Battle of the Somme 1916 saw also the foundation of the Maynooth Mission to China, as the Columban Society was originally called.
Idealism was running at high tide, Father Luke O'Reilly writes in Passing the Torch (Columba Press). Indeed, his testament of generosity sounds alien, to a "Me Generation". For him, "self sacrifice is of the very core and essence of Christianity. And to the extent that self sacrifice has a place in our lives, to that extent has Christianity taken root in our souls."
Ironically, the separatist movement contributed to the expansion of Ireland's spiritual empire. The co founder of the society, John Blowick, brought, five senior students to Maynooth for ordination in April" 1918 because of a renewed threat of conscription, under which only priests would be exempt. Later when setting up the first Columban seminary, Father Blowick was inspired by Pearse's school, St Enda's. Bishop Patrick Cleary, one of the pioneers of the Maynooth Mission to China, defended Terence MacSwiney theologically during his 74 day hunger strike. Dr Cleary supported the hunger strike as a protest against British policy, but not to death.
At a time when the moral authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland is low, Father O'Reilly's book recalls a golden age of missionary activity. Despite structural and editing weaknesses, it stands as an unadorned tribute to the hundreds of retired missionaries, women and men, who have laid the foundations of indigenous churches from Africa to the Far East.
Expelled
Aged 81, Father O'Reilly is from Williamstown, Co Galway. With his fellow missionaries, he reminds one of Belloc: "From quiet homes and first beginning,/Out to the undiscovered ends,/There's nothing worth the wear of winning,/But laughter and the love of friends." He was one of the last two Irish Columban missionaries expelled from the diocese of Nancheng in 1953 after the communist revolution there. He went to China 50 years ago. An earlier work, The Laughter and the Weeping, records four years of persecution.
In Passing the Torch, Father O'Reilly writes about three heroes of the China mission, two Chinese and one Irish - Father Tom Ellis - and reflects on the witness of Chinese Christians, during the persecution under Mao's regime. He remembers Patrick Cleary, bishop of Nancheng in 1931-52, who was in the same mould as Bishop Joseph Shanahan of Nigeria.
Father O'Reilly asserts that the church in Nancheng has been revitalised by suffering, that the long winter of persecution is nearly over and soon the buds will be appearing on the trees. "If all this is true and if we did produce men of prayer ... what is the need to go round the globe with the spiritual begging bowl? The answer is this. In the Red persecution, to borrow a phrase from St Paul, our struggle was not with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers, with angels of darkness in high places. There was a satanic element in communism. I experienced it. I felt it at least twice. I know it, although I could not prove it. To exorcise that satanic element, we needed all the prayers of our commissionaries round the world."
Repression continues
In the meantime, China continues to execute, torture and imprison its lovely people, Mary Lawlor writes in the current issue of the journal of the Irish section of Amnesty International. Behind the economic miracle, the crackdown goes on seven years after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Thousands of political dissidents and members of religious and ethnic groups remain in jail simply for expressing their views. Hundreds of thousands of people who have never been charged with a crime are arbitrarily detained, many of them in forced labour camps.
Ms Lawlor adds wisely:
"Don't let the Amnesty diet of unrelenting inhumanity get out of proportion and blind you to the glory, goodness and beauty of this world."
Father O'Reilly agrees with Tennyson that "more things area wrought by prayer than this world dreams of with the Cure of Ars: "that it is always springtime in the heart that loves God"; with Oscar Wilde: "where there is sorrow, there is, holy ground"; with Pascal, that Christ continues to suffer in humanity; and the Chinese saying "only with adversity does man achieve wisdom".
He studied the psalms pending his trial as a criminal. "Persecution is a great teacher. Persecution seemed to make the psalms so relevant; we were being pursued, falsely charged, plotted against."
Inspiration
Father Ellis inspired the Chinese priests, some of whom endured up to 30 years in jail. Bishop Cleary wrote: "When I appointed Tom Ellis to Nanfeng in 1934, some of the Catholics there thought Tom mildly mad. They came to this conclusion because on his first day walking down the streets of Nanfeng, he encountered a dysentery patient ... in a loathsome condition. Tom brought the sick man to the church somehow and scrubbed him clean and was about to wash his clothes when some Catholic proposed to do it. Tom never recovered from that madness, though it took him some years before it developed to its full grandeur in Nancheng.
His grave became a place of pilgrimage despite official attempts to desecrate it.
Tom Ellis belonged to the same school of spirituality as Dr Cleary, according to Father O'Reilly. "He was not only his disciple but they both shared a nobility of character, a certain gallantry and compassion. As well as that, although Patrick Cleary had studied scripture for so long, he was always trying to improve his knowledge of the psalms. He felt that the psalms and the other readings in the Divine Office provided the missionary with everything he needed for his personal prayer, meditation, preparation for Mass, spiritual reading."
Psalm verses continue to light up Luke O'Reilly's path.