By Carmel Gallagher
Published in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 2025.
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Abstract

, Reflecting on the demise of traditional Catholicism in Ireland almost a decade ago, theologian Fr Vincent Twomey expressed the view that the greatest achievement of the Catholic Church is perhaps its missionary tradition.1 Twomey pointed out that Irish missionaries built up societies in every continent through their involvement in education and healthcare. While the contribution of missionaries has been acknowledged from time to time by politicians, the media, and academia, the work of missionaries has been largely tangential to discourse on religion and ethics in Ireland. This contrasts with the extent to which missionaries have had civic honours bestowed on them internationally for their extraordinary impact in particular areas of human welfare or education.2 In Ireland their legacy is regarded as more of a cultural and historical phenomenon than as an important reservoir of Catholic faith in action and of Christian wisdom. There are fewer than 700 Catholic missionary nuns and priests serving overseas today3 in contrast to a highpoint in 1965 when Ireland had 7,085 Catholic missionaries, primarily nuns and priests, working overseas.4 Irish missionaries are now a cultural anomaly in a post-Catholic society characterised by extra-institutional religion, secularisation and a postcolonial global order. Do their lives only make sense as a specific socio-historical instance of ‘the missionary movement’?5 What can we still learn from what they did, how they did it, and what they hoped to achieve in going overseas to serve as Catholic missionaries?, Irish missionaries have worked across cultures in over ninety countries, mainly in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and South and Central America,6 striving to serve the poorest and most marginalised communities as a lifetime commitment and in a variety of roles and settings. Journalist Joe Humphreys’ informative and engaging book on Irish missionaries whom he visited across the globe praised their strong practical emphasis, courage, and single-mindedness as they engaged in outreach work with marginalised groups and spearheaded campaigns for social justice, often at considerable danger to themselves.7 The contribution of missionaries to global work on social [End Page 558] justice and development aid can be traced. For example, the work of Concern Worldwide, Trocaire and Ireland’s development aid programme8 have all been shaped directly or indirectly by missionaries. The UCC academic Denis Linehan has highlighted the influence of Irish missionaries on the relative strength of Ireland’s ‘soft power’ in international relations through the valuable social networks they created in the Global South and in their work for social justice.9, Yet, it is questionable whether the work of our missionaries, including their deep insights into human problems and dilemmas and their way of serving the Church and being Christian, has been seen as a resource or inspiration in the Catholic Church in Ireland. Their collective experience of lived faith does not seem to have impacted religious practice or the Christian imagination as one might have expected. Neither do their contributions seem widely known or valued in Irish society, and there appears to have been a disconnect between the work of missionaries and discourse on values., These questions inspired my late NUIG colleague sociologist Dr Ricca Edmondson and me to embark on a sociological research study to tell the stories of thirty-seven Irish Catholic missionary nuns and priests who had returned to live in Ireland after, in many cases, a lifetime of overseas service as missionaries and to explore the meaning of their missionary lives.10, This article will present some findings on the life stories of this overlooked group, whose lives are both ordinary and extraordinary. The life stories, experiences, and reflections of the missionaries offer perspectives on living ethically as a human being, a Catholic, and a Christian in contemporary Ireland. Contextual theology informed by Vatican II, liberation theology, small Christian communities, and the social sciences provided important frames of reference. Four themes have been selected from the findings: the intercultural and interreligious experiences of the missionaries, the holistic missionary methods they used, their strong learning orientation, and living with dissonance. Arising from these themes, the article will reflect briefly on what, if any, impact the missionaries have had on the Catholic Church in contemporary Ireland.