In 1969 Pope Paul VI visited Uganda and made a plea in Kampala for Africans to become Missionaries in and for the Church themselves. The Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria established the National Missionary Seminary of St Paul in September 1976 and invited Kiltegan priests of St Patrick Society in Ireland to assist in the formation programme. Around the same time, inspired by the same call from Pope Paul VI, monks from our monastery at Glenstal Abbey in Ireland founded a Benedictine community at Ewu, also in Nigeria.
I taught philosophy and theology for three years from 1992 to 1995 at Gwagwalada, where the MSP have their headquarters and their seminary near the capital of Nigeria, Abuja, One of the classes I taught were celebrating their silver jubilee of ordination in October this year and they invited me back to preside at their Jubilee mass and conduct the retreat which preceded this happy occasion. Abbot Christopher Dillon who had served in Ewu as prior and novice master from 1990 to 1992, and who has visited there on a yearly basis until they became independent in 2006, is now helping them to finance the building of a new church due to open in 2026. We decided to go together from the 9th to the 26th of October this year. Christopher went directly to Benin while I remained in Abuja with the MSP, following on later to join him at our daughter house in Ewu.
Pope Paul’s initiative has come to fruition. Both these enterprises are now thriving: MSP has almost 400 missionary priests all over the world [including fourteen of their members working in parishes in Ireland]; while the monastery at Ewu has a community of 62 members and have foundations in Calabar and in Angola.
Whereas Saint Patrick’s Society in Kiltegan have no longer any vocations in Ireland and have moved their central organisation to Nairobi in Kenya, their onetime thriving motherhouse at Kiltegan is now a retirement home for returned missionaries. This means that Africa has become a focal point for global Catholicism and the expansion in Nigeria, both in its contemplative and missionary wings, is in full flight. Nigeria has become a beacon of light for the Catholic Church as a whole.
Mark Patrick Hederman OSB