My life and smart kids
01.09.2008
My First Holy Communion at age seven was one of the most important experiences of my life. After coming home from church that day, my mother sent me out to the farm to call the workmen for lunch. I felt Jesus' presence. I stopped and told Him that I would always do His will.
My father noticed my prayer life and encouraged me to be a priest. He died when I was 11 and his death had a profound influence on me. But the most traumatic experience of my life was the sudden death of my mother five years later.
At that time the call to priesthood was so insistent that I made a decision to be a priest and never questioned it.
After studying at the Columban seminary in Dalgan Park I was ordained a priest by Bishop Patrick Cleary on December 21, 1959.
After a long land and sea voyage I finally arrived in Ozamis City, Philippines in November 1960. The language course lasted six months but in a real sense continued throughout the remaining five years of my first term on mission.
In 1967 I became parish priest of Dimataling, a remote rural area, on the island of Mindanao. It had 40,000 Catholics with 72 villages and two priests and no roads. This is where I believe I made my best contribution to pastoral work in the Philippines.
I set out to maximise lay participation. I asked for two male leaders from each of the three strongest Catholic communities to sit down with me and work out what pastoral programmes we should adopt. We prayed for guidance and decided to start a Sunday Prayer Service in each community. The experiment was successful.
After six months we requested 60 leaders from 30 communities to attend a seminar where they were trained to conduct the prayer service. This was also successful. Finally, the programme was expanded to include all the villages.
The next stage was to invite the leaders for a five-day training seminar that eventually became an annual event. Each community was called a Basic Christian Community.
In 1972 the Basic Christian Community Programme was adopted by the First Mindanao-Sulu Pastoral Conference as a basic pastoral plan for the whole of Mindanao-Sulu. I had the joy of adapting the same programme in two subsequent parishes, Aurora, diocese of Pagadian (1972-1977) and Margosatubig, Prelature of Ipil (1984-1988).
From 1978 to 1982 I worked at the Filipino Chaplaincy in London, England. This was a period of great turmoil when 300 Filipinos were picked up for deportation. After an intensive campaign in the media only a few were actually sent home.
Working in Mission Awareness from 1989-2007 in the Columban Northern District of the Philippines was a time of great joy for me. It gave me much satisfaction to see the magazine Misyon, (funded and edited by the Columban Fathers), grow to 36,000 subscriptions nationwide.
Columban Companions in Mission (CCIM), is a group of dedicated lay people who have supervised and managed the sale of Misyon in more than 150 churches in Manila and surrounding dioceses over the past 10 years. Ten vocations to a full-time commitment have come from the group: two priests, four sisters and four Columban lay missionaries.
At the moment the Companions are involved in a substantial education programme for educating the very poor but talented young boys and girls at all levels - elementary, high school and college. Only extremely poor young people who have a minimum academic average of 86% or who belong to the top 10% of their year levels are accepted into the programme.
In 2007, 27 students were in the programme at a cost of AUD$4,000 (PHP$174,000). In 2008, 44 students will be in the programme at an estimated cost of AUD$6,442 (PHP$283,536). In order to make this programme more professional and acceptable to prospective donors, the CCIM has set up a non-government organisation called BINHI AT UGAT INC (seeds and roots) that the government has approved.
Preference for the poor has been basic to my priesthood for the last 47 years. The development of talents, leading to more skills and better opportunities of getting employment, has always been my way of acting.
If given the chance to live my life over again, I would not change anything. I want to acknowledge all the people along the way who have made my life of service to the Filipino people possible and fruitful.
Fr Donal O'Hanlon lives at St Columban's Singalong, Manila, Philippines.
