If Columban Fr Donald Hornsey had been asked last year if he would like to return to continue his mission in South America, the answer would have been an unequivocal “yes”.
But these days, Fr Don is fired up with “a new mission in my own country”.
“You know, New Zealand is short of priests. So in many ways, returning to your home country is a way of showing that we are all missionaries and that it is no longer necessary to go overseas to be a missionary,” he told New Zealand Catholic newspaper in a recent interview.
Fr Don who spent the past 40 years as a Columban missionary in Chile, Brazil and Peru, was asked by Cardinal John Dew to help with Colombian refugees in Lower Hutt and Porirua. There are about 400 Colombian refugees in Wellington.
“Working with South Americans makes me very happy because I can speak to them in Spanish and have meetings and visits with them,” he said. “I don’t like to say ‘working’, because it’s a joy for me.”
Initially Fr Don studied to be a diocesan priest, but later asked Auckland’s Archbishop James Liston to be allowed to leave the diocese to become a Columban missionary.
“I felt that I liked working with people of other cultures, and at that stage New Zealand seemed to have sufficient priests which, of course, it doesn’t now. Chile, Peru and Brazil didn’t have as many priests to cover all the needs,” he said.
After graduating from a Spanish language school in Bolivia in 1975, Fr Don was appointed to a parish in Santiago, the capital city of Chile.
Three years later, he was asked to set up a new mission in the city of Arica, on the northern Chilean border with Peru.
“That was a very wonderful experience, to live in the middle of four separate housing estates for the poor. Here I lived close to the people, buying everything in the markets and forming youth groups. The only problem was that this was during the dictatorship of Pinochet,” he recalled.
Fr Don said that at that time priests working with the poor were branded as communists. “There were very tense situations and we were involved in protests and things like that,” he said.
After seven years in Arica, Fr Don volunteered to join the new Columban mission in Brazil where he worked in rural areas of the Brazilian state of Bahia. Here, while working as a prison chaplain, he experienced being jailed.
“It was a set-up. The mother of a prisoner asked a Brazilian priest for some money to get a lawyer to get her son out of jail. And he, the Brazilian priest, didn’t have money. So she said, ‘I will get revenge on another priest’. She asked one of her sons to give me a package to take to another son who was in jail,” Fr Hornsey recounted.
The mother then tipped the person in charge of the prison to inspect Fr Don’s package. The package had brandy and marijuana cigarettes.
“The prison authorities said I was taking drugs into the jail. I was asked to spend some time with my friends the prisoners. But I wasn’t there very long,” he said. “Because I knew all the prisoners, I was happy to spend some time with them.”
He spent 17 years in Brazil until the Columbans decided to close that mission. He was then assigned to the Andes Mountains in Peru where he would spend 12 years in parish work including becoming the Director of Evangelisation and Catechesis in the area.
Fr Don said coming back to New Zealand “in a way, was very disappointing”.
“I certainly miss the people I worked with. They are very friendly. And they send me emails and we keep in touch,” he said.
While not overjoyed to be back in New Zealand, Fr Don says he is “content”.
“I am content to be rediscovering New Zealand and working with people from South America and maybe helping them by becoming a bridge for them to the New Zealand culture. It is a new mission in my own country,” he said.
This interview of Columban Fr Don Hornsey by Rowena Orejana of the New Zealand Catholic newspaper was published on February 7, 2016 .
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