Columbans do not have outstanding personal gifts or genius. Our 'genius' comes from the people we have lived with and grown to love. However, these experiences have also given us questions. In Latin America and the Philippines, the biggest questions revolve around poverty and justice; in China, Korea and Japan around culture and language; in Pakistan and Mindanao around dialogue with Islam.
When I was a seminarian, I was trained to be a parish priest who could work in lonely, difficult places overseas. I don’t think the major missiological questions occurred to me. But by the middle seventies mission theology was becoming increasingly important in our College in Turramurra. Studies in culture, religion and interreligious dialogue, justice and eventually ecology began to play an increasing part in the training of our seminarians. We also began the Pacific Mission Institute (PMI) to train religious, priests and teachers preparing for or returning from cross-cultural ministry.
Probably the most significant Columban in this shift was Fr Cyril Hally, one of the fathers of missiology in Australia. Cyril was an anthropologist and a voracious reader of history, sociology, anthropology and demography. He was still reading the night before he died at 91. I know because I visited him that night and he told me about what he had just read in Charles Taylor’s The Secular Age. All this reading gave Cyril a refreshing outlook on theology. Anthropology is the study of cultures and implicit in that outlook is a freedom to look critically at your own culture. He asked questions most theologians did not think of.
More than a decade after the end of the Council, we were also coming to realise the deeper meaning of Vatican II. Pope John XXIII wanted the Council to engage with the world and to take history seriously. The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World insisted we could only be faithful to our mission by “scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel.” (#4) Up till Vatican II we had a more perennial theology found in major classical textbooks. It was a theology that rarely changed. Now theology had to be historical and to interpret the 'signs of the times'.
This prompted the staff at St Columbans to start teaching the seminarians and the people preparing for mission by studying missiology more scientifically. We also developed an excellent Missiological Library and Resource Centre.
The PMI residential course closed in 1996. Its successor the Columban Mission Institute (CMI) was built around centres for China, Peace, Ecology & Justice and Christian Muslim Relations and did not have its own academic program so, there was a break in formal studies in mission.
Missiology returned as a serious academic discipline in 2005. When Columbans started teaching missiology at the Catholic Institute of Sydney (CIS). Some of the early courses offered were New Models & Images for Mission, Introducing Islam, Justice & the Church’s Mission, Evangelisation Today - Educational Perspectives, Interreligious Dialogue and Faith, Mission and Culture. Shortly after we also began to teach missiology at the Broken Bay Institute.
Fr Patrick McInerney and I still lecture in the Masters programs at both CIS and BBI (Broken Bay Institute - The Australian Institute for Theological Education). This is critical because it enables us to keep mission before the eyes of our theologian colleagues, to encourage them to theologise in the light of the 'signs of the times'. We also have the opportunity to keep mission before the seminarians and teachers of the future.
After the CMI closes Patrick and I will continue to lecture in the meaning of mission in our present secular, plural and globalised world, on Islam and interreligious dialogue.
Brian Vale and I will be involved in programs to welcome, integrate and enable overseas trained priests and religious into the Australian church. We feel specially called to this last cause because this is the 'age of migration' and our Australian Catholic Church is becoming increasingly multiethnic but is not yet fully multicultural. Once again, we are speaking out of our experience. We can speak because we too have been migrants. We know the challenges, confusion and loneliness. We also know the excitement and expansion of our humanity that people can experience in living in another culture.
As you can see, this has been a journey for us Columbans and for the many people who have taught and studied with us. But it has originated in our experience of sharing our lives with people around the Columban world who have shared their lives and questions with us.
Columban Fr Noel Connolly is a member of the Columban Mission Institute in North Sydney and a lecturer in Missiology at both the Broken Bay Institute and the Catholic Institute of Sydney.
Related links
- Read more from The Far East - September 2017
