Columban Fr Willie Lee at the Ignite Youth Conference in Brisbane, 2017
Growing up in Fiji, Willie Lee greatly admired the Columban missionaries who travelled across the world to serve the people of his island home.
His great-great-grandfather had welcomed the first Catholic priests to Vanua Levu or 'Big Land', the second major island of Fiji.
Little did young Willie know that one day he would become a Columban missionary. “I saw that the Columban missionaries were people-oriented. They were always there with the ‘grassroots people’, crossing boundaries and cultures and learning another language,” he said.
“The local people were very happy to see a foreigner speaking their own language. It gave them a feeling of belonging. And that’s what caught my attention.”
Willie Lee is the fourth child amongst six boys and three girls. His father expected that he would one day take over the family’s kava growing business. He studied farming. However, all the while, there was “a yearning within”.
“It was very difficult for my father as he was looking forward to me taking over the family business, but it didn’t happen the way he wanted. It was to be the way God wanted,” Willie said.
“I started communicating with the Columbans, reading their Far East magazine, listening to their stories and seeing what they were doing with the Fijian people,” he said.
“The sacrifices they made in their calling, in their missionary life, amazed me a lot. If these people can leave their family, come this far, eat the food we eat and drink Kava and be happy on their mission, why can’t I do this? That’s what I was thinking about, looking at the Church, God and missionary life.”
At 23 Willie Lee started nine years of formation as a Columban missionary: three years in Fiji, a spiritual year in the Philippines, pastoral work in Peru - where he learnt to speak Spanish - and theological studies at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union.
Finally he was ordained on August 2, 2008, and almost immediately he was assigned to be the Parish Priest in San Matias, a sprawling parish of 90,000 people on the outskirts of Santiago, Chile.
Fr Lee entered the tough world of the barrio slums, amongst the city’s poorest. “All these social challenges were there, drugs, prostitution, murder, gangsters and shootings, suicides and young pregnancies,” he said.
Fr Lee said the people of the barrio welcomed him. As a missionary, his challenge was to “come down to the grassroots”, to listen and understand the daily lives of the people.
“I left my country with my suitcase filled with my own culture, food and other things, but when I arrived, I learnt that I should have left with an empty suitcase. I needed to feel and learn new things from the people there. It was then that I started filling my suitcase through listening” he said.
There were times when Fr Lee feared for his life. Once he was conducting a wake for a drug dealer, in an apartment, protected outside by gun-wielding gangsters. There were fears that a rival drug gang might launch an attack.
“Suddenly I heard shooting outside. They were only firing their weapons in the air, but it was frightening,” he said.
“One thing that struck me is that in the barrio there is a lot of respect for the priest. And when they can see us attending to the people’s needs they protect us."
Fr Lee said he learnt a lot about being a priest and holding on to faith during his six years in the parish of San Matias. “It is a challenge for us to respond to Pope Francis who is asking the Church to go to the peripheries, the edges,” he said.
“I saw the periphery in the barrio because I lived there. I can be preaching about love and reconciliation from the pulpit every Sunday but if I am not practicing it then I feel in myself that it’s nothing.”
In 2016, Fr Lee was assigned back to Fiji as the Columban Vocation Director to promote vocations throughout the Pacific islands.
“Our Vocations can come from Fiji, Kiribati, Tonga and the Solomon islands. I promote vocations in schools and parishes and I enjoy this role immensely,” he said.
Fr Lee accompanies the young seminarians for the first few years of their training before they move to the Columban seminary in Manila.
Columban Fr Willie Lee at his ordination in Fiji, 2008
He said his own formation for missionary life was a great experience and one he could pass on to others.
“Great experience in crossing boundaries and learning another culture and another language was always the main charism of the Columbans in preaching the Good News,” he said.
“We reach out to those people in need within society, especially the marginalized.”
In 2017 Fr Lee attended Ignite, a national catholic youth conference in Brisbane sharing his experiences with participants.
Mark Bowling, Multimedia Journalist, The Catholic Leader, Brisbane.
LISTEN TO: Fr Willie Lee follows Pope Francis’ call to go to the peripheries of society
(Duration: 5:58mins, MP3: 2.73MB)
Related links
- Read more from The Far East, March 2018
