As I walked up the steps to St Columban's Church yesterday afternoon in the Hanyang area of Wuhan, I noticed that a white sheet of paper still formed a seal on the main door as it has done since early January. The printed details on this sheet of paper indicate...
“You have the wrong number. This is the North Korean embassy.” It was sometime in 1999 when I did my First Missionary Assignment (FMA) in Peru, recalls Fr Thomas Seungwon Nam, a South Korean Columban missionary. I had to renew my passport. For the first time in my...
Fr Frank Hoare writes about an Indo-Fijian marriage ceremony he celebrated near the town of Savusavu in Vanua Levu, the second main island of Fiji. The marriage ceremony was almost finished. It was time for the civil wedding. The groom’s younger brother had...
Lockdown changed life in the Philippines for Columban seminarian Jerry Lohera and spurred him to get planting fruit and vegetables to ease the stress. From September 2019 up to the first week of March 2020, I and four other Columban seminarians (one from Fiji, two...
From my youth I developed a strong friendship with the Columban missionaries that ministered in Jeju (Korea). Fr Patrick Murphy was in Mosulpo and I became a long-time friend, writes Kang Kyung-Sue [Andrew]. One afternoon at the beginning of summer the two of us...
Fr Patrick McMullan, a member of the regional council in Korea, writes about the need for ecological conversion as a rediscovery and deepening of the Hebrew insight that God creates, not just saves, the entire world. It seems normal now, but when I first came to...
In the middle of the half acre plot in which the rectory of Savannah Lar Mar Catholic parish is situated, a mango tree has pride of place, writes Fr Bobby Gilmore. Not only is the tree admired for its expanse and the shade it offers in the dead tropical heat of...
When I see the newly arrived children - all victims of human right violations and sexual abuse - healing and recovering in our Preda Foundation home and striving to be “good,” to be a “better person", somehow thinking they are “bad,” I and the Preda staff...
The year 2020 was synonymous with Covid-19. The virus was first recognised in Wuhan in China in late 2019. It was highly infectious and spread quickly in China, before moving on to Europe, the United States, Latin America and Africa. In December 2020 in the US, the...
Columban Father John Boles celebrated Christmas Mass in ‘Paradise’ last year. It was not the future paradise we all aspire to but something from the past - a 4,000-year-old temple in Peru. People often boast about having celebrated Mass in churches that are...