On 10th April 2024, I travelled to Suva for Fr Iowane Naio’s ordination at the Sacred Heart Cathedral. The night before, Columban priests gathered with Iowane’s relatives at our Columban Mission Office for the traditional kava ceremony.
Iowane entered the room, wearing a Fijian cape, and sat with his relatives. After his uncle’s inspiring speech, he stood up, removed the cape and moved across the room to sit with us Columban priests: Iowane’s family was gifting him to the Columban family.
Suva Cathedral was packed the next day for Iowane’s ordination ceremony, presided over by Archbishop Peter Loy Chong. Many of Iowane’s family had travelled six hours by bus from their mountain village in Ba on the west coast of the southern island of Viti Levu, and over 100 parishioners from the Columban-staffed parish in Labasa on the northern island of Vanua Levu had travelled overnight by bus and boat.
After Communion, I thanked Fr Iowane’s father, Isake, and his mother, Mariana (looking down from Heaven) for nurturing their son in the faith and supporting him in his missionary journey. I reminded those gathered that Columban missionaries from Ireland, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand arrived in Fiji over seventy years ago. Now, Fiji was sending Iowane to our Columban mission in Pakistan.
On 1st May 2024, at St Luke’s Church, Edin, Myitkyina, Kachin State, in war-torn Myanmar, Columban Fr Nbwi la Aung Francis Xavier was ordained as the first Burmese Columban missionary priest.
The history of Columban missionaries working in Myanmar began when Fr Bernard Way from Melbourne and Fr Patrick Usher from Ireland arrived by boat in Yangon on 21st October 1936.
They travelled eighteen hours by train north to Mandalay, from where they took a four-day riverboat trip up the Irrawaddy to Banmaw, the mountainous area where the Columbans would work.
Fr Bernard worked for 42 years in Banmaw and was interned in Mandalay along with other Columbans captured by the Japanese in 1945. A coup in 1962 led to the military government ordering all missionaries who had arrived after 1948 to leave, the last three Columbans leaving in 1979.
In 2008, a small group of Columban lay missionaries returned to Myanmar, and a new Columban mission team, comprising priests and lay missionaries, began to serve the Kachin people again in June 2015. With the ordination of Fr Nbwi la Aung, the Columban presence in Myanmar begins a new and exciting chapter in responding to God’s mission.
Columban Fr Peter O’Neill is from Australia. He has been serving as regional director of Oceania and was elected Society Vicar at the recent General Assembly in Peru.
Published in the September/October 2024 issue of the Far East magazine. Please subscribe and support Columban missionaries for €10 digital or €20 print. See: https://columbans.ie/far-east-magazine/
