Fr PJ McGlinchey was remembered at midday Mass on the 23rd of April in Geumak parish in Jeju.
The liturgy was followed by prayers at his grave and later that night the Eucharist was celebrated by Bishop Kang in the Trinity Church.
The homily was preached by Fr Simon Im Moon Chol, who was baptised by Fr PJ. Fr Simon’s father was one of PJ’s original catechists in Hallim Parish.
On 22nd April, the Irish Embassy in Korea tweeted a special tribute to Fr PJ marking the first anniversary of his death.
The tweet stated: “Today is the 1st anniversary of the passing of Fr PJ McGlinchey, a Columban missionary who worked with the people of Jeju for more than 60 years, receiving the highest Presidential honours of Ireland and Korea and only the 4th person to be awarded honorary Korean citizenship.”
Fr Michael Riordan has recalled in the latest Korean Newsletter that PJ sometimes told him the story of when he went to the Gwangju Seminary to give a priests’ retreat and noticed a bust of Archbishop Harold Henry in the foyer of the building at the bottom of the stairs.
He noticed a few cleaners and others working in the area, so he asked them who was the person portrayed by the bust?
None of them knew but told PJ that they thought the bust was of some ‘old foreigner’. PJ was shocked that they didn’t know Harold Henry after all he had done for the Gwangju diocese.
“Several years before he died, he made me promise that I wouldn’t let anyone make a statue or bust of him. I tried to laugh him off, but he insisted on making me promise. What he didn’t know was that there was already a statue made of him that he had never seen.”
“When the stations of the cross were being made, Kim Matteo commissioned the sculptor to do a statue of PJ. It was stored in a shed where PJ would never visit, and I was afraid to tell him about it in case he made me promise to destroy it.”
“Recently, we had the sculptor here for a few days finishing off some work on the Resurrection scenes and I took the opportunity to ask him to set up PJ’s statue outside the Isidore Centre. And as it says in Genesis, the Lord said, ‘Let there be… and it became’.”