“It is sad that the Irish church is only now admitting that it failed to draw on the experience of our missionaries and on those Irish priests who were leading international orders – Msgr Denis O’Callaghan in Putting Hand to the Plough, Veritas, 2007. But a little bit of our foreign based missionary background might…

If only the Madlanga Commission had been in Assisi! Once upon a time (800 years ago) there was a well-off teenager called Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone or simply Francis Bernardone who lived in Italy, in a small town called Assisi on top of a mountain. After fighting (hoping to be a celebrity war veteran)…