Bishop Charles Hammawa of Jalingo, Nigeria, and Bishop Fintan Monahan of Killaloe with concelebrating priests after the annual Mass of St Feichin in Abbey, Co. Galway. Overseas priests call for renewed drive to foster home-grown vocations
Ireland cannot rely indefinitely on overseas priests to compensate for falling local vocations and needs a renewed drive to encourage Irish men toward the priesthood, missionary priests serving in Ireland have told The Irish Catholic.
“I’ll serve as a jack. I’ll lift your car, but you have to double time with your effort in replacing your tyre,” said Fr Jonas Rebamontan, a Filipino priest serving in Boyle and a former seminary formator, comparing his ministry to a passer-by helping a stranded motorist. Missionaries, he said, “are not long-term solutions… these are just temporary.”
He called for a “massive movement or recruitment for vocations, especially to the priesthood,” saying: “We cannot just depend on the missionaries.”
Fr Rebamontan said missionary priests were helping to meet an immediate need but were “not the complete answer”, stressing that local vocations were essential to the Church’s future.
“There must also be somebody from the grassroots, from the local, maybe Irish young people who would sign up,” he said. He called for greater vocation awareness in schools and more opportunities for young people to meet priests and understand priestly life.
Kenyan priest Fr Amos Ruto, who now serves in Castletownbere, recalled an older Irish priest describing a time when there were “so many priests that all of them could not actually be accommodated in their dioceses here in Ireland”.
“They had to move out, to go and evangelise,” Fr Ruto said. “But now, 40 or 50 years later… they are struggling with vocations, the parishes are being merged. It’s kind of hard to believe that is happening within such a short period of time.”
For Nigerian priest Fr Anselm Emechebe MSP, serving in Kilsaran, Co. Louth, this reversal is personal as his own Catholic formation was influenced by Irish missionaries.
“The Irish came to us and now we are also coming back,” Fr Emechebe said, describing the movement as part of the “dynamism of the Church”.
However, the priests also cautioned against viewing the Irish Church solely through the language of decline.
The priests also spoke about strengths they have found in Irish Catholic life, the experience of adapting to ministry here and what Ireland might learn from the Churches it once helped to build.
Polish priest Fr Dominik Domagała, newly appointed as a curate in the Castleknock Parish Partnership after previously ministering in Ireland for more than six years, said: “Ireland, really, it’s not a lost battle… it’s far away from that.”