Introduction
By all measurable standards of judging West European missionaries and Religious Orders who preached the gospel in Nigeria over the past one hundred years, Bishop Patrick J. Kelly and his band of mostly Irish members of the SMA and nuns were exceptional. ‘SMA’ stands for Societas Missionum ad Afros translated as the Society of African Missions. It is an international community of Catholic missionaries given the responsibility for the evangelisation of Africa. The society was founded in France in 1856 by Melchior de Marion Brésillac, a French Catholic bishop with considerable experience in India.
However, he resigned from the Indian mission because it appeared to him as if the Church condoned the Indian Caste System, a cultural practice where a person’s worth was determined by birth. As an alternative, Brésillac offered himself to the authorities in Rome for a mission to the West Coast of Africa and was granted permission to start a new organisation. Not long afterwards, tragedy struck: Brésillac and his companions died a few weeks after arriving at Freetown in Sierra Leone. Suffice it to say that the organisation would have been short-lived were it not for the sheer courage and resilience of the friends he left behind in France.
With incredible courage, they took up the challenge of working to realise Brésillac’s dream. Patrick J. Kelly took the oath of membership of the SMA in 1918 and arrived in Nigeria in 1921. Except for the time he was a professor in an Irish Regional Seminary, Kelly, who worked as a missionary for 49 years in present-day Western Nigeria, spent a total of 70 years as a priest. As a pastor, he was a role model, a man of deep faith who gave all he had to build Churches, hospitals, old people’s homes and to generally meet the spiritual needs of the people under his care. Under his able leadership, the SMA Missionaries outdid themselves in school apostolate – exceeding their own standards for commitment.
Early years
As a minor seminarian in 1972, my friends and I were going past the Bishop’s Court on our way to the school chapel when I saw Bishop Kelly working in his garden. As I looked on, he thrust a spade into the ground. What I remember to this day is that every inch of the blade of the Patrick J. Kelly (1894-1991): A posthumous birthday tribute to a great missionary spade went into the ground. I was never able to make sense of the sheer physical energy behind this mundane act of an old man in the 70s working in his garden until I came across Michael O’Shea’s Bishop Kelly of Western Nigeria published in 2006 by the SMA.
This excellent book deepens insight and fills blanks in any researcher’s understanding of the workings of the Religious Order. With the ample information from the SMA archives, the book contains snippets of oral history and details on the early years of Bishop Kelly. It has a trove of information on the teething problem and the clear vision of the SMA missionaries as they laid foundations for schools, Churches and hospitals in the early part of last century. Patrick J. Kelly was born 130 years ago this year, on August 3, 1894 to be precise. As records show, he was born into a home where prayers, catechism, school work, and farming were taken seriously. He grew up to be able bodied – six feet tall, with broad shoulders and well suited for physically challenging jobs. Patrick endeared himself to his primary school headmaster who inspired him to become a priest. He completed his primary school in 1909, and halfway through his secondary education, dropped out to help on the family’s farm which required more farm hands at that time. In any case, the family wasn’t quite sure whether priesthood was a good investment. As the family saw it, the road was long and expensive; he might even change his mind midway or be turned down. Young Patrick did continue his journey to the priesthood.
His biographer recalls that before that, Patrick worked for the government commission digging ditches. At other times, he carted sand for a builder renovating a local church. He has always been a hard worker and the habit never left him even on the day I saw him working in his garden when he was over 70 years of age. When he went back to school, and given his intellectual ability, he earned advanced standing in the college enabling him to complete his studies ahead of his peers, and to proceed to the Senior Seminary. His father died in 1919, and on June 29, 1921 Patrick and nine of his classmates were ordained priests by Bishop Thomas Broderick, SMA, one of his professors he met in the Seminary who, in 1928, founded St. Thomas’s College, Ibusa in Delta State.
Hard work
In November 1921, Kelly bade farewell to his mother and siblings and set sail for Nigeria. His first posting was as a curate to Eku in the present-day Delta State of Nigeria, a mission station opened a few months previously by Fr. Georges Krauth, SMA, the parish priest at Aragba. One task he gave himself was to learn the local language, get to know the people and the local custom. He sat in catechism classes, learning by heart the catechism answers along with the catechumens. He listened carefully to their pronunciation and tried to repeat the sound as best he could. As he settled into the mission work at Eku, he adapted quickly to local foods. He later planted a few coffee trees and discovered that avocado pear made a wonderful substitute for butter.
Working hard, helped by the people, he built a two storey, mud-walled house with an external stairway, wide balconies and corrugated iron sheets. At the end of June 1926, he returned to Ireland and was appointed a professor of Moral Theology in a regional seminary in Ireland. Kelly’s second journey to Nigeria was in October 1929. He travelled by sea from Liverpool in England to Lagos, and then, by lorry to Asaba the headquarters of the Vicariate of the then Western Nigeria. The resident bishop, Thamas Broadrick, SMA, welcomed him. The Vicariate extended for some 600 miles from Zaria in the North to the Bight of Benin in the South. It was nearly 200 hundred miles in width from the River Niger westwards to Ondo-Ekiti areas.
Kelly was soon posted to Sapele, a place bubbling with the timber industry, robber factories, flour mills, grain stores and a navy depot. With hindsight, it is quite easy for researchers to see why Bishop Kelly was such a successful missionary, an effective leader and role model. In the first place, the people and the civil society of Ireland, a truly Christian country (if ever there was one!), took the African Mission to heart, and shared the vision of the organisation. Such enthusiasm for the wellbeing of people in a distant continent was rarely found elsewhere. Second, Kelly had the inestimable good fortune of managing loyal and dedicated co-workers. There was an extraordinary affection for and loyalty to him among the SMA priests and his personnel. As his biographer aptly observes, this did not mean that they always agreed with him. However, his SMA co-workers saw him as a man with a sense of dignity and decorum with the ability to lead; he was thought of as someone who presented himself well and followed laid down rules. Moreover, he had an unflappable manner and exhibited a great ability to cope with any situation he found himself in.
His boss, the then Bishop Taylor whom he replaced, and who later became the Archbishop of Lagos thought that Kelly was tolerant, pious and clever. He was, however, irritated by Kelly’s God-will-provided attitude and optimistic approach to life. Kelly was known to be ‘a lone ranger’ not particularly drawn towards making personal friendships. However, he didn’t mind the occasional round of beer but disapproved of heavy drinkers and chain smokers. He preferred a simple lifestyle and disliked anything fancy in terms of clothing, all of which seemed to be an advance warning to those thinking of asking him for money.
Leadership style
Kelly’s biographer quotes one contemporary as saying that there was never a missionary more deserving of the honour of being made a bishop. He added that with Kelly in charge, the Western Nigerian Mission was in a safe and holy pair of hands. Elsewhere, Bishop Taylor wrote that Kelly “was a perfect man, one of the very best of priests and the greatest of missionaries” with the ability to deal with problems compassionately. Evidence from his biographer’s research in oral history point also to the fact that Kelly was mentally and physically razor-sharp. It is worth noting that there was a general feeling among his fellow missionaries that his leadership style as a senior priest gave way, in his first decade as a Bishop, to a tougher style, in which he pursued a policy of “mission before men.”
It was a style that invited the individual to “do their duty and stick to their post.” Such an approach promoted self-sacrifice and the need for the missionary to take up seemingly impossible tasks for the sake of the gospel without flinching. In any case, Kelly didn’t think that seeking material comfort and expensive living was what he would expect from his colleagues and co-workers. By way of an example, he sometimes travelled by bike with his cassock tucked inside his shorts, apparently hoping to inspire those who were becoming too emotionally attached to their cars.
Challenges
Illness and premature death were part of the psychology of being a member of the Society of African Mission. As noted earlier, all the pioneer missionaries including the founder were wiped out by illness in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1859. In his time, Bishop Kelly coped with losses and deaths of young priests, and many had to be sent home to Ireland due to illness. Indeed, during his own first tour as a young priest, some of his colleagues died within weeks of each other. To Kelly, a man of deep faith, whatever happened was God’s holy will, and he was perfectly resigned to anything.
It is said that, as a bishop, Kelly kept the advice he got from an old Irish Parish priest ‘never to suspend any priest.’ On why his priests were always happy to go wherever he sent them, he said: I talk to them first, find out where they want to go, and I send them there. It therefore meant that a priest didn’t complain if the assignment opted for turned out to be more challenging than expected. Kelly was not a house-bound bureaucratic bishop; he did a great deal of his own office work as he didn’t believe in full time secretaries. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Vicariate at his fingertips, but he was never ‘bossy’. Neither was he given to looking over the shoulders of his staff. If ever he wanted one to do something out of the ordinary, he was most humble in his way of asking.
Normally, he wouldn’t criticise fellow missionaries nor was he effusive in praising anyone as he believed that rewards were for the next world. To those who looked closely, he always seemed to have a dishevelled look. However, no matter what he wore, he radiated a commanding presence of someone in authority – with penetrating blue eyes. He spent a great deal of time on confirmation tours made memorable because they usually had a festive air about them. They took place throughout the year, each lasting two or three weeks depending on the size of the parish and the number of outstations.
Legacy
By the time he became a bishop, he had already held senior administrative positions in the Vicariate and had a clear understanding of how the system worked. In the 1940s, there was, as yet no Government educational policy worth talking about; the colonial government of the day depended on Bishop Kelly and his team of missionaries to run schools and colleges. Not only did Kelly develop the work of his predecessor but he responded to new situations especially the school apostolate. This involved a huge expansion in the number of primary schools, the initiation of secondary education, and the recruitment of teachers with university degrees.
Kelly liked to establish schools in the rural areas with priests in charge so that the people there would have the benefit of a priest for Mass on Sundays and for the administration of the Sacraments in emergencies. At times, he began by building a large Church that doubled as a school until he found the money for school buildings. When donations and government grants began to trickle in, Kelly used them thriftly, and at times, building two or three schools for the price of one. To cope with expanding school apostolate, he recruited the Order of Teaching Brothers and nuns, as well as lay graduates from Ireland. He equally sponsored Nigerian men and women for university degrees abroad. Kelly and his fellow missionaries never stopped thinking of how to make life better for the people.
In the 1940s, for instance, records show that they gave serious consideration to the establishment of a training institute for agricultural and technical works in their area of jurisdiction as they believed that Catholicism and scientific progress could go hand in hand. They even pushed for the colonial authorities at the time to consider St. Thomas’s College, Ibusa, as the location for a London University college which later metamorphosed to become the University of Ibadan. Kelly and his SMA colleagues wanted to help the people to advance on the road to education and self-reliance. He was convinced that schools were not only instruments of education and national development but also a primary means of evangelisation.
But why this emphasis on school apostolate which did not really coincide with what the colonial authorities wanted at that time? In defending his approach to education, Kelly is on record as telling the Provincial Assembly of the SMA in August 1968: We ordinaries (Bishops) always did what we thought best for the missions. If we had neglected education, we would have at present, no standing in the country. If we have any standing, it is through those people who passed through our secondary schools and Teacher Training Colleges. Bishop Kelly and his colleagues considered education worthwhile, not only as a value in itself, but in terms of religion.
As his biographer sums it up, Kelly was persuaded that school apostolate was the best way to win souls to Christ. Consequent upon this, he pleaded with his superiors to allow him to open more schools notwithstanding the challenges that inevitably faced foundation staff of new schools. Curiously, the more he worked, the more his superiors required of him. For instance, after a visit to the diocese late in 1952, a senior SMA priest visiting from Ireland demanded that he build a new house in Uzairue, Agbor and the Teacher Training College at Ubiaja. Kelly was also directed to open chapels in parish houses at Benin, Asaba, Ashaka, Onitsha-Olona and Ozoro. All things considered; records show that Bishop Kelly’s statistics for services to the people of Nigeria is quite impressive.
His achievements placed him in the ranks of the long-established diocese of the whole West Africa. By 1956, the then Benin Diocese had 660 primary schools. His medical apostolate statistics surpassed all other West African jurisdictions, thanks to his SMA Fathers, the sisters of Our Lady of the Apostles, lay doctors, nurses and helpers. By the late 1950s, the Benin Diocese had 67 medical centres. Education, however, was the ‘crown’ of his immense achievement. St. Patrick’s College Asaba was then one of the best secondary schools in Nigeria. In 1954, for instance, in the Senior Cambridge Examination, fifty students passed out of fifty-four, twenty-one gained Grade 1 and ten gained Grade II. Both Catholics and non-Catholics took notice. Indeed, wherever the bishop went on confirmation tours, delegates of local people besought him to set up a college for them “like St. Patrick’s.”
While he couldn’t always provide another St. Patrick’s, he did, in the long run, provide the people with nearly eighty new secondary schools but he tested the genuineness of their desire by requesting them to make a large financial contribution towards it, “Bring £1000 in ten bags, then I will build a secondary school.” Many of the communities did. In his desire to increase the number of graduate teachers, Bishop Kelly sent some twenty-Five Nigerian students (men and women) to study for degrees in universities Ireland, Scotland, England and Ibadan anticipating that in independent Nigeria, such students would get the highest Government posts. It is gratifying to learn that during the 1950s, 1960s and the 1970s, he enjoyed the tremendous pleasure of noticing that at public functions, the top dignitaries of Church and state were products of the Catholic schools he and his fellow missionaries had founded.
To their credit the number of Catholic schools and colleges at the end of Kelly’s time in Nigeria included about 700 Primary schools, forty-five Secondary Modern Schools, forty-one Secondary Grammar schools and 4 Teacher Training Colleges. Most notably, he founded St. Paul’s Seminary Benin-City, and co-founded the Ss. Peter and Paul Major Seminary, Ibadan both of which continue to prepare the way for the formation of an indigenous clergy and hierarchy. As at today, the area within his jurisdiction has been divided into the present-day dioceses of Ondo, Benin, Issele-Uku, Warri, Auchi, Bomadi, and Uromi.
Civil war years
Bishop Kelly was seventy-three years of age when the Nigerian Civil War began, and he was, by then, one of the oldest of the SMA Fathers. There was not much he and his fellow missionaries could do except to commit the lives of the people to God. There is ample evidence that all the missionaries in the then Midwest suffered, in one way or another, whether in close encounters with the Federal troops or the rebels, or from the inescapable tension that wars generate. However, except for the bombing of the residence of the Principal of St. Thomas’ College and senseless killing of Brother Roman Wicinsky, the Marianist Principal of St. Patrick’s College, Asaba, by Biafran soldiers at Ogwashi Uku, the SMA did not suffer any other loss of life. Many of the missionaries believed that the prayers of Bishop Kelly brought them safely through the war. After the war, Bishop Kelly and SMA personnel were in the forefront of caring for refugees and the displaced.
Kelly’s office became involved with aid to war victims, initially in the form of food and clothing, and later with funds from Oxfam, and other humanitarian agencies for repair work on damaged buildings at St. Mary’s Hospital, Ogwashi-Uku, St. Patrick’s College, Asaba, and St. Thomas’ College, Ibusa. Kelly celebrated fifty years as a bishop in 1990. He died on August 31, 1991. He would have been 97 years of age on August 31, that year. It goes without saying that today and always, the faithful he left behind in Nigeria will continue to testify to his holiness, and pray that he would, one day, be elevated to sainthood. It remains quite puzzling, though, that the Nigerian Bishops and even the SMA are not vigorously pursuing this cause as one would expect.
• Benedict O. Ushedo is an author and experienced educator