Missionary academy opens next month

BY A STAFF REPORTER
BRITAIN, which produces about 50 new missionary priests each year, is to have its first Catholic Missionary Academy. It will be used by about a dozen missionary Orders and Congregations.
The existing Mill Hill and White Fathers' seminaries will form the basis of the academy, which will be established in North London and be ready for its first theology students in September.
The project will in no way rationalise the existing congregations or rob them of their individual identity. Instead it will mean a more efficient use of lecturers and teaching facilities.
The participating congregations are being invited to establish their own Houses of Residence in the grounds of Mill Hill and Totteridge or in adjacent property.
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As well as providing lectures in dogmatic and pastoral theology, scripture, linguistics, anthropology and missionary catechetics, the academy will have close links with London University from which lecturers will be drawn.
Plans for the academy were mapped out during a series of meetings, culminating in a visit by Fr. Leonard Kaufman, Research Director of Ecclesiastical and Missionary Studies at the White Fathers' headquarters, Rome.
While in London he met missionary heads and representa
tives from many parts of the country.
Although the thinking behind the academy is very much the same as that which brought about the establishment of the Pontifical Athenaeum at Heythrop, Oxon, it has been realised that missionary work (in the sense of operating in developing countries) comes within a very specialised category.
Cardinal Heenan is giving his support to the new project, which will prepare priests for work in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Two typical moments in the week-long conference of members of the Sodality of Our Lady at the Ursuline Convent, Westgate-on-Sea, Kent, last week. The Sodalists, organised by Fr. Ralph Eastwell, S.J., went through a crash course on how they could play their part in the fight against world poverty.
Ages of the conference members ranged from a septuagenarian lady to a little girl in a pram who was there with her parents, but most were in their late teens or early twenties.
The course was a mixture of teach-in and round-table. The pace was set on Monday by a stimulating opening talk from Mr. Douglas Hyde, who — among his other experiences of the hard life lived in many countries—stated that once a year he goes voluntarily to prison in one part of the world or another, so as to share people's hardship with them. This, he said, was the only way to get a real grasp of the poverty situation.
Another speaker who caused excited discussion was a Dominican student on vacation from Sussex University, the Rev. Augustine John, a West Indian who recounted his experiences of colour bar.
Pictures show: (top) Morag McAuley, a London Sodalist, making a point over tea break with Julien Hofman, a Jesuit scholastic from Heythrop College, Oxon, and (left) the daily procession to Mass at the convent chapel, with hymn singing accompanied by guitarists Jill Joseph and Morag McAuley.