Life spent in service of others
Gearóid Wille Ó Fátharta spent years in Chile and Brazil as a Columban missionary. Living and working with people on the margins of society, he had to navigate political repression, rebukes from cardinals and threats to his life. He eventually left, married the woman he loved and had a family. Gearóid documents this life in his new memoir, as he tells JUDY MURPHY.
Gearóid Wille Ó Fátharta learned young what it was like to be an outsider. Having gone to school locally in Indreabhán until he finished fourth class, he attended St Pat’s in Galway City for the final two years.
“it was difficult,” recalls Gearóid, who was born in na hÁille, Indreabhán, in 1954, and went on to spend years as a Columban missionary in South America, before leaving the priesthood in 1996, later returning to Ireland with his Brazilian-born wife, Genecci, and their young family.
But that was all in the future back when Gearóid the child found himself an outsider in the city school.
“It was the first time I came up against marginalisation,” he says of how other boys referred to him ‘a Cunnie’ – a derogatory term for someone from Conamara.
Gearóid isn’t sure why he was sent to St Pat’s, but says “my mother placed great value on education. Maybe she thought it would benefit me to have this new experience”.
It certainly taught him hard lessons, ones that served him during his decades as a Columban missionary in Chile and Brazil, which he documents in his memoir, Mo Scéal Fhéin.
In it, he describes a life that’s entirely unfamiliar today, one in which young Irish men and women joined various religious orders to work with marginalised people overseas.
Gearóid served in Chile in late 1970s and the 1980s, during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, when missionary orders who spread Christ’s message about justice for the poor and oppressed were regarded as a malign influence. It was a time when Chilean people who were seen as a threat to Pinochet’s regime ‘disappeared’.
“I knew people who ‘disappeared’,” says Gearóid, whose first period in Chile was in the late 1970s, while training for the priesthood.
Coiste Cearta Síbialta na Gaeilge, a group set up in the late 1960s to campaign for rights for Gaeltacht areas, inspired him to join the missions.
“That gave me a different outlook on life. People like Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Caitlín Maude were inspirational,” he says of the activists and acclaimed writers.
“I was standing beside them and was in awe. They were inspirational orators.”
Gearóid chose the Columban Order for his priestly life, partly because his parents used to get its magazine, The Far East.
“I had read accounts of what the priests were doing, especially in the Philippines. The work they’d been doing there since the 1920s,” he says.
Although South America wasn’t mentioned much in The Far East, that’s where he was sent following several years’ training at the Columban headquarters in Dalgan Park, County Meath.
Before being ordained, students had to spend two years on the missions. That rule was introduced when he was a student and while it delayed his ordination by two years, Gearóid felt it made sense. It allowed potential missionaries to see if they could adapt to new cultures and learn new languages. He studied Spanish in Bolivia – being bilingual helped – before serving in Chile’s capital, Santiago.
Pictured: Gearóid Willie Ó Fátharta was inspired to join the missionaries by the Gaeltacht Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. PHOTO: JOE O'SHAUGHNESSY.