
November 3rd is the Feast of St Martin de Porres, the Patron Saint of the Liverpool Archdiocesan Missionary Project which sends priests to serve in Latin America with the Boston Based Society of St James.
This year the project marks it's thirtieth anniversary and we look back to it's founding by the then Archbishop of Liverpool, Derek Worlock.
'Mission Accomplished. LAMP is lit. Deo Gratias.”'
With these stirring words, the late Archbishop Derek Worlock finished his diary of his historic visit to Latin America 30 years ago, marking the start of the Liverpool Archdiocesan Missionary Project.
In his pastoral letter of November 1979, the Archbishop urged: 'Please help to make this LAMP Sunday a day to remember in the history of the Archdiocese, a day when we try to forget our own needs and take our share in the missionary work of the Church.
'And may the Lord bring the strength of his love to those in Latin America for whom our priests are caring in his name.'
Three decades on this vital work is still being faithfully carried out, as Archbishop Patrick Kelly noted in his pastoral letter read on this LAMP Sunday, 1 November. It is being carried out by priests like Father Joe Bibby, keeping the LAMP flame alight high in the Andes in Bolivia, and by Fr Denis Parry and Fr Simon Cadwallader in Lima, Peru – the former in the parish of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the north of the capital, the latter in Villa el Salvador.
For the past three decades Liverpool priests have volunteered to serve in Latin America, standing alongside the poor and deprived, and supported by the people of the Archdiocese. Archbishop Kelly paid tribute to '30 years of constant, affectionate commitment to LAMP by priests and people'.
He cited the example of how parishioners’ generosity had enabled Dr Jonathan Berry of Penketh to add languages to his medical skills so that now he is serving as a doctor in Bolivia. And there is Archbishop Paul Gallagher now the Nuncio in Guatemala.
Archbishop Kelly also paid tribute to the courage of his predecessor, Archbishop Worlock. He said: 'Reading his diary of his visit to Latin America brought home to me for the first time the sheer physical courage of this great man.'
In the diary, reproduced in the Catholic Pictorial 30 years ago, we read how the plane he was travelling on 'had webbing seats along each side, with maximum capacity for 30 passengers. There were 63 persons aboard, plus luggage down the middle, several babies, and a chicken or two.'
And again: 'Tomorrow we are to visit a village some miles away, cut off by landside, so there is talk of horses. But just now my thoughts are of cockroaches which have reached my bed and my suitcases and of the overflowing WC from which the water is now spreading across the floor.”
Archbishop Worlock setting up an altar in a school hut in a clearing in Peru and being handed a bottle of mosquito lotion. “Gratefully, liberally and apparently successfully we applied this anywhere within reach as the bugs committed suicide in the candles.'
Archbishop Kelly believes that our priests have come back from Latin America in the intervening years 'to bless us, because they themselves have been blessed by those who are the poor in spirit, gentle, hungry and thirsty, peacemakers and yes, who are persecuted in the cause of right.'
This is a theme well-understood by Fr Chris McCoy, now parish priest of St John Fisher, Knowsley Village, who worked in Peru from 1990-96, after responding to a call by Archbishop Worlock for volunteers.
Then an assistant priest at Our Lady Queen of Martys in Croxteth, he 'decided to go because I was young, in my early 30s, and had served six years since my ordination, and I thought it was an important part of my service in our Diocese, to serve in Latin America.'
Peru was then 'fairly unstable and a quite dangerous place”'with terrorists around and he spent most of his time in a shanty town on the edge of Lima with a very young population, 70 per cent of whom were under 25. Yet the the people very responsive. 'It was all about serving any needs there were. The real issues were poverty, lack of work and nutrition – they went hungry.'
Lima is built on desert so access to water was a big problem, with supplies often switched off. 'It was a real challenge. But priests are very much organised by the people and they organised workshops, helped people with TB, organised shared kitchens where people fed each other. They organised themselves into different groups, many for young people.
'One guy coming from England doesn’t do everything. My job was to encourage and support the struggle for justice and dignity in their lives.'
Fr Chris, who lived in the middle of the shanty town, described his experience in Peru as 'deeply formative'. He said: 'I am very glad I went. I am still in touch with priests sent to Latin America through the Missionary Society of St James, all around the UK and the world.
'We meet every two years and reflect on how the work we did impacts on our personal ministry in the UK. It changes us, and the way of thinking, when face to face with very diverse poverty. It puts lots of things in perspective.
'For example, the population of Catholics in my parish was nearly 70,000 in one shanty town. It’s like having just four or five priests to cover the whole of Liverpool, with its population of around 400,000. This is why the lay people take the lead and the responsibility, and this is the way it should be.'
Serving in Latin America in this missionary work , added Fr Chris, 'is part of our understanding of what it is to be a Catholic. Christianity doesn’t stop at the boundaries of the parish. It reaches right across the world, whether it is through the work of LAMP or CAFOD. The world is our parish.'
From his parish in the northern zone of Lima, Fr Denis Parry told a similar story of trying to deal with huge numbers – he can envisage his young parish having a population of 60,000 one day.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, he explained, was founded in 2006 as the offshoot of another densely populated parish and covers an area 17 kilometres in length. 'It is divided into two distinct realities – one is mainly rural and consists of 11 small villages which have no irrigation and electricity only during the day, the other sector is a new urbanisation that continues to develop and grow.'
Fr Denis had to start from scratch. 'I have lived in rented accommodation for three years because there is no infrastructure in the parish,' he said. 'We still have no parish house, office, meeting rooms or permanent church. Likewise, we lack catechists, ministers of the eucharist or people adequately trained to assume responsibility.
'However, we have made great strides in a relatively short time. With the help of donation money and fundraising activities, we were able to construct a prefabricated chapel with concrete floor in time for the parish feast in December last year. We celebrated First Holy Communion for the first time in the parish – more than 80 children in all. It was a very joyous occasion.
'This year we began a confirmation programme for the teenagers and in 2010 I hope to begin with the construction of a parish house, and later on with the construction of a church that will be large enough to hold 800 people.' Thirty years after the LAMP was lit, it is burning bright – but there remains much work to be done.
Read in full Archbishop Patrick Kelly's Pastoral Letter for LAMP Sunday 2009 here
Make a donation to LAMP here