Healing memories

Saurimo, in north-eastern Angola, on Monday, Brendan Carr CSSp, Irish Spiritan provincial, tells us his mind was filled with competing emotions of nostalgia, sadness, delight and gratitude. During the cold war years, Angola was riven by a brutal civil war. Brendan, young and enthusiastic, had arrived in Angola in 1983, one year after his ordination. His mother pulled out an atlas to find first, Angola, and then Saurimo, and asked him, “Could they send you any further?”

“Our mission was one of solidarity with a suffering people visited by a conflict not of their own choosing,” Fr Brendan tells us. “It was the Church at its best – defending human rights, confronting the parties of war, caring for the hungry and the displaced, uniting people in the hope of peace. Many missionaries were killed – on roads, by landmines, or because of their work in organising communities. Jean-Étienne Wozniak CSSp, a young French Spiritan, was killed in an ambush on Pentecost Sunday 1984 while travelling to a remote community. His Irish Spiritan companion, John Kingston, was badly wounded, taken hostage and later released. Those years in Angola were harrowing, marked by trauma, suffering, loss and grief.”

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