Below are stories from past issues of Columban Mission magazine. The Columban Fathers publish Columban Mission magazine eight times a year. Subscriptions are available for just $15 per year. Sign up to receive our next issue. Read more about Columban Mission magazine.
“What are you doing in Taiwan?,” my friends would ask. “Oh, I work at the HIV/AIDS Center.” “What? What did you say?” My friends were confused by my answer and couldn’t understand what I said. After answering several times, they finally managed to understand.
I visited Korea in February earlier this year after an absence of nineteen years.
In September 2017 our class celebrated 50 years since we first came to Dalgan Park, Ireland, to follow what we all believed at the time was a call to missionary priesthood in the Society of St. Columban. The reunion was a joyful and uplifting experience.
Every year in the Catholic Church we have a “World Day of Prayer for the sick” on February 11, which is also the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. All the experts on the life of Jesus agree that He was indeed a healer.
When people ask me about my job, I still hesitate with my answer. I find that I don’t fit in with a conventional category of any job listing. Even within our own Catholic tradition, many clergy find it strange when I answer that I am a lay missionary, along with my family.
One day, words on the poster at a local charity shop caught my attention.
Simon unfurls his tattered sleeping bag under the shelter of a park pavilion in one of the biggest parks in Hong Kong, a city where sky-high property prices and a yawning wealth gap have helped fuel a surge in homelessness.
It was a Sunday morning. I was turning the pages of my Mandarin Chinese prayer book looking for suitable prayers for the dead. I was in one of the eight villages of our parish in the Dabaijian mountains in Taiwan.
Columban Fr. Daniel O’Connor is part of a small group of eight in the Hyderabad Diocese, Pakistan, where they manage a health and tuberculosis clinic in the Badin Parish Church Compound in the interior area of Sindh.
The Christmas/Epiphany cycle offers us generous glimpses into the mystery of the birth and manifestation of Jesus. The story of the Magi comes at the end of these glimpses and rich reflections of the Christmas season.
The Columbans are a society of missionaries, including priests and lay people, who minister to people of various cultures as a way of witnessing to the universal love of God.