From Student to Father–

A Short Trip to Africa

Prior Joel Macul OSB

Each year for the past six years I have made a trip to Tanzania and Kenya in the first half of the year. This year I left for East Africa a few days after Easter. The trip has a clear focus—to visit the student monks in East Africa who are living together in two study houses. It is a service to our Ottilien Benedictine Congregation as the Congregation Study House Advisor. It is understood as a fraternal visit to our student monks to listen to them about how their studies are going, to assess their living situation and to make recommendations to their superiors regarding the various academic institutions where the monks are studying. For the most part these student monks are taking courses in philosophy and theology in preparation for ordination.

Morogoro, Tanzania

My visit this year began with the monks studying at Jordan University College in Morogoro, Tanzania ( 120 mi west of Dar es Salaam). There are nine monks studying there at the moment. They come from the four abbeys we have in Tanzania plus a monk from the priory in Zambia. Five of the brothers are in the philosophy or theology program while four of them are taking courses in the area of accountancy and business. The four abbeys are large communities and skills are needed in several areas. The need for financial transparency in the monasteries means that young monks are being trained in this area to better serve their communities. Jordan College is a young, small educational Catholic institution with a strong program in education among other areas. This means that our communities that have schools can take advantage of the college for training their future teachers.

My delight this year was the conversations that I was able to have with two of the first year philosophy students, one from Hanga Abbey and one from Katibunga Priory, Zambia. These young monks are excited about their studies and, despite the fact that English is not their first language, they have mastered enough vocabulary to speak what is on their mind. Philosophy is about wisdom and my impression is that the young members of our Tanzanian communities come to the monastery with wisdom that now needs encouragement to be fanned into a flame, as St. Paul tells Timothy. This is a new generation of monks entering our communities in Africa, reflecting the societal changes in their own countries and their hopes for the future. and full of energy.

Our Benedictine students at Morogoro live with the Salvatorians in their International Study House close to the college campus. The College itself is run by the Polish Salvatorian Fathers. The Benedictine relationship with the Salvatorians goes back a long way to the early 1960s when Ndanda Abbey needed help in covering the pastoral work in the territory it was responsible for. Eventually the USA Salvatorians came to the abbey’s rescue and were simply given part of the Benedictine territory as their own. They are now a fully Tanzanian province. The total number of students in the study house is about 45. The Salvatorian formators are always hospitable towards me and while I am visiting our Benedictine students, they usually invite me to celebrate the Eucharist in the morning for the whole student community. Kiswahili is the national language of Tanzania but for classes and common religious exercises, English must be used. Not always so easy for the brothers who may not have to use English in everyday life in their monasteries.

After four days with the brothers at Morogoro, I returned to Dar es Salaam. There I stay a day in the Kurasini guest house that Peramiho and Ndanda Abbeys have for the use of their monks in Tanzania’s largest city. Here, too, it affords me the opportunity to touch base with the guest masters of the house and find out what is happening in the monasteries in Tanzania and enjoy their company.

Langata, Nairobi, Kenya

April is the rainy season in East Africa, but that does not prevent the planes from flying, though a heavy downpour makes the runway scarcely visible. The rainy season in East Africa means a good down pour from time to time or gentle showers throughout the day or night. It also means plenty of mud from the red soil of Africa’s rift Valley…It is barely an hour’s flight north to Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city and one of Africa’s larger cities. The Missionary Benedictines built a study house for its monks here in 2005. There is a great advantage of having a study house in Nairobi. There are many religious educational institutions located in close proximity to one another such as the Consolata Institute of Philosophy, Catholic University of Eastern Africa, Tangaza University College, Marist International University College as well as seminaries run by the Apostles of Jesus and the Salesians. Most religious communities of men in Africa have a study house in Nairobi.

At our Benedictine Langata Study House, there are 24 students finishing up this year’s academic program. These students come from our monasteries in Tanzania, Zambia, South Africa, Uganda and of course Kenya as well as Kerala, India. The African section of our Congregation is clearly represented. Living and studying together affords these young monks a cross-cultural experience and the prospect of establishing contacts with monks from other communities. English is the language of house as it is the medium of instruction in all higher educational institutions in Nairobi. For some of the monks this takes some getting used to. Some brothers have to take an English language course before they can start their regular program. Now they must not only speak it, but must be able to write their papers in it.

All of the students are taking either philosophy or theology courses in one of the institutions mentioned above. Tangaza College is the preferred school of theology. It is a consortium formed from over 20 religious communities who provide lecturers and some staff for the institution. Over the years, many other institutes related to the Catholic tradition have been aggregated to the College creating a rich resource for both religious and lay people. The Benedictines have been part of Tangaza College since in founding in the 1980s.

I usually like to spend a good 8–10 days here at the study house. This helps me get a good feel for the study habits of the many monks and the quality of the community life and a chance to assess the academic quality of the institutions where the brothers are studying. There is a regular community life for the student monks, mitigated a little due to the variety of schedules, etc. This allows them to remain in our Benedictine environment and practice sharing their skills and talents with the whole group. I also spend more time here since I lived in the priory here in Nairobi and Tigoni for five years while teaching at Tangaza College and the Catholic University. I still have friends and acquaintances to catch up with. One former student is now a teacher of biblical languages at Catholic University.

The Benedictine Mission House each year contributes to an education fund of the Ottilien Congregation that supports the studies and housing of these young monastic students in East Africa. To complete the picture, there are a few monks from Africa who have the opportunity to study in Rome and Germany and are sponsored by the monasteries there.

My visit also allows me to listen to the leadership team of the house to hear what their concerns and hopes are. At the end of my visit, I am able to write up a report that is passed on to the leadership of the Congregation and to the superiors of each student monk. It is a report that includes encouragement and recommendations based on my listening and seeing. And for me, personally, there is the chance to be refreshed in the place in Africa that I called home for some years.

Inkamana Abbey, South Africa

My stay at the Langata Study House was short this year. There was a different event awaiting me. Early in the morning of 19 April, I boarded  a Kenya Airways plane for the four-hour flight to Johannesburg, South Africa. I was on my way to Inkamana Abbey in Vryheid, KwaZulu-Natal Province www.inkamana.mariannhillmedia.org. The occasion was the abbatial blessing of the third abbot of Inkamana and the first African abbot of the community. Abbot John Paul was one of my students in the novitiate class I taught when I was living at the priory in Tigoni, Limuru, Kenya, back in the nineties. His own monastic journey with the Missionary Benedictines had brought him to become a member of the abbey in South Africa. Now the community there has elected him its Father Abbot after he had served them as prior administrator for three years. In accord with ancient tradition, the abba, the father, of the monastic community is blessed by the local bishop. For the new abbot of Inkamana this took place in the abbey church on 21 April. His fellow abbots from Tanzania all came down to join in this blessed occasion.  There were three abbots from Tanzania, the archabbot of St. Ottilien, Germany, plus four of us abbot emeriti present to show our solidarity with the newest abbot of the Ottilien Congregation. Our liturgy began about 10 a.m. and finished close to 2 p.m., four hours that seemed to fly by in good African fashion. The liturgy was bilingual, English-Zulu. The Inkamana High School choir took care of the musical element in good form for which they are well-known. The speeches following the liturgy were likewise bilingual. Abbot John Paul was blessed to have had his mother come down from Nairobi, her first airplane experience ever! He was likewise blessed to have a number of his former confreres from Tigoni priory join him as well as representatives of St. Benedict’s Parish, Nairobi, where he had served as pastor for a number of years. With his abbatial blessing, all of our monasteries in Africa now have local African leadership. The missionary era of monk leadership has passed on the wisdom to a generation of local monks. The spiritual fathers of our African monasteries are now all sons of the soil, as an African expression has it.

Inkamana Abbey is not an unknown to me personally. One of my own confreres from my home monastery of St. Paul’s Abbey, Newton, NJ, has been monk there for a long time. I have visited him in South Africa from time to time over the years. In the evening of his life now as the oldest member of the community, such visits afford him the opportunity to hear news from home and for us to share stories. Father Peter was my Latin teacher in high school at St. Paul’s over fifty years ago. His years of pastoral experience in South Africa have kept his heart sensitive, his mind clear and honed his ability to share a story. Inkamana was the first place that saw American Missionary Benedictines when monks from St. Paul’s were missioned there in 1945.

Inkamana is well-known throughout South Africa for its high school www.inkamana.co.za. The school has been in existence for 95 years. It is the oldest Benedictine secondary school in Africa founded in 1923 by the first Missionary Benedictines who settled at Inkamana and who gave it a high priority. While small in enrollment, it prides itself that all its graduates are able to continue on to college. Founded to serve the educational needs of the poor people in Zululand, it now draws students from the larger cities of South Africa. The younger monks are making an effort to become more involved as teachers thus keeping the Benedictine presence alive in the school. From its start until 2000 it was the Benedictine Tutzing Sisters who ran the school while some monks served as teachers. Several of the teaching sisters are now living in the Tutzing Sisters priory in Norfolk. NE, and have fond memories of their days in the Inkamana High School classrooms.

The Blessed Gérard’s Care Center bbg.org.za in Mandeni, South Africa, is the apostolate of a monk of Inkamana Abbey, Fr. Gérard Lagleder OSB. It has grown from a simple hospice for AIDS/HIV patients into a full care center for all aspects of those affected by AIDS/HIV. Realizing that South Africa and Zululand in particular are hard hit by this disease, this pastoral, medical and social care for those afflicted is an outstanding expression of the Church’s outreach to those who are literally hidden away from sight. The Benedictine Mission House has the Care Center on its list of Benedictine run programs that it fully supports. I confess that my stay in South Africa was too short this time to make a visit to Fr. Gérard’s ministry down by the coast possible.

When I return from such a trip, I go through something of a re-entry period. Having lived in East Africa for some years and having made trips there regularly to visit monks and communities I have come to know over the past 25 years, I am profoundly touched by the growth of our communities, the ability of the student monks to articulate their ideas and now to see some of them in leadership positions in their communities endowed with strength and above all with hope. I enter into a different world when I am there and I find that by stepping into it for a while I am touching a part of my humanity and my soul that I might otherwise neglect or fail to recognize. Relationships are the key to Africa; other things can fall by the wayside.  To be in a relationship, with a community or an individual, because you simply are and not because of what you do, that is what matters. It is presence in communion that Africa nurtures; that is one of its many treasures. When I return, even from a short visit, I have come back with little in my bag but much in my heart. It takes some time to unpack that.