Fr Derek Byrne tells TOM HENNIGANwhy he is happy to devote the rest of his life to his new flock in remote Guiratinga, Mato Grosso
THOUGH ALREADY night, the temperature was still around 30 degrees and two lizards were scrambling up the wall behind the altar when a cheer of “Vivo San Patricio” brought to an end the first Mass for St Patrick’s Day in this sleepy Brazilian town.
The Mass was held to welcome its officiating priest, St Patrick’s Missionary Society member Fr Derek Byrne, who told an attentive congregation the story of the missionary who converted Ireland to Christianity over a millennium before Brazil was discovered.
Known in Brazil as Padre Der-ek-e, this compact 61-year old Dubliner is in town because tomorrow he will be ordained and installed as the new bishop of the Diocese of Guiratinga.
He is the latest in a long line of Irish missionaries who over the centuries have become bishops abroad, though it is a tradition under threat from the dramatic decline in vocations in Ireland and the ageing of Irish missionaries.
“When I entered the society I was one of its youngest members. Now 40 years later I still am,” says Fr Byrne.
His links with Brazil go back to 1973 when he came as a young missionary to work as a priest near the city of São Paulo.
Fr Byrne left in 1980 and for the next 22 years worked in the US and Ireland in fundraising and leadership positions, but always with the desire to return to Brazil.
Five years ago he got his chance, being sent out as parish priest of Castanheira, a recently settled region in the state of Mato Grosso.
Though over one and a half times the size of France the state has a population of less than three million and much of it was hacked out of the Amazon rainforest within the last 30 years.
The move from the society’s headquarters in Kiltegan, Co Wicklow, to being a rural parish priest on the Brazilian frontier was a shock.
“I found it isolating and difficult at the start. There was one other priest three and a half hours away up a dirt road so it wasn’t easy to go and visit him. When Mel Gibson’s Passion came out a friend wrote and asked had it come to my local cinema. My local cinema was 800 kilometres away.”
But Fr Byrne evidently settled in so well that when Rome came to fill the vacant bishopric of Guiratinga he was offered the post.
Despite the fact that when Rome offers a priest a bishopric it expects acceptance, Fr Byrne did have some reservations, principally centred on how his prospective Brazilian clergy and congregation would accept an Irishman as their pastor.
The papal nuncio said it would not be a problem, pointing out that of Brazil’s 400 or so bishops, a quarter are foreigners. At a first meeting with the priests of his future diocese Fr Byrne received a warm welcome.
Members of the local congregation also seem supremely unconcerned that their new bishop is an Irishman and not a Brazilian.
“The people here have faith and will accept what the Holy Spirit decides and Fr Derek was chosen by the Holy Spirit,” says José Carlos Madureira, editor of Folha de Guiratinga, the town’s local newspaper.
The challenges facing the new bishop are considerable. His new diocese is spread out across a thinly populated rural area almost half the size of Ireland. Of its 155,000 inhabitants, two-thirds are Catholic.
To administer to this flock Fr Byrne will only be able to call on 11 diocesan priests and an additional seven priests from religious orders.
Vocations in Brazil have held up better than in Ireland but the region’s bishops recently criticised the reluctance of priests to work in challenging rural areas such as Mato Grosso in favour of staying in the big towns and cities.
This has resulted in rural bishops in frontier states in Brazil having to spread their priests thinly on the ground.
Ready to fill the resulting gaps are Brazil’s home-grown evangelical Protestant churches. Even the smallest towns in Mato Grosso have chapels belonging to the new Pentecostal churches that have spread across the country like wildfire within a generation.
One of the advantages that the evangelicals have in ministering to new communities in isolated regions is that while Rome’s training for the priesthood is long and demanding, anyone who wants can set up as an evangelical preacher and open a chapel.
“You spend a lot of time travelling but in trying to visit the rural communities you feel you are not giving enough attention to the town.
“Therefore sometimes people have left the church and joined an evangelical church. I’ve had a number of people doing that. Maybe they find they get more personal attention there,” says Fr Byrne.
As well as the task in ministering to such a large area with meagre resources while at the same time meeting the challenge from the evangelical churches, there are also personal wrenches involved in taking on his new job.
Fr Derek knows becoming a Brazilian bishop makes a return to Ireland unlikely.
Just four years away from the retirement age for priests, by becoming a bishop he is signing up for another 14 years since they only retire at 75.
“The rest of my life is Brazil now. When I first visited Guiratinga I was taken to visit the grave of my predecessor and one of the priests showed me the plot beside it and said it was for me. And he was only half joking. But I am happy to be buried in Guiratinga if the Lord calls me when I am still here.”