PE clergy remembered

JUST?REMEMBERING, by Fr WH?Barnes. Self-published, Port Elizabeth. 2011. 130pp. R50

Review by Michael Shackleton
A  well known active and energetic priest of the Port Elizabeth diocese in his seventies has to have a knee-replacement operation and, though unable to walk, he does not rest. He decides that this is a good time to write a book to remind the clergy, religious and layfolk of the diocese of the Christian witness and heroic lives of the priests and religious brothers who have graced their region since 1830.

In this little compendium he can devote only thumbnail sketches to each because either his sources were too few or too untraceable, or too much material on one would be at the expense of others. This can be frustrating for the reader whose attention is immediately gripped by what he has to narrate so sparsely. Fr Barnes whets the appetite to know a lot more, particularly for those who had met the priests or brothers whose lives and works he reanimates with colourful strokes.

For example, he tells of East London’s widely known and respected priest, Mgr John O’Keeffe, who had been an army chaplain and spent 27 years as parish priest of Immaculate Conception church in Albany Street. Fr Barnes quotes the late Donald Woods, a Catholic former editor of the Daily Dispatch, who published an appreciation of this great, charitable-to-all priest. He tells how Mgr O’Keeffe visited hospital patients of all faiths and none. Once, when a woman told him she had just given birth to a boy, he remarked: “It’s St Andrew’s day. You should call him Andrew.” “But I’m Jewish, Father,” she protested, and got this retort: “So was St Andrew, my girl.”

Fr Matthew McManus was a rough diamond and a bit of a hell-raiser, getting himself into trouble with the law and the bishop at times. But when the need for real Christian love and courage arose, he was unhesitant. During the bubonic plague he was the only volunteer to go into the townships to tend to the sick and bury the dead.

Fr Barnes includes his own story with straightforward candour. But he modestly does so towards the end of the book. His first aim is to recall those priests and brothers who lived before him and in his own time, and present them as great Christian men in spite of their human sensitivies and weaknesses.

Fr Barnes has been meticulous in gathering information and writing it up descriptively, in spite of the often frustrating lack of material. His hard work may yet prompt some other author to dig deeper and beyond and provide the diocese of Port Elizabeth with more complete biographies of one or more of the men who laid the foundations for the Church in the Eastern Cape and who have continued a fine tradition into the 21st century.

This book is easy to read and yet can impress deeply as it paints portraits of the magnificent courage and faith of the priests and religious we tend to take for granted.

Copies at R50 each (excluding postage and packaging) are available from Fr Barnes at PO Box 3089, Cambridge, 5206 East London