Young people urged to take up missionary life

YOUNG people were urged yesterday to consider missionary life and promote justice and peace amongst the “most abandoned people” of Africa.

Preaching during a special Mass in Cork to launch the Society of African Missions (SMA) 150th jubilee celebrations, its superior general, Fr Kieran O’Reilly, said the society’s Irish province had sent 800 men on missions over the years.

But we can no longer provide the numbers we did during the heydays of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, he told Mass-goers at the historic SMA St Joseph’s parish church in Wilton - one of the society’s first churches in Ireland.