GOING out of one’s comfort zone is pretty much par for the course when it comes to being a missionary priest or sister, but Mill Hill Missionary priest, Fr Bernard Fox, didn’t expect that when he arrived in Cameroon in 1977, he would be delivering something else other than sermons!
“I arrived with a few books and one of the books I brought that someone had given me as a going away present was called Where there is no doctor,” Fr Bernard explained. “I received a knock at my door at three in the morning to be informed that there was a Muslim woman who really needed a caesarean, and I was asked if I could take her to the hospital. It was 100 kilometres away the road was quite bad and not tarred, but I agreed to take the woman and her husband too. Two hours into the journey, the baby decides to come and I thought I'm not a midwife, so I said to the husband: ‘Do you know anything?’ And he said: ‘We're not allowed in our religion to even look at the birth.” So, there was me asking him to hold a torch at about four or five in the morning and I delivered twins. They both died and I was absolutely devastated.
“I suggested carrying on to the hospital, because the woman needed attention, but the husband said: ‘No, we go back.’ I had a little spade in the back, so we dug a hole at the side of the road and buried the two children, because it was the custom that had to be buried—if they died during the night they had to be buried during the night. So, I was absolutely devastated. When I got back, I was told that that they had probably died in the womb before we left, but it just threw me completely. I thought, why didn't I learn something about it? I'd learned something about mechanics and I'd learned something about building before I came out, but nothing about delivering babies. So that was one experience that stayed with me.
“However, about two months later, I was asked to take another expectant woman to hospital, but in a different direction. It was nearer, some 60 kilometres away and we delivered the child in the car and that was okay. When we got back, the woman said: ‘Can we have it Baptised in three weeks’ time?’ And I said: ‘That's fine. What name would you like to give it?’ “Bernard!’ was the reply, which kind of threw me a bit.
“I didn't go out to Cameroon expecting to do this kind of work! When I moved to my next mission, there was a health centre there, but I still did a lot of travelling, taking sick people to hospital at night. That said, there were five African sisters, one of whom was a midwife. So, after that I travelled with a midwife.”
Vocation
It’s doubtful that this young boy—born in Monaghan, who grew up in Donegal in Ireland and then in Duntocher—could have envisaged that he would have ended up as a reluctant midwife in the missions in Cameroon. That said, the idea of becoming a missionary germinated in the Emerald Isle and took hold in Scotland. A meeting with a Spiritan initially piqued his interest and then the influence of family friends set him on the path to priesthood.
“When I grew up in Donegal, I was very fortunate to meet a Spiritan, who was a distant relative of mine,” he said. “He had had a bad accident while working in Nigeria and it actually became one of the reasons why he chose to learn French. The word for paraffin in French is petrole and the word for petrol is essence, so he had a young helper who came from Cameroon, whose English wasn’t the best and he confused paraffin with petrol and so put petrol into his fridge. It was one of these petrol fridges and the thing blew up. So, he injured his two legs and had to come home, but he was a wonderful, cheerful guy who told lots of stories about the missions on the Adamawa Plateau in Nigeria and that kind of acted as a catalyst for me from a fairly young age.
“There was also a lovely family In Duntocher called the Gildeas who moved to Scotland in 1956—two years before we did—and two of the boys, Ronnie and Pat went to Lochwinnoch to start training as Mill Hill Missionaries. When I finished primary school at St Mary’s Duntocher and was seriously thinking of becoming a missionary priest, I met them during the holidays and they spoke about how great it was, so they were a big influence and I went to Lochwinnoch in September 1961.”
Perhaps having these influences and that of his mother, who had contemplated becoming a nun at one stage, it came as no surprise that Fr Bernard would discern his vocation and it’s a vocation that included: seminary life in Scotland, England and the Netherlands, an initial stint in Cameroon teaching English with the Voluntary Service Overseas organisation, a further 25 years in the country as a missionary priest, becoming a spiritual director and also seeing himself in charge of vocations for the society itself. Little wonder then that he has a very profound take on what a vocation is.
“Vocation is probably at the core of what it means to be a Christian,” he said. “Many of us were brought up to believe that being a Christian is about saving your soul and getting to Heaven. That can be a very selfish pursuit, if it's just me getting to Heaven on my own and to hell with everyone else. Jesus did not come to offer us an evacuation plan. He offers us a transformation, a plan for transformation. So, for me, vocation comes from our baptism, we are called. Yes, we want to get to Heaven, but for me, we get to Heaven as a by-product of going out and being involved, being sent, powered by the spirit of the Risen One, to allow God to use us to transform societies and that was very definitely my experience in Cameroon.”
Transforming lives
And transforming lives and society in Cameroon both in a spiritual and material sense is something that Fr Bernard and his fellow Mill Hill Missionaries accomplished over the course of many years, but it wasn’t without its challenges. Obviously there was the fact that many of the areas—including in the Adamawa region where he lived and worked—were underdeveloped and catching malaria was unfortunately pretty common too, but also the fact that despite being welcomed wherever he went in the country, he had to deal with a lot of different peoples all of whom had unique cultural sensibilities.
“The Tikar people would smile continually, and I thought that's because they were happy, but it wasn't. It wasn't always because they were happy. When Cameroon beat Argentina in that 1990 World Cup, they smiled and there was a reason that they were happy. Generally they smiled due to fear. Fear was huge—fear of spirits—and they believed in spirits in the water, spirits in the forest, spirits in the air, spirits underfoot.
“Fear of ancestors too and the ancestors of the Tikar are usually buried in the front garden. When I arrived in 1977, I couldn't understand this, people would go out in the morning, and they put some food on the grave and then they pour palm wine over the grave because they believed that the ancestors still had to eat and drink and if you forgot them your son might fail his exams, or your wife might have a miscarriage. So, remembering the ancestors was very important because they are believed to be very powerful, but if you forget them, they can be quite nasty, and this just permeated.
“So, you keep smiling at everyone so that you don't make any enemies, because if you make an enemy, you may feel that they will use witchcraft against you and that was really, really big, but it took me a long time to work that out, you know, because they won't tell you.”
Another incident, Fr Bernard recalled, concerned a feisty lady from Bandam village called Agat (Agatha). She had been Baptised by German missionaries during the First World War and became friendly with him. One day she asked him to buy some aluminium sheets the next time he was in Bafoussam so that she could replace the raffia palm on the roof of her house and have something that was more secure and could catch the rainwater. Some of the villagers, however, implored him not to go ahead with the purchase as departing from the tradition of raffia palm roofs would upset the ancestors.
“Agat heard about this, Fr Bernard said. “She turned up at night—generally people didn't travel at night—even though it was only a 10 minute walk and she said: ‘Are you afraid? Jesus said that we shouldn't be afraid. Father, do you remember in the boat when they were going down and everyone and Peter were all shouting and screaming and saying we're going down and what we're gonna do?’ She said: ‘Why were you so afraid? Where is your faith?’ Are you afraid of the chief? Are you afraid of the ancestors?’ This was me being evangelised by this strong-willed woman who was probably about 70 at the time!”
So, Fr Bernard eventually bought the aluminium sheets, which were erected by people from another village due to his own villagers’ superstitions. However, when he came to celebrate Mass on the following Sunday, his usual 1000-strong congregation had dwindled down to about 20 people, including Agat and her daughters. Despite his fear that he had ‘lost a parish,’ Agat told him to come to her house on the Tuesday night and celebrate a Thanksgiving Mass there.
“I turned up at her house, which was on the other side of the river and to my great surprise, there was about 200 people assembled outside,” he explained. “We celebrated Mass from the veranda and by the end of the Mass, there was about 400 people congregated. What I didn't know was that during the night, Agatha had sent her daughters out to the four corners of the village and she said to the people: ‘If you come to mass in the morning, there will be free meat and free beer, and somehow 200 people braved their fear of the ancestors and we had a lovely mass. The ancestors had nothing to say and that was it.
“It was a real watershed moment in the village. It was like a spell being broken and what happened was in the months and years that followed was that one family after another decided to follow Agat and use their money to buy aluminium sheets, which was brilliant news for the village girls, who for at least seven months of the year, no longer had to trudge off every morning at 5am to carry water. They were liberated a little from that fear.”
Strength amid strife Amid such challenges, Fr Bernard drew strength from prayer—most notably Lectio Divina—the scriptures and the example of St Ignatius of Loyola, whom he praised for being ‘a man of the world, who had a burning desire to share his experience with God and other people,’ and who would greatly influence him when he trained to become a Spiritual Director.
“On my Ordination card, I had the call of Abraham—God addressing Abraham and saying: ‘Go, go leave your country, leave your family and go to a country that I will show you.’ So, that was important. When I started studying theology in the Netherlands and then at London University, the big thing there was Exodus, the whole call of Moses. God appeared to Moses saying: ‘I have heard the cries of my people who are suffering in Egypt.’ And then He says to Moses: ‘Go and tell Pharaoh to let my people go.’ While that might sound very grand, in actual fact, that was that was the core Biblical text that kept not just me, but us as a group going in Cameroon.”
Adaptability, practical skills and the ability to listen are key for any missionary priest or sister to possess, Fr Bernard noted, because they will allow them to be of great use to the people that they serve and help them to appreciate the richness of another’s culture. Practical skills and positive interactions were of paramount importance when the Mill Hill Missionaries sought to help bring the infant mortality rate down, which, in 1977, saw approximately 40 per cent of babies not making it past the age of two. One of the main reasons for this was that the mothers were mixing powdered milk with contaminated water from the River Mbam, thus causing serious health issues and even death. So, the missionaries decided to initiate a campaign to dig wells and prevent these tragedies happening in future.
“There weren't many wells around the Tikar plain because people thought that if you dug into the ground, you would upset the female spirit in the earth,” Fr Bernard said. “So, it took us a long time to get them to dig wells and I worked for more than 10 years trying to help the people to dig wells.”
Understanding mission
Nearly three decades spent on mission has given Fr Bernard not only a well-rounded understanding of what the term mission means, but also an appreciation of the ‘vital’ support that Missio Scotland and its partners in the Pontifical Mission Societies throughout the world provide to missionaries wherever they are called to serve.
“The term mission really relates to the phrase ‘Ite missa est,’ which in days past the priest would say to mean ‘go the mass is ended.’ Therefore, go and do it, do what you've celebrated, proclaim it be bearers of joy, of the Good News” he said. “So, for me mission is best summed up by Pope Francis’ strong take on it when he said: “Mission is an activity that's not just done by professional missionaries. Every Baptised person is called and is sent out.” For many people, it's the way we live. For missionaries, it can be much more specific, but it's definitely about going out. We're not just there to save our own souls.
“And support for Missio Scotland is not just important, it's absolutely vital. As I understand that one of the things that Missio Scotland does do is support local churches and local communities. Very often, in places in Africa, for example, like Cameroon, you can have local priests and sisters, but they just don't have the means to either expand the communities or to keep them going. So, I think it's really important.
“If I could single out one group, that I'm sure Missio Scotland helps, it would be Catechists. When I was in North Cameroon, there was one place I went to mass that I could only go twice a year, because it was so remote and the road was so bad, but the communities were there and were kept going by catechists. A catechist teaches religion, but they also gather the people for prayer and keep them together. So, I think it's absolutely vital that we support Missio Scotland, because we're all one family, we're all in this together. It's absolutely vital that we share what we have with our brothers and sisters who belong to that same family.”
Going back to the well—pardon the pun—when Fr Bernard and his fellow missionaries embarked upon their aforementioned campaign to provide fresh, clean water, he discovered that he had a flair for the divine, but not in the way you might expect!
“One of the things that I discovered when I was involved in the well project was that I can actually divine for water and that was a real big surprise,” he said. “There was a professional diviner who came to help me. He gave me these little eight millimetre iron rods and he bent them quite simply and said: ‘Just take those now, follow me.’ And I watched him and when we hit a water vein on the road on the ground, the rod started moving. He threw his away and said: ‘Now you do it.’ I said: ‘I can't do it, I'm not a diviner.’ Anyway, we walked along the road and I got to this spot where the rods were just moving like mad—and I was desperately trying to not make them move. We dug there and low and behold, we found water. So that was the surprise. I'm not good at telling you at what depth you'll find it, but I can divine for water. So that was a big discovery for me.”
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