They loved and served by Sr Janet Fearns

"We give thanks to God for these our brothers, who give themselves without reserve to pastoral ministry, sometimes sealing their fidelity to Christ with the sacrifice of their lives.”

When Clement and Mary Thorp rejoiced in the birth of their fourth son, Brian Hilary, on 30th January 1931 at Yorkshire Bridge in Bamford, Derbyshire, little did they think that the day would come when a Pope would be speaking of him with gratitude as he addressed a huge crowd, gathered in St. Peter’s Square in Rome.  But, then, Brian himself, even when he woke up on the morning of Wednesday 9th April 2008, could not have expected it and neither would he have known that it was to be his last day on earth.

In his Regina Coeli message on 13th April, Pope Benedict linked the death of the 77 year-old Mill Hill Missionary (MHM) to the life of St. Paul, for whom "vocation and mission are inseparable."  The Apostle of the Gentiles is still a model for all Christians, particularly "those men and women who dedicate themselves totally to announcing Christ to those who still have not known him: a vocation which continues to maintain all of its validity."

As happens so regularly with those whom God calls to serve him as Religious Brothers, Brian’s gifts as a carpenter were to be extremely valuable during his years spent as a Mill Hill Missionary in DR Congo, Uganda and finally, Kenya.  As anybody will know who has had an experience of life ‘on the missions’, life tends to become a process of on-the-job learning the rudiments of plumbing, carpentry, building, vehicle maintenance, water management, agriculture and so on, interspersed with the daily tasks of the work that was the real reason for an assignment to a particular mission. To have someone who is actually trained to work with wood and construction immediately transforms such an individual into a local treasure and an oracle on anything that needs a pair of hands and some energy!

As a result, Brother Brian, as he became, did not remain in England for very long after taking his Perpetual Oath on 29th June 1972 at Courtfield, the Herefordshire ancestral home of the MHM Founder, Herbert Cardinal Vaughan.  Arriving in Basankusu, Zaire (DR Congo) in April 1973, he immediately launched into practising his building skills.  He eventually found himself living and working in Uganda and Kenya, where he died, apparently at the hands of a burglar, raiding the mission house in Lamu Island.

Catholic Church on Lamu Island

Within England and Wales, there is close cooperation between the Mill Hill Missionaries and the Pontifical Mission Societies (best known for their joint work for the Association for the Propagation of the Faith (APF) and the Red Box collections.)  The APF is the official support organisation for the overseas mission of the Catholic Church.  It is through Religious such as the Mill Hill Missionaries, Missionaries of Africa, Comboni Missionaries, Conossians and the many varieties of Franciscan, that the money collected in parishes on World Mission Sunday and in the red boxes throughout the year, is put into effective use on behalf of those who are most in need.  Between them, the APF, Mill Hill Missionaries and many other Religious and lay missionaries provide for the ongoing care and support of the young Church throughout the world.

When people go as missionaries to a mission area, they do not normally expect to be killed in the course of their labours, but they do know that they are going to ‘lay down their lives for their friends’ through a variety of different forms of service.  From time to time, some individuals are called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice, not always specifically for faith-filled reasons.  It can be that there is great poverty in the area for one reason or another and that the killer is a ‘chancer’, perhaps driven by hunger, to attempt to take forcibly the help that would have otherwise been given voluntarily. Sometimes the killer is ‘a common criminal’.

Within hours of Bro. Brian’s death and far away in Baghdad, Syro-Orthodox priest, Father Youssef Adel Abudi, 40, was shot by a group of armed men outside his home.

Fr Youssef was director of an integrated school attended by Christians and Muslims of both sexes and is believed to have received death threats because of this work. His parish priest, Father Doglas Youssef Al Bazi, was kidnapped in November 2006 and released nine days later.

There are times when missionary work, whether at home or on foreign soil, has its dangers.

As the Pope reflected on the meaning of Vocation on Vocation Sunday, he mused that ‘men and women have a primary role in evangelization’ and that ‘some of them dedicate themselves to contemplation and prayer, others to a multifaceted educational and charitable work. All of them, nevertheless, are united in the same objective: to give witness to the primacy of God over all and to spread his Kingdom in every sphere of society.’