More than 400 years of foreign missionary leadership in the parish of Cauayan, Negros Occidental, comes to an end when the last of the Columban parish priests in the province retires on Easter Sunday.

Fr. Michael Doohan, 78, will turn over the reins of the St. Paul's Parish in Cauayan at a mass at 4 p.m. Sunday to be led by Kabankalan Bishop Patricio Buzon.

"This is history in the making. The missionaries have been in the diocese since 1572 and now there are sufficient local priests to replace them," Doohan says.

The first Roman Catholic priests, Fathers Alba and Merino, of Spain arrived in Cauayan in 1572 and, since then, it has been a long history of foreigners who have ran the town's parish apart from a few war years, Doohan says.

"I am the last of the foreign missionary parish priests but that does not mean that we are leaving completely....Retiring from the Cauayan parish does not mean my retiring from life," he says.

He says that, as missionaries, the Columbans have completed the first phase of their mission of ensuring that there are local priests to take over the parishes they have led, the second phase is sending Filipino missionaries to the rest of Asia.

When he leaves Cauayan, Doohan says he will work at mission promotion by finding more people to join the priesthood and serve as missionaries in the rest of Asia.

"We still do not have enough priests, we only have less than one to 20,000 people. And we are the only Christian country in Asia so we are challenged to become a missionary people for Asia. So we Columbans will continue to do what we can, even in old age," Doohan says.

As Columban missionaries, we only are successful in our mission if we make ourselves redundant, he says.

That means being able to turn the reins over to local priests, he says.

Doohan says he is very thankful for his 53 fruitful years in Negros, 20 happy ones of which he spent at the St. Paul's Parish.

I will miss the Cauyanons and remember them with love, says Doohan, who will retire at the Columban headquarters in Binalbagan town.

Doohan came to the Philippines in 1965 as a young Columban missionary and when he was assigned in the rural town of Cauayan visited his parishioners in remote villages by riding a horse.

I am too old to go horseback riding through the mountains now, he says.

Doohan says that, aside from the Columbans who arrived in the 1950s the Cauayan parish was led by Fr. Martin de San Nicolas, now a "Blessed," who came to Negros in 1627, and in 1632 by the Jesuits, among whom was Fr. Esteban Jaime who was martyred in Isio, Cauayan, on Feb. 17, 1659.

Later the Recoletos priests took over, then the Dominicans in 1769 and the Dutch MillHill priests who came in 1909 and stayed until 1942.

So the turnover on Sunday, he says, is a historical completion of the transition from a foreign mission to the Filipinization of the Catholic church in southern Negros Occidental under the Diocese of Kabankalan.*CPG

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