Sir, —
I was delighted to read the piece by The Reverend Canon Paul Arbuthnot in the April edition of the Gazette about the Lusitanian church in Portugal.
It played a very formative part in my own journey to ordination.
I was a parishioner in the Parish of the Holy Spirit in Setubal, Portugal from 1991 to 1993, during which time I taught English in the International Language School in the city.
The vicar, The Reverend Stephen Brook, was a Church of England clergyman working with the Anglican Missionary society BCMS Crosslinks, now Crosslinks. He and his wife Stella, and the tiny Portuguese and English-speaking congregations, welcomed me warmly and I preached my first sermon in the church there!
They were a huge influence on my spiritual formation, and when I attended my Selection Conference for ordination training in 1993, in an era before mobile phones, I had to fly back from Dublin to School before the results had been released to the House of Bishops. My Diocesan Bishop, The Right Reverend Walton Empey of Meath and Kildare, was unable to let me know if I had been recommended for training, so I had to phone him from a coin box the following week to get the news.
The then Bishop of Portugal, The Right Reverend Fernando Soares, was always an encouragement as he travelled the country at weekends while holding down his day job as a banker.
The Portuguese congregation encouraged me to read lessons and attend their Bible studies, and watching the way the Brook family ministered in that place was an incredibly motivational and inspirational lesson in incarnational ministry, faithfulness, and hospitality.
I still have my Lusitanian prayer book and my Portuguese New Testament, and when I was rector of Kilmore and Inch (Down and Dromore), I had the joy of welcoming a Brazilian family in Portuguese to the baptism of their twin grandchildren, and doing some of the service in Portuguese. It has also occasionally served me usefully when we have Portuguese visitors in my current parish of St Finnian’s, Cregagh.
In another former life as a historian, when doing my dissertation about the Church of Ireland’s attitude towards society and government in the Republic of Ireland between 1945 and 1966, I had to read the editorials of the Gazette from that period in the RCB Library. There were a number of references to visits from the Church of Ireland to the Lusitanian Church, and I have a memory of the then Archbishop Gregg having quite a close and longstanding link with this member of the Anglican Family.
Special memories — and thank you to Canon Arbuthnot for jogging them!
Yours, etc.,
The Reverend Canon Jono Pierce
(by email)
