Columban Fr Charles Duster RIP

Fr Charles Duster

(15 September 1934 - 7 March 2017)

Father Charlie was born on 15 September  1934 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, USA, where his parents Charles Henry Duster ['DOOster'] and Cleo Catherine Handley Duster owned and operated a supermarket. He has an older brother William C. Duster (Audrey) of Littleton, Colorado, a sister Mrs Robert Enns (Katie) of Fort Pierce, Florida, and eleven nieces and nephews and their families. His older sister, Margaret Jeanne Duster, died in 1972.

Cedar Rapids, on the Cedar River [Wikipedia]

Fr. Charlie attended Immaculate Conception Grade and High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, (1952). After high school he attended Regis University, Denver, Colorado (1952-53) and Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1953-1954).

After briefly considering medical school he instead decided to enter the seminary to become a Columban missionary priest in 1955. He studied at St Columban’s Seminary, Milton, Massachusetts. As an exchange student, he studied theology at St Columban’s, Dalgan Park, Navan, Ireland (1958 – ’61). He did his fourth year of theology at St Columban's, Milton, where he was ordained a priest of the Missionary Society of St Columban on 21 December 1961. He celebrated his first Solemn High Mass at Immaculate Conception Church in Cedar Rapids on 31 December.

Immaculate Conception Church, Cedar Rapids [Parish website]

In 1962 Father Charlie was assigned to Japan where he spent the next six years. The first two of these were spent studying Japanese language in Tokyo, the third one as Acting Regional Bursar, and the last three years as Associate Pastor at Shingu Catholic Church, Wakayama Prefecture, in the Diocese of Osaka.

In Japan

In July 1967 Father Charlie visited the Philippines, accompanied by a Columban confrere. After spending some days with Columban colleagues on the island of Negros, they narrowly missed their flight from Bacolod City to Cebu on 6 July because the plane departed a few minutes ahead of schedule, due to severe weather conditions. The next morning they learned that the plane, a Fokker F27 Friendship, had crashed into a mountain and all 17 passengers and four crew members perished. Father Charlie wrote about this in A Close Shave in the May-June 2016 issue of MISYONonline.com.

From 1969 – 1972, Father Charlie was the Columban Vocation Director for the Midwest Region of the USA based in Omaha. Afterwards, he continued a similar ministry while residing at the Columban house in Chicago. He then served a year in the Archdiocese of St Paul and Minneapolis as chaplain at Hennepin County General Hospital in Minneapolis accompanied by studies in Clinical Pastoral Education.

With the late Archbishop Petero Mataca of Suva

In November 1974, Father Charlie was assigned to Fiji, Archdiocese of Suva. After initial language studies, he was appointed as Associate Pastor in Holy Family Parish, Nabala, Macuata, and a year later as Pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish in Solevu, Bua, where he served for six years. 

Following home leave in 1980 he did renewal studies at Notre Dame University. On his return to Fiji he became the Regional Vice-Director. He returned to the USA to undergo by-pass surgery in Houston, Texas, in 1982. Upon returning to Fiji later that year, Father Charlie was appointed Vicar General of the Archdiocese of Suva, and served in this position for four years.

Offices of the Archdiocese of Suva [Wikipedia]

In September 1986, he was appointed Rector of Collegio San Colombano in Rome where he was Superior of the sixteen-member community. During his eight years in Rome, he also earned a licentiate and doctorate in Canon Law at the Angelicum University, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude. Before being reassigned to the Fijian Region, he worked for six months in the Marriage Tribunal in the Archdiocese of Dubuque, Iowa, in order to gain experience in matrimonial law. 

Father Charlie returned to Fiji in November 1994 and served for six years as the Coordinator of the Columban Lay Mission Program, while teaching Canon Law at the Pacific Regional Seminary. In December 1998 he returned to the USA to undergo by-pass surgery for the second time, but returned to Fiji seven months later to continue his ministry to Columban Lay Missionaries. In December, 2003 he was appointed Associate Pastor at Holy Family Parish, Labasa, where he served until returning to the USA in September 2005. This was prompted by the recommendation of his doctors that he should reside in a place where he could receive monitored medical attention, which was unavailable in Fiji. 

With old friends in Fiji

He was assigned to the Columban Magnolia house in Chicago where he worked on Mission Promotion and Vocations (2005 – 2011) and served as house Superior (2008 -2011). In 2011 he began work at the Omaha office in Planned Giving and Development, and later combined this ministry with Superior of the Omaha community (2012 – 2016).

Father Charlie’s warm and outgoing personality, many talents, and deep commitment to his vocation as a Columban missionary priest, drew many people to God in the various places where he ministered. Wherever he was sent, his ability to recognize and celebrate all that was good in the world around him made him a truly joyful messenger of the Good News.

There is one thing I ask of the Lord,

for this I long,

to live in the house of the Lord,

    all the days of my life,

to savour the sweetness of the Lord,

    to behold his temple (Psalm 27:4).

Some Personal Memories

With Fijian Columban Lay Missionary Serafina Vuda in Peru

Serafina died unexpectedly on 31 May 2014

I met Father Charlie at long intervals over the years. My abiding memory of him is that he was a joyful person, as the photos of him above indicate. I visited Rome for the first time in April 1988. My first full day there happened to be my birthday and he insisted on taking those of us in the house at the time to a restaurant to celebrate the occasion.

In 2007, if my memory serves me right, he gave a retreat to Columban priests in the Philippines at St Scholastica's Center of Spirituality in Tagaytay City, south of Manila and much cooler than the latter because of its elevation. The retreat was truly a fraternal one, exemplifying what the psalmist wrote:

How good and how pleasant it is, 

when brothers live in unity (Psalm 133[132]:1).

My first time to meet him was in St Columban's, Dalgan Park, Ireland, during Easter Week 1961 when I went there to be interviewed and to have a medical examination before entering the seminary the following September. I went back to Dublin, where I lived, with a group of the seminarians going to the city for the afternoon. I remember him singing a parody on a popular song from 1911, I Want A Girl (Just Like The Girl That Married Dear Old Dad). I never heard Father Charlie's version again until today when I found it on YouTube.

In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also (John 14:2-3). 

May Fr Charles Duster enter the place prepared for him by Jesus and may he add to the joy of the saints in heaven.

'But when you give a banquet, invite the poor . . .' Sunday Reflections, 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Baptism, Confirmation and First Holy Communion at Holy Family Home for Girls, Bacolod City

Readings (New American Bible: Philippines, USA)

Readings (Jerusalem Bible: Australia, England & Wales, India [optional], Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Scotland, South Africa)

Gospel Luke 14:1, 7-14  (New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition, Canada) 

On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely.

When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable.  “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Responsorial Psalm (NAB Lectionary, Philippines, USA)

But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed . . . 

Last Sunday I experienced this after Mass at Holy Family Home for Girls (HFH) here in Bacolod City. Kathy wished to share her birthday joy - the day itself was actually the day before - with the girls at Holy Family Home along with her family and co-workers. Most of the more than 30 girls in Holy Family Home have had traumatic experiences in their lives and the majority are from poor families.

Kathy and her husband Hernan have been celebrating their birthdays with the girls at HFH and the Capuchin Tertiary Sisters of the Holy Family who run it for some years now. There are other families who have been doing the same, some in HFH, some in orphanages or homes for the aged in Bacolod City.

And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you . . .

Kathy, whose father died suddenly when she was only three months old, spoke briefly at the end of the programme after the catered lunch but asked Hernan to take over. (The programme included a magician, some games and dances by the girls.) He told us how blessed his whole family was simply by the joy they saw in the faces of the girls. That has been my own experience since I became involved with HFH nearly 14 years ago. That involvement has been one of the greatest blessings of my life, an ongoing one and all the greater because it was something I had never expected when I returned to the Philippines in 2002 after a two-year stint in Britain that was supposed to be a four-year one.

Most of these girls have had experiences that no child or young person should ever have. But in HFH they get the best of truly caring professional help that enables them to feel the healing power of God's love. Much of that healing comes form their interaction with each other and from their shared responsibilities. For example, each cubicle for personal hygiene is used by three girls, who also have to maintain it. And something that touched me when I first began to go to HFH and given the 'grand tour' was to learn that each new girl, whether still a child or already an adolescent, is given a cuddly toy which she keeps on her bed. There are two large dormitories, again maintained by the girls. And they make their bed first thing in the morning, have an early breakfast, gather for prayers and then go off to the local elementary and high schools, both within walking distance.

Columban Fr Michael Sinnott visits HFH

The girls had been praying their hearts out for Fr Sinnott, then 79, after he was kidnapped in October 2009. He came to visit them later. This was their reaction when I told them of his release:

Hernan reminded us in his 'few words' of Jesus and children: Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs (Matthew 19:14).

The First Reading and the Gospel remind me of a line in the Handbook of the Legion of Mary: Always will the legionary bear in mind that he is visiting not as a superior to an inferior, not as one equal to another, but as an inferior to his superior, as the servant to the Lord. This is the opposite of what I have heard many well-meaning people say: We must go down to the level of the poor (or whoever). Jesus identifies himself with the 'outsider', with the 'other', whoever the 'other' may be. And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me' (Matthew 25:40). 

Children's Games, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1559-60

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna [Web Gallery of Art]

'Alleluia' by Ronald Raz

Hail Mary the Queen Children's Choir

Quezon City, Philippines

'God takes delight in his people.' Sunday Reflections for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God

Adoration of the Shepherds Murillo, painted 1646-50

Readings (New American Bible: Philippines, USA)

Gospel Luke 2:16-21 (Jerusalem Bible: Australia, England & Wales, India [optional], Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Scotland, South Africa)

The shepherds hurried away and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in the manger. When they saw the child they repeated what they had been told about him, and everyone who heard it was astonished at what the shepherds had to say. As for Mary, she treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds went back glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen; it was exactly as they had been told.

When the eighth day came and the child was to be circumcised, they gave him the name Jesus, the name the angel had given him before his conception.

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An Soiscéal Lúcás 13:33-37 (Gaeilge, Irish)

San am sin d’imigh na haoirí anonn go Beithil go deifreach, agus fuair siad Muire agus Iósaef, agus an naíonán ina luí sa mhainséar. Agus ar a fheiceáil dóibh, d’inis siad an ní a dúradh leo mar gheall ar an leanbh seo. Agus cách a chuala, b’ionadh leo na nithe a dúirt na haoirí leo. Agus thaiscigh Muire ina cuimhne na nithe seo uile, ag machnamh orthu ina croí. Agus chuaigh na haoirí ar ais ag glóiriú agus ag moladh Dé faoinar chuala siad agus a bhfaca siad, de réir mar a bhí ráite leo.

Nuair a bhí ocht lá caite agus é le timpeallghearradh, tugadh Íosa mar ainm air, mar a thug an t-aingeal air sular gabhadh sa bhroinn é.

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My mother once told me a story about her mother-in-law, my grandmother Jane Coyle, that made me smile. I was Jane’s first grandchild and my father John was her only child. When my mother would take me over to my grandparents’ house, as she often did, the neighbours would drop by to admire the infant, as people do. Some would say I looked like my father while others would say I was more like my mother. 

My mother discovered that after we had gone, especially if some had remarked that I looked like her, my grandmother Jane would go to the next-door neighbour and ask, ‘Doesn’t my grandson look like my son?’ (Jane Coyle died when I was three and was buried the day my brother was baptised).

One of my favourite lines in the Bible – I quoted it in Sunday Reflections for Christmas Day – is ‘God takes delight in his people’ (Psalm 149). This is from the Grail translation of the psalms, the version used in the English-language editions of the Breviary, the Prayer of the Church.  Psalm 149 appears in Morning Prayer of the Church on the first Sunday of the four-week cycle and on all solemnities and feasts. I had been praying this psalm regularly for many years before the line jumped out at me some time in the early 1990s. I can’t remember how or why.  

 I have some idea of the delight that God takes in us and in me from the kind of delight that I and most people I know take in a newborn child, even one whose circumstances of birth aren’t ideal. Murillo captures the delight of the shepherds, the light reflected from the infant Jesus showing it in their faces. We see St Joseph in the background. The light of Jesus is reflected most strongly in the face of Mary, who looks so young and almost vulnerable, a quieter delight on her face, taking in the wonder of what has happened. But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart (Luke 2: 19). She is wearing red, the colour associated with the Holy Spirit, rather than the conventional blue. And Mary said to the angel, "How shall this be, since I have no husband?" And the angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God (Luke 1:34-35). 

The eyes of all in Murillo’s painting, and our eyes, are drawn to the Baby Jesus, the painter capturing the truth of St John’s words: In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:4-5). 

Murillo’s painting is similar in ways to Gerrit van Honthorst’s Adoration of the Child that I used on Christmas Day and that you can see below. I do not know if Murillo was familiar with the earlier painting in which Mary is also wearing red and holding the cloth in almost the same way. Again, all eyes are on The light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. 

Both paintings capture the beautiful blessing that God asked Moses to give to his people and that we listen to in the First Reading today: The LORD bless you and keep you:  The LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you: The LORD lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace. "So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them" Numbers 6:24-27). God truly takes delight in us, his sons and daughters. The birth of Jesus invites us to take delight in God who became Man.  

 [Scripture quotations from Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition].

 Adoration of the Child Gerrit van Honthorst, painted c.1620

  Look toward the Lord and be radiant; let your faces not be ashamed (Cf Ps34[33]). Communion Antiphon, Third Sunday in Ordinary Time.

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Today is the eighth day of the Octave of Christmas. I came across this video on a couple of blogs today. The normally fearful Linus is not afraid to explain the meaning of Christmas by quoting the words of St Luke directly on the stage. At the words of the angel, 'fear not' he drops his security blanket, rather like the Apostles after Pentecost.

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Happy New Year!

Manigong Bagong Taon!

¡Feliz Año Nuevo!

Athbhliain Faoi Mhaise Daoibh!

Moving house

St Joseph the Carpenter, Georges de La Tour, 1640s

Today is the feast of St Joseph the Worker. My Dad, like St Joseph, was a carpenter. As his names were John Joseph I can proudly claim to be the son of Joseph the carpenter. He was known as John in his own family and among his workmates but as Joe to my mother and her family.

Jesus too was a carpenter but I have no skills whatever in that area.

In my imagination, St Joseph built furniture. However, Dad worked on building or construction sites all of his working life, most of that time as a highly respected general foreman. He often said to me, 'Anything that's worth doing is worth doing well'. He lived by that. I don't know if he was aware of what GK Chesterton wrote, 'Anything that's worth doing is worth doing badly', but he agreed with that too in terms of encouraging me whenever I tried to do something new, such as taking a scholarship examination or whatever. He would say, 'The experience will do you good'. And it always did.

Today, 1 May, is a holiday here in the Philippines. If it hadn't fallen on a Friday or Monday President Arroyo would have changed it to one of those days. She has an obsession with long weekends and has demeaned every single distinctively Filipino public holiday, including Independence Day, 12 June, by switching them sometimes at the last minute. Her late father, President Diosdado Macapagal, moved Independence Day from 4 July to 12 June for historical and practical reasons but his daughter seems to have forgotten that.

Instead of blogging I should really be packing. Yesterday I got the keys to the house down the road I'm moving to. The Columbans have been renting the house I've been living in since 2002 for about ten years. The owners told me last August that they would need it for one of their sons, Jose Maria 'Jong' Abaya, who was married in 2006 and whose first child, Bernadette Sophia, was born to his wife Ella a few weeks before Christmas. Around that time Jong was discovered to have cancer of the colon. Sadly, he died, aged 42, and was buried last Wednesday. Please remember him in your prayers, along with his young widow of 29 and baby daughter.

I was to have moved at the end of November to another part of Bacolod City but learned of a house down the road becoming available after Easter. With the agreement of all parties involved I was able to change my plans. But the arrangements are made now.

We have a grace period in the sense that we won't transfer our office equipment for http://www.misyononline.com/ until the phone lines are connected, probably during the coming week. We'll still have the same number.

While I adjust very quickly to a new place I'm somewhat of a procrastinator. I meant to move some things this morning but it's coming up to lunch time now. (It's 11am here and 12 is the usual time for lunch in the Philippines). However, after post-siesta coffee I'll move at least some of my clothes and maybe a few books. I guess I'm in a sort of denial, but it's really only the bother of moving that I don't want to face.

I'm sure that Jinky, the ten-year-old 3/4 black Labrador I inherited from the late Fr Niall O'Brien, will adjust quickly. I hope her companions, Pembo, a very friendly neutered male cat, the only one of five orphaned kittens to survive, and Pascua, who became mother of four kittens nearly four weeks ago, will adjust too.

A young DJ's simple expression of faith

Bacolod City, looking north

Here in the Philippines radio stations are almost all commercial, including those run by various dioceses, depending on advertising or on selling ‘block time’, usually to local politicians. AM stations play mostly ‘soaps’ in the local language or councillors or would-be councillors shouting into the microphone and criticising their off-air opponents as if they were addressing a public meeting.

FM stations play mostly colourless contemporary music – where are the great songwriters of the 20s, 30s and 40s? – introduced by DJs speaking English and trying to sound like Americans, with a nasal ‘mid-Pacific’ accent and for ever telling you that the time is ‘one - or whatever - o’ clack’. Some even use American names instead of their own.

Some years ago I met a young man here in Bacolod who used to be a DJ and he told me he deliberately put on what he thought was an American accent.

San Sebastian Cathedral, Bacolod City

Yesterday, Sunday, I was driving on my way to hear the confessions of some young people making a recollection. The schedule was the unearthly hour of 1:30pm when I’d normally be in bed. I had a station in that I never listen to, but that had passable music. The DJ was a young woman with a pseudo-American twang, speaking a mixture of Tagalog and English, not unusual here, where conversations are often a mixture of two or even three languages, changing in mid-sentence.

Then the young DJ, whom I had more or less dismissed in my mind, signed off and in doing so said very simply to the listeners, most of whom were probably teenagers and young adults, ‘Don’t forget our Sunday obligation to go to church and thank God for our blessings’.

Yesterday was a particularly good day for me, despite missing my siesta, and that young DJ’s simple expression of faith was one of God’s blessings.

San Sebastian Cathedral, interior

Was St Monica an 'Irish mother'?

I had a pleasant lunch today at Colegio de San Augustin-Bacolod as the Augustinian Friars celebrated the feast of the great St Augustine (354-430). Present too were the Augustinian Sisters of Our Lady of Consolation who run La Consolacion College, beside San Sebastian Cathedral here in Bacolod. This congregation was founded in the Philippines and has more than 230 sisters. Some of the friars of the Augustinian Recollects, known in the Philippines as the Recoletos, were also present. They own the University of Negros Occidental-Recoletos (UNO-R) here in Bacolod.

Both the Augustinian and Recollect friars played a large part in the evangelization of the Philippines in Spanish times.

The second reading in the Office of Readings for the feast of St Monica (332-387) yesterday always brings a smile to my face and leads me to ask, ‘Was St Monica an “Irish mother”?’ St Augustine’s brother had said to their mother when she was dying that it might be better if she died in her homeland in north Africa, rather than in Italy. The extract from St Augustine’s Confessions goes on: But as she heard this she looked at me and said: ‘See the way he talks’. And then she said to us both: ‘Lay this body where it may be. Let no care of it disturb you: this only I ask of you that you should remember me at the altar of the Lord wherever you may be’.

The latter part of the last quotation appears on innumerable memorial cards and I don’t know of a better request for prayers for the dead. But it’s the ‘See the way he talks’ that makes me smile. May’s the time I heard my own mother – and other Irish mothers – say, nearly always in a family-type context, ‘Did you ever hear such nonsense?’ It’s the kind of thing that only people intimately related can say to one another, conveying gentle criticism/a reprimand and affection at the same time.

Both St Monica and St Augustine were from the north-east of present-day Algeria. Hippo, where Augustine was bishop, is also located in Algeria. Today there is hardly a trace of Christianity in most of north Africa. Is Europe heading the same way? Our faith is a gift. We can lose it as individuals and as communities, as I often remind people.

Death of a dear friend of the Deaf

Please pray for the soul of Mrs Salvacion Valderrama Tinsay of Bacolod City who died peacefully early this morning at her home. She turned 76 on 3 April.

For more than twenty years Tita Salving, as she was widely known, devoted her life to the Deaf. She had worked with the late Columban Father Joseph Coyle who died on 18 December 1991. After his death she not only continued his work with the Deaf but expanded it.

Tita Salving will be buried on Monday 11 August after Mass at 8am in the Carmelite Monastery in Bacolod where her sister, Sister Kathleen, is one of the out-sisters.

You may read more about Salving here.

I had a special post on Salving for her 76th birthday on 3 April. That was the last time I had a real conversation with her. She was well enough to come down for a celebratory breakfast with her family and some close friends. I gave her the Sacrament of the Sick on 31 July. She woke up during the celebration and at the end spoke a few words to some of her family and to me. for quite some time she and her family knew that she was slowly dying but they were all very much at peace with this, trusting in God's loving mercy.

Salving was a latter-day Lydia:

Setting sail therefore from Troas, we made a direct voyage to Samothrace, and the following day to Ne-apolis, and from there to Philippi, which is the leading city of the district of Macedonia, and a Roman colony. We remained in this city some days; and on the sabbath day we went outside the gate to the riverside, where we supposed there was a place of prayer; and we sat down and spoke to the women who had come together. One who heard us was a woman named Lydia, from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods, who was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to give heed to what was said by Paul. And when she was baptized, with her household, she besought us, saying, "If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay." And she prevailed upon us (Act 16:11-15).

Many, including myself, who got involved with the Deaf and many Deaf people here in Bacolod and in other places could say of Salving as St Luke says of Lydia, 'She prevailed upon us'. Thanks be to God for that. May she rest in peace.