FR Raymond Hickey OSA: At peace with God

Funerals in Nigeria are elaborate affairs, and it was fitting that on July 15, a few days after the death of Fr Raymond Hickey OSA, the religious order to which he belonged, marked his passing with a Funeral Mass attended by eleven Catholic bishops, numerous priests and women religious, and a vast crowd of laypeople […]

Funerals in Nigeria are elaborate affairs, and it was fitting that on July 15, a few days after the death of Fr Raymond Hickey OSA, the religious order to which he belonged, marked his passing with a Funeral Mass attended by eleven Catholic bishops, numerous priests and women religious, and a vast crowd of laypeople including representatives of the Emirate Council of Potiskum.

It took place at St Monica’s, Rantya, Jos, and among the many who came to Rantya that week to express their condolences was the Governor of Plateau State and Chairman of the Northern Governors Forum, the Rt.Hon. Simon Bako Lalong. 

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Fr Hickey had come to Nigeria at the age of 24 in 1960, a few weeks after Nigeria had formally attained independence. He had spent all his life here since then, apart from a few years in Rome in the 1970s, and although he could have returned to his native Ireland on learning that he was suffering from a terminal illness, he preferred to die here.  

The OSA—the Order of St Augustine or Augustinians—is one of many Catholic orders or congregations dedicated to the service of the Church and made up of ‘religious’, who are either men or women and have taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.  Males used to be known as monks, females as nuns, but both these words have become unfashionable. The Orders are not under the authority of bishops, and this gives them a flexibility which has undoubtedly contributed over the centuries to the growth and dynamism of the Catholic Church and to the spreading of the Christian gospel.

Like other Orders, the Augustinians have a distinctive ‘charism’, a special philosophy and way of life reflecting the ideals of a founder who lived in the more or less distant past. In their case, this was Augustine of Hippo, the philosopher-saint and prolific writer of the late fourth and early fifth centuries AD, who was born and died in Africa, in what we now call the Maghreb. His most famous work is the Confessions, a spiritual autobiography, but his faith-based philosophy shaped the thought of the Christian Middle Ages and had a great influence on the Protestant reformer Martin Luther.

As Fr Hickey was ready to remind us, the Augustinians had had some contact with coastal Nigeria from the fifteenth century onwards; but they did not establish a permanent presence in the country until 1939, and for a long time operated only in the far North-East. Fr Hickey’s years in the country thus amounted to considerably more than half the whole time that the Augustinians have been here. 

For many years, he worked among ‘minority’ peoples in what are now Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states, in what became the Catholic dioceses of Maiduguri and Yola. Later in life, he spent some time in Benin, Lagos and Abuja; but he was always proud to call himself an Arewa, a Northerner. He became fluent in Hausa, and using it to say mass, preach homilies and counsel penitents was for him routine.  

Fr Hickey was essentially a man of God and a servant of the Church, to whom the performance of the duties just mentioned governed his life and gave meaning to it. He was broadminded in the sense that he had great respect for and cultivated good relations with people of other faiths or religious traditions, of course including non-Catholic Christians, and Muslims.  

In spite of his somewhat austere, upright appearance – or because of it – he was a keen sportsman, who once enjoyed playing tennis; in later years he loved to relax by watching football on television. He also had marked scholarly interests, and wrote numerous books and articles.  Naturally enough these were mostly concerned with the Christian faith, and he can be said to have specialized in writing up the history of the Catholic Church in Nigeria. 

I first got to know ‘Fr Ray’, or Ray as in the end I called him, about thirty years ago when he lived for a while at the Augustinian monastery in Jos and I, from time to time, visited the place from Kano. We became much better acquainted when, after many years working in the secretariat of the Papal Nunciature (i.e., the Embassy of the Vatican) in Abuja, he came back to Jos as part of the small community of OSA priests at Rantya. Help that I was happy to render him was that sometimes when he went to celebrate Mass at the church of St Francis at Babale, just outside Jos, I accompanied him and read out the homily he had composed: this was because, over a period of some years, he had a voice impediment which made it difficult for him to read aloud for any length of time. 

So, during his last years in Jos, I and Ray often met; and I knew that he enjoyed discussing with me subjects of common interest, notably languages, literature and history.  As well as Hausa, he was fluent in Italian, and also in Gaelic, the ‘mother tongue’ of Ireland that today, sadly, is known and spoken by fewer and fewer Irish people; he loved explaining to me the etymology of Irish proper names, such as ‘Fionnbarr’, an early Irish saint after whom the Catholic Church at Rayfield, Jos, is named. I was glad to feed his interest in literature by lending him novels both European and African, including Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms.

Ray was also interested in British politics, and was happy to describe himself as being politically of the Centre-Left. In general, he was extremely moderate (to use an oxymoron, perhaps) in his views, and most cautious in his expression of them, whether in relation to politics and ideologies, or to the internal affairs of the Church.  He once took me to task for referring to certain current tendencies in the Church and the wider society in the Western world as manifestations of what I called ‘diabolical liberalism’, and I had difficulty in explaining that I did not mean that all liberalism was diabolical, only some manifestations or developments of it. But he said he was generally optimistic about the future of the Church.  

When in Ireland, Ray lived with his sister Gladys, and thanks to modern technology, she, like many other people in and outside Nigeria, was able to take part in the funeral ceremonies.  

A generous, honourable, courageous, fair-minded and peace-loving man and priest, Fr Raymond Hickey now dwells in a new kind of peace with God. He is greatly mourned and missed in the Church in Nigeria and in the wider Nigerian society. 

Professor David Jowitt writes from Jos