A book launch at Maryknoll headquarters in Ossining, New York, gathers Maryknoll Society member authors to share their works.
By Michael Centore
Father Joseph Healey could have kept the spotlight on his work alone. Instead, the Maryknoll missioner used the book launch of his recently published four-volume series to bring together multiple Maryknoll authors. His Small Christian Communities in Eastern Africa: History and Evaluation became the starting point for a rich sharing about global mission.
“I’ve been working on this book for 30 years, and I’ve interviewed maybe 40 Maryknollers,” Father Healey said. “This is our book; it’s not my book.”
The program was held at the Maryknoll Society’s headquarters in Ossining, New York, on Oct. 16, 2026. Father Leo Shea gave the day’s opening prayer, imploring those assembled to “embrace real opportunities to contribute to the common good.”
The Small Christian Communities (SCCs) explored in Father Healey’s series are an example of that contribution.
Father Michael Kirwen was “a living witness” to the SCC’s development at Nyarombo Parish in Tanzania’s Musoma Diocese in the mid-1960s, Father Healey said. These were the first SCCs in English-speaking Africa, he explained. (In Latin America, similar groups are known as Christian base communities or base ecclesial communities.)
Father Kirwen gave a brief historical overview of the SCCs at Nyarombo, drawing on the pioneering work of Orbis Books author Marie-France Perrin Jassy, a cultural anthropologist. The pastoral plan at the time, Father Kirwen recalled, “was to avoid the center of worship being the parish with its school and its large church.” Instead, the focus shifted.
“The real church was out in these Small Christian Communities,” he said.
After obtaining his doctorate in theology, Father Kirwen returned to the region in 1970 and developed 15 Small Christian Communities in Musoma’s Masonga Parish. These communities, he said, “brought out all kinds of strong Christian leaders,” who supported one another in both their spiritual and material needs. Furthermore, he added, the SCCs facilitated an exchange between “the spirituality of the local people that was unwritten” and the “trained spirituality” that Maryknoll missioners brought to them in mission.
Alloys Nyakundi, a Catholic lay leader visiting from Kenya, offered a testimony to the influence of Small Christian Communities. He had arrived at Kenyatta University in Nairobi in 2013 from his home village of Kisii. Father Lance Nadeau, Maryknoll’s current superior general, was then serving as a chaplain at the university, where he worked with seven Small Christian Communities. Nyakundi joined one of those groups.
Maryknoll Sister Susan Nchubiri greets Alloys Nyakundi, a featured speaker at the launch. (Michael Centore/U.S.)
A “transformation” happens in Small Christian Communities, Nyakundi said, recounting his own experience. Together, student members read and pray with the Gospel, collaborate on justice-oriented projects, and build “powerful” relationships that support their faith formation. These university-based communities “help our students to be truly synodal, walking together, accompanying one another,” he said. Nyakundi coordinates the online Young Seekers Small Christian Community, which includes members from six different countries. Members “bring different gifts from their countries” to create a forum for intercultural exchange, he said.
He praised the Maryknoll missioners for sharing “different gifts and talents” and promised to bring these gifts back to the young people of Africa.
The day’s program turned to Maryknoll’s efforts in Asia, recalled by Fathers James Kroeger and Vincent Cole.
Father Kroeger, who served in mission in the Philippines and Bangladesh from 1970 through 2022, sketched a historical timeline, beginning with the first Maryknoll missioners to China in 1918, followed by their arrival in Korea in 1923, the Philippines in 1926 and Japan in 1933. Maryknoll has worked in 16 countries throughout Asia to date.
Among Father Kroeger’s many books is Once Upon a Time in Asia, published by Orbis Books in 2006 and subsequently translated into 12 Asian languages. He cited the late Father Larry Lewis’ memoir of his experience in China, The Misfit, as a classic text in Maryknoll’s Asian mission studies.
Father Cole began his missionary work in Jakarta, Indonesia, over 40 years ago. He then moved to Irian Jaya, now called West Papua, the western half of the island of Papua New Guinea in Melanesia. There he ministered to the Asmat people in what he described as a “totally unique and new world for me.”
Father Cole recorded these “unique experiences” through essays, poetry and “missioners’ tales” — sketches and portraits of people he encountered in ministry. He is also an avid photographer. His present aim is to publish both his writing and photographs in a volume tentatively titled Welcome to the Unique World of Asmat.
The goal of the book, he said, is to help readers “see life through the Asmat lens.”
Having collected myths, stories, songs and historical remembrances of the Asmat people — many of whom were his friends and mentors — Father Cole also praised them as “world-renowned woodcarvers.” He displayed one of their figurative carvings for the gathering.
In his overview of Maryknoll’s presence in Latin America, Father Stephen Judd also displayed a work of art: a reproduction of a painting by Argentinian Adolfo Pérez Esquivel depicting five hundred years of Christianity in Latin America. Its images included Maryknoll martyrs Sister Ita Ford and Sister Maura Clarke, who were killed in El Salvador in 1980.
Father Judd’s book project is a critical history of Maryknoll in Latin America from 1942 to the present day. The genesis of the book came from his time on Maryknoll’s General Council, when he traveled “near and far throughout the continent of the Americas,” observing up close the work of Maryknoll missioners.
Father Judd, who also serves on the Maryknoll Mission Formation Ministry Team, now devotes much of his time to historical study. He and his research assistant, returned Maryknoll Lay Missioner Teresa Rhodes, are working to “fashion and shape a narrative” by weaving together stories and “witness examples” as well as “our own recollections and our own historical memory” of Maryknoll’s 80-plus years in Latin America.
“It’s more of a courageous, historical kind of witness,” Father Judd said.
As the daylong gathering made clear, the Maryknoll story is made up of the individual stories of countless missioners, published and unpublished.
Father Healey noted that one of the intentions of the event was to serve as a source of inspiration. “We hope this day will encourage some others in Maryknoll — Maryknoll priests, brothers, sisters, lay missioners, affiliates — to write their own books, especially memoirs,” he said.
Featured image: Father Joseph Healey stands beside a table displaying his four-volume series Small Christian Communities in Eastern Africa: History and Evaluation along with other books related to Maryknoll in Africa. (Michael Centore/U.S.)
