A course of “Britishness” to help foreign priests to adjust to the culture of the United Kingdom was held for the first time this year in the seminary of Ushaw, at Durham, in northern England, where twelve priests from Poland, India and West Africa studied for three weeks such issues as the role of women, divorce, homosexuality, the lay ministry and the permanent diaconate. The course, which will be held twice each year, is the brainchild of Bishop Crispian Hollis of Portsmouth, chairman of the committee for foreign missions of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales. The programme was defined by the committee’s secretary, Father John Dale, who is also national director of the Pontifical Mission-Aid Societies. “Many of these priests come from very religious cultures; one example is the Igbo tribe in Eastern Nigeria. Arriving in a secularised culture like ours may thus come as a cultural shock”, explained Father Dale to the English Catholic weekly “The Tablet”. Some of the priests who arrive in the UK come from a major seminary at Enugu, Nigeria, which comprises a thousand seminarians and is funded by the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales. There are some two hundred foreign priests in the UK, all of them involved in the parishes. Their number is increasing, while that of local priests is declining. According to Father Dale “the Catholic Church in Britain welcomes foreign priests because this forms part of the universal mission of the Church and not just because they fill the gap left by the decline in vocations”.
