St Columban: monk or missionary?

Extract

My subject has been under discussion recently, for example by Ludwig Bieler in the 1966 Spoleto Settimane and at a more popular level by Brendan Lehane in his Quest of Three Abbots. But for me the question was raised fourteen years ago, when I was editing the Latin works of St Columban, and Aubrey Gwynn showed me much kindness in correspondence. He mentioned inter alia the comments of Bishop Galvin, then nearing the end of his long life as a missionary to China. Galvin first went out as a young priest in 1912 to serve a mission in Hanyang. Returning on furlough in 1918, he made a celebrated appeal to the members of Maynooth College for the conversion of the Chinese, as a result of which he was joined by Father John Blowick in founding the Irish Congregation of St Columban, popularly known as the Maynooth Mission to China. Soon appointed Vicar Apostolic, Galvin later became Bishop of Hanyang, and stayed in his diocese under a series of trials, persecution, and house arrest, until he was expelled from the country in 1952. He told a friend that he would never have survived his experiences had it not been for a constant memory of Columban’s example, and he felt that he had enjoyed the saint’s companionship for forty years. Though not an academic scholar, Bishop Galvin is entitled by the circumstances of his life to judge the spirituality of Columban, and he criticized my original statement that his patron was ‘a monk, not a missionary’.