Catholics have lived in Jamaica since Christopher Columbus weighed anchor off the island’s north coast in 1494. Jamaica was seized from Spain by Oliver Cromwell in 1655, as part of his great “Western Design”, intended to halt the spread of Catholicism in the Hispanic New World.
The loss of the Caribbean outpost was a disaster for Spain: Britain could now inflict piratical raids on Catholic territories along the Panama trade route to Europe and thus rival Spain’s King Philip IV as a force for imperial power and plunder. Only 50,000 Catholics remain in Jamaica today – about two per cent of the population – but they are a distinguished presence.
Fr Jim Webb, who sadly died in 2012, was a Canadian Jesuit and friend who operated out of the Jamaican capital, Kingston. Shortly before his death I called on him at St George’s Jesuit College, of which he was principal. A sense of ordinary goodness surrounded him – his Kingston office was practical rather than pious, with bare wooden floors and filing cabinets. Only the pectoral cross round his neck betrayed his high rank as Jesuit regional superior for Jamaica; he wore sandals and a T-shirt.
In Fr Webb’s view, Catholics were running some of the best secondary schools in Jamaica. Even non-Catholic Jamaicans will say: “I want my child to go to a Roman school,” meaning St George’s. Unfortunately, pupil attendance has declined in recent years owing to levels of violence in the ghettos downtown. Parents are increasingly frightened to appear at school drop-off and collection. “I can’t even get a pizza delivered here,” said Fr Webb.
Catholic priests are intermittently murdered in Jamaica in reprisal for their “meddlesome” politics. In 1993, Fr Ron Pieters, a Guyanese Jesuit priest, was found nailed to a post in Kingston’s Jonestown ghetto, symbolically thorned and crucified. The following year, Fr Vincent Power, a 62-year-old Irishman, was shot dead while at prayer in his church in Falmouth in northern Jamaica.
The killings intensified in the mid-1990s, when imports of crack cocaine powered a cold-blooded violence. In 2000, Fr Howard Rochester was found murdered on an isolated road outside Kingston; his car and mobile phone had been stolen. All these priests had worked on the front line of the Jamaican ghetto, and were not afraid to speak out on behalf of the poor.
Fr Webb understood that the Catholic Church had had to become more “Jamaican” in order to compete with Revivalism and American Evangelicals. Typically, Mass in Jamaica incorporates call-and-response rhythms, drums and other Afro-West Indian expressions.
The red-brick Catholic church of St Anne (“Annie’s”), situated in Kingston’s impoverished Hannah Town ghetto, is almost Charismatic in its use of hymn, clapping and testimonials.
I attended Mass there on the feast of St Joachim and his wife, St Anne – July 26. Within, a North American Jesuit priest was energetically preaching forgiveness and an end to gang warfare. His eyes roamed over the congregation. “Brothers and sisters! Picture it, the clouds of darkness over Kingston, and the people full of fear – unless we put away our guns!” It was an odd mixture of Revivalist-Catholic fervour and Pentecostalism. (“Does the Pope know about this?” I asked a Jamaican journalist, who was by my side. “I hope not,” he replied.) The congregants swayed in their pews as the organist twisted and turned on his bench, and the drummer hit rimshots off his kit, reggae-style.
Afterwards in the refectory, loudspeakers blared adorations to the Almighty as feast-day food – paper cupfuls of soup and slices of pink-and-yellow cake – was served at trestle tables. With an annual murder rate of around 1,500 in a population of less than three million, Jamaica is now one of the most violent countries in the world, on a level with South Africa. But the Catholic Church tries to bring what calm and balm it can to the former British colony.
In the Archdiocese of Kingston and the dioceses of Mandeville and Montego Bay (Jamaica is divided into three dioceses), most Catholic churches have a statue of Mary. But Marian devotion is not as strong in Jamaica as it is in European and Iberian-influenced cultures. Resolutely Jesus-centred, Jamaican Catholicism has very little embodiment of saints, rosaries and other devotions.
The Church’s signal achievement remains the Kingston-based St Patrick’s Foundation, launched in 1994, which offers sanctuary for lepers, drug and alcohol addicts and those infected with HIV. The foundation does not merely give handouts, but also provides carpentry and metalwork skills to help Jamaicans escape cycles of poverty and violence. “The last thing Jamaica needs is charity,” Fr Webb told me.
At the St Monica Home for lepers near Spanish Town, the atmosphere was something approaching joy. Of the 30 patients when I visited, 10 had Hansen’s disease (or leprosy: the condition had been widespread in slavery-era Jamaica).
The other patients were terminally ill with Aids. Catholic nurses in their starched aprons went about the morning’s ministry, providing palliative care so that the dying could leave this world with dignity. It lifted the heart to think that something solid and beneficial was being built amid the island despair.
Ian Thomson is the author of The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (Faber & Faber)
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