Centenary Celebration of Mary Charles Walker in Nigeria

November 24, 2023248 views0

Centenary Celebration of Mary Charles Walker in Nigeria

2023-11-24T09:39:45+01:00

By Church News

The Centenary Celebration of the arrival of Mother Mary Charles Magdalen Walker RSC in Nigeria, Founder of the Handmaids of the Holy Child Jesus, was held at the Church of the Most Precious Blood and St Edmund, Edmonton, on 18th November 2023.God called the young girl, Margaret Walker, at the age of 20 into the order of Religious Sisters of Charity in Ireland whose motto is Caritas Christi urget nos, the love of Christ urges us on, or the love of Christ impels and directs us onwards.Mother Mary Charles began her vocation as a servant of God in education which she understood led to the empowerment of women. She became a teacher in Dublin and followed a course in pedagogy at St Mary’s College, Dublin.It would have been difficult for a woman to study at third-level at this time and so it shows her determination for the good of others. She then taught in Cork, later Foxford, Co Mayo, where she met the pioneering Mother Arsenius Morrogh Bernard. Mother Arsenius, named after a desert monk, had opened a convent in April 1891, with an attached school and also provided pupils with both food and clothing.To alleviate the desperate poverty in the district she decided to establish a woollen mill. She took advice on factory construction and layout, selected her machinery, and recommended the factory’s first manager, Frank Sherry.With the assistance of a loan, a substantial grant from the Congested Districts Board (CDB), and other monies, the Providence Mill opened on 25 April 1892. Factory inspectors commented on the mill’s good management and working conditions.William JD Walker, an adviser to the CDB, after a surprise visit to the factory, spoke of its ‘smart business-like air’, and of its contribution to the ‘social and moral elevation of the people’.Alongside the mill, the convent opened a co-operative creamery, and it also provided community education in horticulture and diet. This additional work involved up to 800 households. She often said, ‘I am here to help the poor regardless of creed or politics’.Mother Bernard’s entrepreneurial spirit in the poor area of Foxford must have inspired Mother Mary Charles for her later work in Africa. On return to the Dublin area, Mother Mary Charles compiled a book of catechism notes used throughout schools in Ireland.Increasingly she felt God’s call to work in Africa. Like Abraham, she experienced the call within a call to ‘leave her country, family and father’s house to follow God’s calling.This was to be Calabar in SE Nigeria. When the Spiritan Bishop Shanahan CSSp appealed to the Mother General of Religious Sisters of Charity for a foundation in Southern Nigeria, Sr Mary Charles volunteered and obtained permission to work with Bishop Shanahan in 1923 in Calabar Nigeria.She became known as Mother Magdalen and headed to a distant land, although advised that the climate was hard, that it would be an act of madness, and that her mission would be impossible. Nothing deterred Mother Magdalen and so she sailed for Nigeria. She would hold the people of Africa in her heart for the rest of her life.There with a pioneering spirit, she dedicated her work to teaching, preparing women to be good wives and mothers, establishing literacy centres, developing vocational education, and using the Montessori method of education for holistic learning.She was responsible for the building of schools, dispensaries and centres for twins and their mothers and visited the poor in their homes. She organised religious education so that, by 1929, 1000 people were attending her classes. She strove to raise the status of women and gave them a sense of their own dignity.ALSO READ: RCCG Invests N61 Billion in Nationwide Projects – Pastor Adeboye