Students at Maryland Comprehensive School Lagos with Mary Crowley OLA, Mary T Barron OLA and Josephine Enenmo OLA
Our District Leader, Sr Mary Crowley, is in Lagos this week, among leaders and members of the Sisters of Our Lady of Apostles and the Society of African Missions gathering from across the world for the Triple Jubilee: 150 years of the OLA, 170 years of the SMA, and the 200th anniversary of the birth of Fr Augustine Planque, who founded both institutes.
The gathering is taking place at the Domus Fidei Center of the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus in Nigeria. Before formal proceedings began, the first day was given over to arrivals and reunion — people who share a long history of mission, often lived out at considerable distance from one another, present in the same place at the same time. The atmosphere has been described as one of family, and of coming home.
While in Lagos, Sr Mary has also visited Maryland Comprehensive School, where she worked for many years before leaving in 2003. It was her first time back in over twenty years and the school has grown considerably since she left. “It was great to be back and see the growth and development,” she said.
The formal sessions have opened with a question both straightforward and substantial: how has collaboration between the OLA and the SMA actually been lived across countries and decades? Fr Franco Penua, Superior General of the SMA, reflected on the long arc of the relationship between the two institutes, a partnership that has known both closeness and distance, and that is now deliberately choosing to draw closer again. Sr Mary Theresa Barron, Congregational Leader of the OLA, called for conversations that are honest and hopeful. She recalled a gathering in Ara in 2016, where a bus breakdown beside a sign reading “Collaboration that profits” had become an unexpected prompt for reflection. The profit she named was Gospel fruit: communion strengthened, the heart of mission enlarged.
Representatives from different countries have been taking the floor to describe how the two families work alongside one another, where that collaboration holds, and where it has been harder to sustain. The presentations acknowledge peaks and valleys across different regions, without smoothing them over. The week continues, and the conversations with it.
The Triple Jubilee is an opportunity to look honestly at what has been built across 150 years of shared patronage and shared presence. Fr Planque founded the SMA in 1856 and the OLA twenty years later. For our two institutes that share a founder, a patronage, and a century and a half of mission on the same continent, this week in Lagos is an occasion to sit together, to remember together, and to find in that shared history something that continues to sustain them both.
