Cardinal Otunga's Appeal Sparked Irish Priest's 35-Year Kenya Mission

In the autumn of 1950, a newly ordained Kenyan priest arrived at St. Joseph's Freshford Minor Seminary in County Kilkenny, Ireland, carrying a request that would reshape the life of a teenage student sitting in the chapel. Maurice Michael Cardinal Otunga had just been ordained in Rome and was traveling through Europe, appealing to seminarians to answer a call that had become personal: his own parents had not yet been baptized, and he wanted missionaries to bring the faith to his people in Africa.

Thomas McGrath was one of those students, and the encounter left an indelible mark. Otunga spoke with a gentleness that stayed with him—not the stern authority one might expect from a bishop, but a warmth that made the distant continent feel suddenly real and urgent. When McGrath was ordained a priest nineteen years later, in June 1969, his first assignment took him to St. Mary's Kibabii Catholic Parish in Bungoma, Western Kenya. It was the birthplace of the man who had inspired him. The circle had closed in a way McGrath could scarcely have imagined.

The two men met again in those early days, though their roles had shifted. Otunga was now Bishop of Kisii, visiting Bungoma when his father, Chief Wasike Lusweti "Sudi," fell ill. During those visits, he would spend time with the Mill Hill Missionaries—the religious community to which McGrath belonged—accepting their hospitality with a simplicity that impressed the young priest. It was in a confessional during this period that something extraordinary happened. Otunga, a bishop attending to his dying father, approached McGrath quietly and asked if he would hear his confession. It was McGrath's first as a newly ordained priest. "The humility of that man was unsurpassed," McGrath would say decades later, still moved by the memory of a bishop kneeling before a young Irish missionary.

Over the next thirty-five years, McGrath witnessed the arc of Otunga's life and the transformation of the Kenyan church. He saw a man who was both humble and uncompromising—someone who could refuse expensive cars and drive to confirmations in the simplest vehicle, yet who would stand before priests and call them out for drinking, for rumormongering, for the divisions that threatened the community. At one ordination in Webuye, when ethnic tensions threatened to fracture the gathering, Otunga reminded the priests of their vow: "I agreed when I became a Priest to go wherever I am sent." His voice was calm and deliberate, leaving no room for misunderstanding.

McGrath's own work unfolded across multiple parishes—teaching at St. Peter's Minor Seminary, serving at Holy Trinity Webuye and St. Joseph's Sotik, and finally settling at St. Joseph's Luanda, where he became known for his work with widows and street children, helping impoverished families access education. He watched as the church in Bungoma grew from a mission barely forty years old into a network of roughly forty schools, each one a gateway to baptism and the sacraments. He saw catechists like Vincent Waswa, men rooted in the faith and trained through institutions like St. Andrew Kaggwa Catechetical Training College, transform the quality of religious instruction from rote memorization into genuine understanding.

In 2009, more than a decade after Otunga's death, the beatification process began. The Vatican declared him a Servant of God in 2010, and his cause now moves through the Roman Phase, where the church examines and verifies the documentation of his life and any miracles attributed to his intercession. If he is beatified and canonized, Otunga will become Kenya's first native-born Catholic saint—a recognition that would formalize what McGrath and countless others already knew: that they had encountered holiness not in grand gestures but in the quiet humility of a man who asked a young priest to hear his confession.

McGrath returned to Ireland eventually, serving as priest in charge of St. Ciarán's in Labasheeda Parish in the Diocese of Killaloe. But when he reflects on his life, he speaks of the plane full of Irish missionaries that carried him to Africa in 1969, and the emptier planes that have followed. The church in Europe has contracted in ways he could not have foreseen. Yet in Kenya, in the parishes where he served, the faith took root and grew—not because of grand plans, but because men like Otunga and McGrath believed that holiness meant showing up, staying humble, and asking others to do the same.