Lamont, Donal Raymond

by Patrick Maume

Lamont, Donal Raymond (1911–2003), missionary bishop and critic of the Rhodesian government, was born Daniel Patrick Lamont in Ballycastle, Co. Antrim, on 27 July 1911, son of Daniel Lamont, master shoemaker and merchant, and his wife Margaret (née Tumelty), music teacher; he had four brothers and one sister. His brother John became a Carmelite priest, and their sister became a nun in the Cross and Passion order, spending most of her later life in South America. Some of Lamont’s obituarists described the family as middle‐class, but this gives a misleading impression. The family shop was small, and although Lamont’s mother gave music lessons to help support them, the conditions in which he grew up were somewhat straitened. He later recalled that ‘during my youth the Irish war of independence was being waged all around us’ (Speech from the dock, 25) and spoke of the hopes aroused in northern nationalists by the birth of the Irish Free State (implicitly equating this with the feelings of Rhodesian blacks at the ending of white rule in neighbouring African countries). He was educated at Ballycastle High School, which was attended by both catholics and protestants, and completed his secondary education at the Carmelite‐run Terenure College in Dublin, which he and his brother attended with assistance from the Carmelite order. (‘I had moderate academic success but very satisfactory results in everything connected with games … represented my province of Ulster in schools hockey … played for the first XV in rugby and was victor ludorum at the college sports’ – Speech from the dock, 25.)

Carmelite Lamont entered the Carmelite novitiate at Kinsale, Co. Cork, in 1929. His name in religion was Raymond, though for much of his life he was known as Donal. After a year he took vows for three years, during which he read honours English at University College Dublin. Between 1933 and 1938 Lamont studied philosophy and theology in Rome at the international Carmelite college, Collegio Sant’ Alberto, and was also an external student at the Pontifical College of Music (he was afterwards a founder member of Our Lady’s Choral Society in Dublin). He later recalled the international and Latinate nature of his class as inoculating him against ‘narrow nationalism’. He was strongly influenced by an austere German superior, Fr John of the Cross Brenninkmeyer, whose ascetic lifestyle he imitated for the rest of his life. Brenninkmeyer fiercely denounced the Nazis, who had exiled him from Germany, declared that the rights of the human person were central to catholic teaching, and warned the students that the age of martyrs would never end; some Carmelite students in Rome had suffered under the anti‐clerical Spanish republic, while classmates of Lamont were later imprisoned by the Nazis and the Soviets. In later life Lamont recollected the growing atmosphere of anti‐clerical intimidation in Rome, as Mussolini aligned himself with Hitler, as giving him a permanent aversion to state tyranny. When on trial in 1976 for defying the Rhodesian regime, he spoke of the Dutch Carmelite Titus Brandsma (1881–1942), murdered in Dachau after resisting the Nazi takeover of catholic media and associations, as ‘my hero’ (Speech from the dock, 28). Brandsma spent some time in Ireland in the mid 1930s; Lamont would have known Carmelites who had known him.

He was ordained priest in Rome in 1937 and graduated STL in 1938 with a thesis on the divine and spiritual maternity of the Virgin Mary. He then returned to Ireland to teach in Terenure College (particularly drama and English). He received an H.Dip.Ed. from UCD in 1939 and in 1942 graduated MA in English at UCD for a dissertation on the metaphysical poet and catholic convert Richard Crashaw (1613–49). He worked in a hostel for homeless men at weekends.

Missionary In 1946 Lamont volunteered for the new Irish Carmelite mission to Southern Rhodesia (latterly Zimbabwe), becoming its first superior. He went with two other Irish Carmelites to the Umtali (later Mutare) district in Manicaland, stretching 400 miles along the Mozambican border. In mission terms this was neglected territory; the English Jesuits responsible for the area were hindered by manpower shortages (exacerbated by the Second World War). Over the next thirty years Lamont built a network of over sixty primary schools, several hospitals, eleven mission stations and a number of secondary schools and teacher training colleges. Assisted by enthusiastic public fund‐raising at home, Lamont recruited many priests and religious from Ireland and Europe to assist this work. He actively encouraged vocations among native Africans, and strongly advocated the appointment of African bishops as soon as practicable. Government restrictions on African education (which impinged on his schools and seminaries) helped to crystallise Lamont’s hostility to the Rhodesian status quo. In 1959 he founded a diocesan congregation of nuns following the Carmelite rule, the handmaids of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which had 100 members by the time of his death in 2003. In 1953 he was appointed prefect apostolic of Umtali and in 1957, when the district became a diocese, he was its first bishop. He chose as his motto Ut placeam Deo, expressing his determination to please God, not men.

Bishop of Umtali As Lamont worked with Africans, he was increasingly outraged by the disabilities suffered by the black population (he later recalled his horror at segregated worship in churches). In 1959, shortly after widespread unrest among Africans heralded the impending demise of the Southern Rhodesian‐dominated Central African Federation (which incorporated what became Zambia and Malawi), the liberal Rhodesian prime minister, Garfield Todd, was deposed by his own party for proposing an extension of the black electorate, and harsh new security legislation was enacted. Lamont issued his first pastoral letter, A purchased people (later translated into 15 languages). This declared that the demands of the black population for land and education were fully justified and that the original colonial conquest of African societies had been unjust. He balanced this view by stating that colonisation brought some benefits and that the settlers had acquired prescriptive rights, and he criticised contemporary African nationalism as having racist undertones, while emphasising that Africans were entitled to maintain their traditional culture (when ‘not contrary to the moral law’) and not be ‘transformed into ersatz Europeans’ or ‘treated as second‐class citizens’. A period of tutelage might be necessary, but could only be justified if it qualified Africans for full citizenship as soon as possible, rather than serving as a pretext for indefinite subjugation.

The pastoral letter equated racial discrimination with communism as state tyranny and violations of the principle of subsidiarity (a direct hit at the state’s tendency to attribute all criticism of white rule to communists). He incidentally bracketed the welfare state with Rhodesian government attempts to control the church’s provision of health and welfare to blacks as state tyranny, and denounced birth control propaganda directed at blacks as both immoral in itself (‘mighty empires in every stage of history have fallen into decay by just such rejection of the moral law’) and motivated by a desire to maintain white privilege by limiting black numbers. Thereafter Lamont was denounced by right‐wing critics as a communist. In fact, while his courageous and outspoken resistance was inspired by a fierce sense of natural justice and decency, the form in which he expressed it reflected his natural‐law Thomist formation in the ultramontanist vision of the church as a besieged fortress which must assert its own legitimate authority and that of wider civil society and saw assertions of state omnicompetence as leading directly to tyranny, a view reinforced by the memory of fascist Itally and Fr Brenninkmeyer’s description of the Nazi Gleichschaltung (seizure of all independent institutions in the name of national unity and efficiency).

While such schools as Latin American liberation theology offered a synthesis of Christianity and Marxism which presented the struggle for revolution as a positive Christian duty, Lamont, though he declared Rhodesian repression responsible for the outbreak of the guerrilla war (from 1972), never went beyond advocating passive resistance. He did not identify with nationalist organisations as did some later South African catholic and anglican prelates in endorsing the African National Congress; in 1978 he recalled that, of the African nationalist leaders, he had met Bishop Abel Muzorewa a dozen times on church matters, Revd Ndabaningi Sithole twice, Robert Mugabe twice and Joshua Nkomo once.

Vatican II Lamont attended the second Vatican council (1962–5), where he spoke in favour of the decree Nostra aetate (withdrawing the traditional accusation of deicide against the Jewish people). His major contribution was a speech, in his fluent Latin, against a proposal to deal with the missions in a series of thirteen propositions rather than a specific document. Tactfully glossing over Pope Paul VI’s apparent endorsement of the propositions, Lamont called them ‘thirteen dry bones’ and appealed to the bishops to ‘make these dry bones live’; he protested that missionary bishops came to Rome seeking John XXIII’s ‘Pentecostal fire’ but were fobbed off with ‘a penny candle’. His intervention had a major role in the development of Ad gentes, the council’s decree on the missions. He served on the Vatican Secretariat for the Promotion of Christian Unity 1962–75, helping to frame the council’s decrees on religious liberty and ecumenism. The preacher at his funeral noted: ‘As an ecumenist he was doctrinally cautious and watchful, but active and enthusiastic about the crucial ecumenical task of personal relationships’. Lamont contrasted the universality of the Vatican council with ‘the parochial, morally primitive and racist existence of Rhodesia’ (Speech from the dock, 44). At the 1971 synod of bishops in Rome, where Lamont represented Rhodesia, he suggested that the church should consider ordaining ‘suitable mature married men’ where insufficient celibates were available.

Opposition to Rhodesian government In 1962 the Rhodesian bishops (who initially refused to endorse Lamont’s stance) issued a joint pastoral denouncing racial discrimination in similar terms to his; in the next fifteen years they issued thirteen joint pastorals, marked by Lamont’s literary style and tone. After the 1965 election victory of Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front, which unilaterally declared independence from Britain with the aim of preserving white minority rule indefinitely, Lamont grew increasingly outspoken in his advocacy of full and immediate equality. Several joint pastorals, such as a 1965 denunciation of unilateral independence and a 1969 attack on the regime’s new constitution, were suppressed by the regime. Denouncing the forcible removal of blacks from designated ‘white’ districts and the implementation of increasingly draconian security legislation, Lamont declared black majority rule imminent and inevitable. He asked how Rhodesian whites would like it if, following the precedent their chosen government set, such a regime were to seize their property and drive them from their homes (as was done to many blacks under the 1970 Land Tenure Act, which he fiercely and publicly opposed) and subject them to arbitrary and indiscriminate repression under the forms of law.

Lamont was president of the Rhodesian catholic bishops’ conference 1970–72. From 1974 until 1977 he was president of the Rhodesian catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (formed in 1972) which publicised atrocities committed by the security forces. In retirement Lamont told friends that on at least one occasion agents of the Smith regime had attempted to murder him by trying to force his car off the road.

The 1974 Portuguese revolution led to a black‐run Marxist government in Mozambique. This allowed large‐scale guerrilla infiltration across the eastern border, placing Lamont’s diocese in the front line. Some of his African priests were arrested and mistreated by the security forces. As his diocese was shelled from Mozambique in response to Rhodesian raids, Lamont published an open letter to the Smith government (11 April 1976) blaming its ‘clearly racist and oppressive policies’ for ‘whatever misery or bloodshed may follow … You may rule with the consent of a small and selfish electorate, but you rule without the consent of the nation, which is the test of all legitimacy’ (quoted in editorial introduction to Speech from the dock, 12). After guerrillas approached catholic missions demanding food and medicine, Lamont had instructed resident priests and nuns that they should meet these requests as an expression of Christian charity and should not report the guerrillas’ presence (as the law required) since this would bring guerrilla attacks and make missionaries complicit in indiscriminate reprisals by government forces; he took sole responsibility for the actions he ordered. In September 1976 he was charged with assisting guerrillas in April–June 1976 and tried before a regional magistrate. He pleaded guilty so as to avoid incriminating any of his subordinates, and delivered a lengthy unsworn statement (published as Speech from the dock) in which he reviewed his career, justified his actions, and denounced the Rhodesian Front government and its claims to uphold Christian civilisation. He emphasised the prevalence of divorce and birth control among Rhodesian whites as well as the indiscriminate murderousness of the security forces as proof of the hollowness of these pretensions. He also pointed out that he had preached publicly against communism. He was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment with hard labour. On appeal this was reduced to four years, with three years suspended. Instead of requiring him to serve this sentence, the government ordered him to be stripped of his Rhodesian citizenship and to be deported; he appealed against this decision on the grounds that as a representative of the Holy See he enjoyed quasi‐diplomatic status. He was detained in a hospital ward in Salisbury (latterly Harare) while his appeal was heard, and on its rejection was deported in March 1977.

Deportation As an exile, Lamont lectured extensively on the situation in Rhodesia and spoke against the ‘interim settlement’ of 1978 which brought some black nationalists (under Bishop Abel Muzorewa and Ndabaningi Sithole) into government while entrenching white privilege. He received honorary degrees from several American catholic universities including Notre Dame, Seton Hall (New Jersey), Marymount College (New York) and Mount St Mary’s University, Maryland. He was nominated for the 1976 Templeton Prize for Religion and Progress and the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize; the Kenyan government issued a stamp in his honour in 1979. He was given the People of God award by the Washington Theological Union.

Lamont returned to Zimbabwe after independence in 1980 at the personal invitation of the new president, Robert Mugabe. According to Lamont’s Daily Telegraph obituarist, his retirement as bishop in November 1981 in favour of an indigenous successor, Alexio Muchabaiwa, reflected disillusionment with black rule – particularly rapidly increasing corruption and the bloody repression by the Mugabe government of the Ndebele people who provided the support base of Joshua Nkomo. (These developments were denounced by the Commission for Justice and Peace which Lamont had founded.) It should be borne in mind, however, that Lamont was approaching retirement age and may have felt the mission could best be sustained by an African bishop.

Later career Lamont returned to Ireland and lived in retirement with the Carmelite community at Terenure College, carrying out some pastoral work (notably administering confirmation, a task he loved) in the Dublin archdiocese. In private life he possessed considerable charm and a talent for storytelling, though some of his brethren found his literary erudition unintentionally off‐putting. He cherished his relationship with his siblings (whom he outlived) and their families. He was a regular reader of L’Osservatore Romano and the Tablet (to which he frequently wrote letters). Lamont loved the contemplative life, the celebration of mass and the communal liturgy of the hours. After his death his Carmelite brethren let it be known that his last years were saddened by the wave of sexual scandals which beset the Irish catholic church from the early 1990s (‘He had a profound love for the Church … to the point of becoming physically ill when reading negative reports’ (O’Donnell, funeral sermon)) and by renewed violence in Zimbabwe from 2000, as the Mugabe government engaged in widespread violence against its political opponents, using Smith‐era security legislation to crush the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and forcibly dispossessing most remaining white commercial farmers.

In his last years Lamont suffered from deafness. He died at Terenure College on 14 August 2003 after a fortnight’s illness and was buried in the churchyard of SS Patrick and Brigid’s Church, Ballycastle, in the same grave as his brother John. He strongly believed that respect was due to the episcopal office, but this did not mean that he demanded deference on his own account; by his own request he was interred in his Carmelite habit rather than episcopal robes. At his graveside, Bishop Patrick Walsh of Down and Connor compared him to Oliver Plunkett (qv), calling him ‘a pillar of iron and a wall of bronze’ for the people and church of Rhodesia (Irish News, 20 Aug. 2003). Some commentators described his death as symbolizing the end of the Irish catholic missionary era.