About
I am a Divine Word Missionary (SVD), serving in Ireland since 2011 — through the word, music, and everyday presence among the people of this island.
The key to understanding my road is the text The Covenant (also in the Polish original). And since a missionary's life is written day by day, the fullest biography is this website itself: eighteen years of notes in the Archive and a photographic chronicle in the Gallery (both in Polish — but photographs speak every language).
Testimonies of the Road
2011 · "Green Beads" — a vocation testimony
Written on the occasion of my priestly ordination and published in the missionary monthly "Misjonarz" 5/2011. Translated from the Polish original.
When I was a teenager, one day my brother brought home cassettes of a band whose music was mysterious, beautiful, and described some world unknown to me. I had no idea then that it was one of the best-known Irish bands playing Celtic music, singing in that very language. In my boldest dreams I would not have imagined that my life would become bound to this part of Europe called the island of saints and scholars — to Ireland. But to understand why it happened so, one must step back a little in time...
Through the working of Divine Providence, the Lord Jesus entered the life of young Bartek, enchanted as he was by the world of computers and electronic music. The fascination with technology and the uncritical absorption of mass culture led to this: that the beautiful world of faith, carried from my family home and enriched by the experience of closeness to the Church — in whose life I took part as an altar server and lector — began to shake in its foundations, and I began to experience in reality what spiritual dying through sin means.
Eucharist among a group of Polish emigrants in Ireland
But God did not leave me alone in that lostness, nor did He allow me to remain long in such a state. At that time I went to an Oasis retreat of the Light-Life Movement, where I experienced conversion — a very deep encounter with Jesus, a living Person, a merciful, forgiving God. That event marked out a new direction in my life: the way of faith. It did not immediately mean the choice of religious or priestly life. With time, however, I began to perceive that this was the life the Lord Jesus desired for me.
For I understood that He did not want me to keep the grace of meeting Him only for myself, or for a family I might found — but that together with Him I should seek those who "dwell in darkness", and that this being-with-Him should become the substance of my whole life. It did not come without interior struggles before I agreed to it; God's grace, however, came to help.
Reporting work during the evangelisation at Przystanek Jezus
God gave me to understand, through very concrete events, that He wanted me to join the Divine Word Missionaries, though I did not know the Congregation at all. And so in August 2002 I went to the postulancy in Nysa — into a world entirely new and foreign. With time, however, an inner conviction grew in me that this was my place, and the Holy Spirit confirmed me in it, especially through the experience of taking part in various works of evangelisation, where I could tangibly experience the power of the Gospel and how much the person of today needs God.
After four years of formation at the seminary in Pieniężno there came an unexpected proposal: to go on missionary practice to Ireland. That proposal stood in contradiction to my plans for the future as a Divine Word Missionary, for at that time I thought much about Africa. After various turbulences, in 2007 I finally went to Ireland for two years.
In the radio studio of the Divine Word centre Kairos in Ireland
It was a beautiful but also difficult time of encounter with a somewhat different world, culture and Church — a Church already then in very deep crisis. During that practice I could also develop my skills in the use of media, particularly radio and television. This allowed me to understand that the evangelisation of the media world, and the use of these powerful means of communication to bring the Good News of salvation closer to others, is my "vocation within a vocation". The years of religious formation were marked by various turbulences and crises, but with God's help there came for me the happy day of perpetual religious vows, then the diaconate, crowned with priestly ordination on 8 May 2011.
By decision of the superiors of the General Council of our Congregation in Rome, I was assigned to work in the Irish-British Province. For me this means a return to people and places I had already come to know. But it is at the same time a new challenge — for I return there as a priest, and a much greater responsibility will fall on me for others and their road to God. In the first years of formation I used to give newly met friends coloured mission rosaries, asking them to pray for me on the green beads, which symbolise the African continent — my first "missionary love". And it came about that this African green of prayer was transformed in Heaven into Irish green. So in closing, I ask you, dear Reader: if you should ever pray on a mission rosary, offer the decade on the green beads for Father Bartłomiej. For which I thank you warmly in advance!
Ministry as a deacon — a youth vigil in Pieniężno
Fr Bart Parys, SVD
2020 · A conversation about the road — Mission Diakonia (22 June)
On my 38th birthday the Mission Diakonia of the Light-Life Movement of the Archdiocese of Kraków invited me for a conversation about my life — I think it sums up my road well. (In Polish.)
2020 · Mission broadcast on Radio eM (6 September)
A good summary on the 9th anniversary of my arriving on the island for good — I spoke about what the Church in Ireland needs. (In Polish.)
2021 · Homily for the 10th anniversary of priesthood (8 May, Naas)
The jubilee card:
2022 · "A Decade of Irish Mission"
Written for the missionary monthly "Misjonarz" 4/2022. Translated from the Polish original.
When we were preparing for priestly ordination, we were asked to write a short testimony for "Misjonarz". It is hard to believe that more than ten years have passed since my text appeared in that magazine.
Now I sit down again to describe the experience of mission on the Irish island. I do so in a spirit of gratitude, and in the spirit of the call which regularly appears in the liturgy of the Mass when we pray the psalms: Let us not forget the great works of God! Without doubt, the past decade of my life is a testimony to the working of God in the Church, which remains unceasingly in a state of mission in every corner of the world. Divine Providence, through the decision of the Superior General, directed me to Ireland as my Promised Land.
Praying for Ireland at Clonmacnoise, 2017
I think the description of my time on mission can be grasped in four aspects: ten years of the outward road, the change in the inner dynamic of the mission, and the transformations in Ireland and in the Church of this country.
As young Divine Word Missionaries before ordination, we were encouraged to keep a so-called stipendiarium, in which we were to note the dates and places of the Masses we celebrated. As I write these words, their number exceeds four thousand — and the lion's share of them, tens if not hundreds, were celebrated in different places across the island: from Eucharists in large assemblies of the faithful, through those for my parishioners at the beginning of the missionary road, to those for small communities, for young people, for the elderly in nursing homes, for various ecclesial movements. Among them one may count celebrations for Poles living in all regions of the island, and very many in our Divine Word houses. Nor are there lacking those at which no one was with me during the Eucharistic liturgy — especially many of them came in 2020, in the time of the pandemic. Let us try to give those thousands of celebrations some shape — in events and places.
The missionary road
My missionary road began in a small country parish of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the south of Ireland. The church's title — "Nativity" — suited well the birth of the long ministry that awaited me for the Church in Ireland. After a year, I gained further pastoral formation in a larger town parish, where I also served as hospital chaplain. Entering the whirl of pastoral duties, accompanying human suffering and helping in the passage to eternity, was a very good foundation for building a pastoral identity. At the same time, from the very beginning I knew that the creation of small groups constituting a space for the experience of faith is essential for fruitful missionary ministry. For the first six years of priesthood these were groups undertaking the study of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, scattered across different places on the island. In those first years the accompaniment of the island's various apostolic communities was important too.
After the two-year parish experience there followed the next stage, connected with service through the media of social communication. It lasted just under three years and was joined with the continued accompaniment of prayer and apostolic communities. Thus passed the first five years of my mission.
A conversation in the radio studio of Kairos Communication
The second five years are bound up with the discernment that the Lord was calling me to leave the media service, which I left at the end of 2015. Very quickly new duties began to appear, both within the Society of the Divine Word and beyond it. In the Congregation I became responsible for the formation of young seminarians, and I also took up the position of archivist of our Province. In that time, amid ministry to various groups, priority came to be given to serving the faithful belonging to a movement which — to my surprise — had begun to develop in Ireland as well. I mean the Light-Life Movement, together with its branch the Domestic Church, embracing the formation of families. I myself have my spiritual roots in precisely this movement — both as regards the conscious living of the faith and the discernment of the vocation to be a Divine Word Missionary. To meet it again, and to return to serving on this spiritual way now as an SVD in Ireland — that is surely the greatest surprise of Providence of this first decade of mission.
Transformations in the country and in the Church
Ireland itself has also changed over these ten years. Many people were surely shocked to learn that this country, with its Catholic past, was choosing — by large majorities of society — a way of existing that is a negation of its own roots. Today, to say that one is "on mission in Ireland" is not as shocking as it was ten years ago, when it could seem an "exaggeration". The Church in Ireland, too, is seeking a new way of finding itself in this world and society. The Church's presence will be drastically different from the one previous generations knew. To accompany and be part of this process — marked especially by the pontificate of Pope Francis — is for me an important spiritual adventure.
Eucharist with a bishop for an Irish circle of the Domestic Church, 2020
Young Irish people of the Youth 2000 movement at World Youth Day 2016 in Poland
Here is my world
My missionary adventure could not have happened if these ten years had been merely an outward apostolic road, rather than above all an inner road of missionary transformation. After ten years I can state that my spiritual and cultural world is precisely Ireland; spiritually and culturally, in Poland I am a guest. Year after year I feel that the world where I grew up — also as a young Divine Word Missionary — has long ceased to be the world of my feelings and identity. That world is now here; it is marked out by the Irish-British Province of the Society of the Divine Word. This cannot be discovered at first glance. It is an inner way of seeing, when a missionary agrees that the Holy Spirit should form in him a multicultural personality. Very often in my Polish-language conversations a slip of the tongue appears: speaking of Poland I say "Ireland", and speaking of Ireland I use the word "Poland". It is a kind of "Freudian slip", signalling where my placement is and where my world is.
After climbing Carrantuohill — the highest peak in Ireland
In the past year, 2021, I began the second decade of mission in Ireland. I certainly enter it with new missionary zeal. The Holy Spirit unceasingly creates new circumstances at the present stage of the history of salvation — which for me has been marked out, geographically speaking, on a middle-sized island at the edge of Europe. Love for this world, for the Church and for the people living here has not gone out; and after these years I can calmly say that if I were ever to be buried in Ireland as a missionary, it would be for me the crowning of the road of service — and, in truth, the best place on earth to sow a seed in the service of mission. I want to end with the same invocation I placed on my jubilee card: Come, Holy Spirit, and lead the way into the future!
Photographs: Bart Parys SVD. The text appeared in the monthly "Misjonarz" no. 4/2022 (original article in PDF, in Polish).