HOMILY FOR THE FUNERAL OF FATHER KEVIN CALLAGHAN CSsR
BISHOP ETON, MONDAY 13 DECEMBER 2021 at NOON
By Fr Tim Buckley C.Ss.R
It is always a great privilege to be asked to share some thoughts at the funeral of one of our confrères. Fr Maurice O’Mahony and I will share this reflection with you because in later years he and Fr Kevin were a huge support to each other at Hawkstone, albeit that Kevin was then moving into his eighties.
I was a boy of 14 when I first met Father Kevin Callaghan in 1961. He had replaced Fr Frank Goodall as Vocations Director and he would help nurture my vocation until the day I went to the novitiate in 1964, during that time bringing me twice to Bishop Eton and once to Erdington for the vocation meetings in Easter Week.
This was my first real encounter with a Yorkshireman. You need to know that I had been brought up to be wary of anyone who lived north of Watford. Being keen on cricket I soon became aware that among Surrey’s main rivals were Yorkshire and Lancashire, and I will always remember my father explaining to me that Yorkshiremen tended to be blunt and uncompromising, while Lancastrians had a gentler side to them. Now, far be it from me to suggest that Kevin perfectly fitted my father’s description, but there is no doubt that he was a strong, determined and no-nonsense character. I should add immediately that he became a great friend of my family and right to the end stayed in close touch with my sister, Anne. Indeed, before he left for hospital on that fateful Monday, two weeks ago today, he assured me that he had just received a message of goodwill from Anne, for which he was obviously very grateful.
He joined the Congregation from school – the famous St Bede’s in Bradford – was professed in 1952 and ordained in 1958. He spent his early years preaching missions and retreats. His gifts for leadership were soon recognised and by the mid-1960s he was being appointed to the role of Rector and Parish Priest in Sunderland, to be followed by a six-year term here at Bishop Eton in the 1970s. Becoming Provincial in 1980, he was to be re-elected throughout that decade. Then, graciously he agreed to join Fr Ronnie McAinsh in Zimbabwe and help build up our mission there. The fruits of that work are evident even on the sanctuary today. He returned to take the reins again in Clapham, before those final years of ministry in Hawkstone until the pastoral centre closed in 2016. And so he came back to Bishop Eton, and although officially retired, he was an integral part of our community, playing his part at every level, including the life of the parish. When you listened to his homilies you realised that he was imbued with a deep faith in Christ. You sensed that, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, he had walked with Christ and grasped the message. He had the wonderful gift of relating the Gospel to everyday life simply and succinctly. Our prayer is that he was ready to inherit the promise, so powerfully expressed in Isaiah, of sitting at the eternal banquet where God has promised to wait on us.
He was blessed with much common sense and was a kind of rock in the community on which we could always rely, tempering his home truths with more than a smattering of humour. I think it is fair to say that he was a man of his time and was never particularly at ease with the modern spirituality which encourages us to get in touch with our feelings. However, that is not to say that he did not care. He was a loyal friend and I know from my own experience and from talking to others, including parishioners who remember his ministry in this parish back in the 1970s, how much they appreciated his support in times of difficulty and sadness.
And finally, Kevin, like almost all Redemptorists, was a fiercely independent man, ultimately proved by his ability to master a very temperamental electric wheelchair in those last few weeks of his life. Oh, and by the way, before I hand over to Maurice, I must tell you that, to my amazement, I discovered, after he died, that Kevin was not a Yorkshireman after all, having been born in Nelson and only moving across the Pennines when he was a child. No matter, he always claimed to be from Bradford, and whether he was a Lancastrian or a Yorkshireman, he will be sorely missed.
