AFTER years on the Columban General Council and a sabbatical in Chicago, Father Frank Hoare returned to Labasa in 2009, taking up parish work and later becoming Vocation Director and Vicar for Evangelization.
As we learnt last week, The Columban General Council is the leadership body that helps govern the Missionary Society of St Columban, a Catholic missionary order that works in countries around the world.
Amid this work, he also faced a personal turning point when news of his father’s illness pulled him back to Ireland for a final, grace-filled farewell.
This week, we journey with Fr Hoare as he steps into the new millennia with new challenges and lessons.
Returning duties
When Fr Frank Hoare returned to Fiji after his mother Eileen’s death in 1999, grief still hung close.
He wasn’t expecting her memory to find new life in a small Bua village, but it happened when Mosese of Natanuku approached him shyly.
“Father, may we name our daughter after your mother?” the villager asked.
He agreed immediately, baptising the newborn Eileen. A year later, he left for Dublin to serve on the Columban General Council and assumed that would be the end of the connection.
Then in 2004 a letter arrived. Mosese wrote of a tense meeting in his village subgroup. They were far behind in fundraising for their new church and feared public shame. Voices were rising, discouragement settling in, until five-year-old Eileen suddenly stood and said, “Tell my son in Ireland that we need his help. He will assist.”
The room fell silent. No one understood where the words came from. Mosese added carefully, “Father, I don’t want to put pressure on you, but I felt you should know what she said.”
A summons like that, he thought, could not be ignored. He sent money immediately.
Back in Fiji years later, he still brings his mother’s namesake a gift when he visits.
“She has no memory of calling me her son,” he says, “but I’ll never forget it.”
The new church remained half-built, halted by the builder’s sudden death, and yet he felt “a quiet pull” to see it completed.
Parish lost and hope reawakened
Dogatuki is a cluster of villages in northern Vanua Levu that had been waiting 30 years for its own parish.
Around December 2013, they were shifted around between parishes, rarely saw a priest, and watched many Catholics drift to other churches.
They had even raised $86,000 decades earlier for a church, but the money disappeared into an Archdiocesan account and no one ever told them where it went. Naturally, people felt neglected, forgotten, and discouraged.
When Fr Hoare heard this, he encouraged the Columban Companions in Mission (CCIM), a group of lay missionaries, to run a week-long evangelisation camp to support and uplift the villagers.
The CCIM team prepared themselves seriously and travelled to Dogatuki at Advent. They split into teams, stayed in the villages, prayed with people, visited homes, and brought the sacraments. Many villagers were emotional, saying things like:
“Father, we thought the Church no longer remembered us.”
Even though one village, Vugalei, rejected the program at first, arguing that only priests or catechists should teach, the mission continued in neighbouring Vitina, where people welcomed them warmly.
The Vugalei catechist, hurt at first, later said, “I came with sadness. I leave with peace.”
By the end of the week, the youth were inspired. They formed new CCIM groups to reconnect Catholics who had left the Church.
And then the twist. When Fr Hoare returned to Suva, the new Archbishop found the missing Dogatuki bank account with over $100,000 still in it.
When Fr Hoare brought the news back to the villagers, he told them, “Your hope was not wasted. God has remembered you”.
The kind of love that stays
Three years later (2016), on a Ba–Suva bus in late January, Fr Hoare found himself beside a mother and her teenage daughter. They slid into the seat with easy familiarity, smiling as if the journey were simply another shared adventure.
Shweeta, lively and articulate, talked about school. “One of my classmates was murdered last year”, she said quietly. Her mother touched her arm gently, grounding her.
When they learned he was unmarried, the questions came immediately.
“Why, Father? Did you never want a family? Do you miss having children?”
Their openness surprised him, but not as much as the mother’s simple confession.
“We are best friends,” she said.
“We go everywhere together. My husband tells me, ‘Distance yourself. Otherwise, it will hurt more when she marries.’ But I can’t. I won’t lessen my love now.”
“When the time comes, I will face the pain.”
Fr Hoare watched them interact, the easy trust, the deep bond.
“In the West,” he reflected, “teenagers do everything they can to pull away. But here, this girl was learning intimacy from her mother. She was absorbing tenderness as a way of being.”
Lessons from a child
And maybe that’s what these stories are really saying, that children have a way of telling us the truth long before we’re ready to hear it.
A little girl in Bua calling out across the world for help, teenagers in Dogatuki carrying a village’s hope, a daughter teaching her mother how to hold on and let go at the same time.
They aren’t just side characters in our lives; they’re often the ones showing us where our responsibilities actually lie. And if we’re honest, they see the world with a clarity we lose along the way.
So maybe the challenge for us, for all of us, is simple: pay attention.
Because the future doesn’t arrive fully formed.
It grows up right in front of us, in the children who keep reminding us of who we’re supposed to be.
