By Francis Quamina Farrier
FOR the past 32 years, Guyanese Catholics and their friends based in New York City have been attending a special annual Mass at which they pray for the well-being of their fellow Guyanese back home and send financial assistance for previously identified projects. That includes the Soup Kitchen at the Brickdam Presbytery in Georgetown, which feeds many of the needy in the capital city.

This annual spiritual, patriotic and humanitarian project was the brainchild of New York-based Monsignor Paul Jervis, formally of La Penitence, Georgetown. He visits Guyana from time to time and sees first-hand the Guyanese people’s needs at home. For over three decades, the priest’s efforts have been loyally supported by a committee comprising mainly former altar boys of the Brickdam Catholic Cathedral in Georgetown. Most of these committee members had migrated from Guyana decades ago but continue to be extremely patriotic to the Land of their Birth. Most of them visit “The Land of Many Waters” from time to time, sometimes even bringing along with them their American or Canadian friends to enjoy the beauty of the “Green Land of Guyana.” They also experience the varied local cuisine and of course the pleasant weather; a country void of hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, monsoon rains, devasting floods, hail storms, snow storms, wild fires, mudslides, sinkholes or volcanoes spewing red-hot molten lava gobbling up all in their path; none of those wraths of Mother Nature is ever experienced in Beautiful Guyana.

The chief celebrant at these annual Guyanese Masses in New York City is usually a Guyana-born or Guyana-based priest who can apprise the congregation in New York first-hand about the progress and the challenges which the Catholic Church and the nation at large face in Guyana. Monsignor Paul Jervis has also been doing quite a lot of extra-curricular work in his adopted homeland; he has built a church from the ground up and also written a book entitled “Quintessential Priest,” which has documented the work of Irish-American Monsignor Bernard Quinn. He is a priest who proved not just by words but more so by deeds, his love for people of colour at a time when racism was so much more rampant and systemic and a way of life in the United States of America.

In his book Msgr. Paul Jervis also chronicles the evil acts of the racist organisation the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)  which burned down an orphanage built by Monsignor Bernard Quinn, an orphanage that cared for many children of colour – including a few who had connections with British Guiana. Having had the orphanage rebuilt after the destruction by arson, the KKK burnt down the orphanage a second time. That was no deterrent, for the good priest had it rebuilt yet again and proved that good can and does triumph over evil.

What is of note regarding the congregation’s make-up at the annual New York Guyanese Masses is the representation of all the races of Guyana, as they meet and greet and worship together in love and unity. A few of them travel from other states, including from far-away Florida to be part of the celebration. There are also a few who travel all the way from neighbouring Canada. At the end of this year’s Mass, Msgr. Paul Jervis who started the tradition and has been with the organising committee for over three decades, announced that he is stepping down as head of the Mass Committee but that he would still be associated with it less actively. Special mention was made of Colin Smith, the Editor of the Guyana Catholic Standard, who was seriously ill at the time of the Mass and who recently passed away in Guyana.