EDWARD NEALON: 'IT IS good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end," said Ernest Hemingway.
Edward Nealon’s journey was immense. A farmer’s son from Co Limerick, he became a missionary priest, Padre Eduardo, spending 37 years working with the poor and oppressed in Brazil. The common thread was the land and his love for the people who worked it and his faith in God. The journey ended with his death in his home place last month.
Joining the Holy Ghost Order (now known as Spiritans) Ned Nealon first went to Brazil in 1965 and became fluent in Portuguese. He knew agriculture and his approach was practical. Working with peasant peoples, he spent much time trying to prevent or overturn evictions, working to get a piece of land for evicted farmers forced to migrate to the big city. Those with whom he spent his working life were the poor and oppressed, subject to arbitrary land-clearance programmes, brutally forced off the land to make way for “progress” in which they would not share. He worked comfortably on three levels: direct involvement locally; co-ordination at regional level using the experience acquired in many local incidents; training others to present the gospel as a force for life amid suffering and death.
In 1992, he was appointed episcopal vicar for the region of São João de Meriti in the diocese of Duque de Caxias, Rio de Janeiro.
He loved the Brazilian people and identified with them. We cannot know what they made of his repertoire of Percy French songs, nor of his single-minded view of the pre-eminent place of Kildimo,Co Limerick, among the wonders of the western world. In him they recognised a good friend and a pilgrim with the drive to leave the world a better place. He taught them that faith could be a source of life. Fellow missionaries appreciated his thoughtful support.
After boarding school – St Patrick’s College, Ballyfin, Co Laois – Ned Nealon joined the Holy Ghost Order and went on to study philosophy and theology in Kimmage Manor in Dublin. Before ordination he was sent to a Spiritan school in Trinidad as a “prefect”, teaching classes, coaching teams and helping supervise students for three years in his mid-20s. On ordination he set out for Brazil in 1965 just two years after the first Irish Spiritans had gone there.
When his work in Brazil ended in 2002, he returned to Kimmage Manor, and Limerick, and eventually settled at the Spiritan community in Ardbraccan, Co Meath. This suited his love of the land, and he was quick to promote solar energy as a source of heating.
The pilgrim journey ended where it began. A holiday visit to his home place, Middlefield, Kildimo, Co Limerick, was interrupted when he became unwell, and he died soon afterwards. He is survived by his brothers Jimmy and Stephen, sisters Peggy and Sr Catherine, and by his Spiritan confreres.
Edward Nealon CSSp, missionary priest: born April 6th, 1935, died June 19th, 2012
