The long presence The Society reached Kenya through Uganda, moving eastward in the early years of the last century into the western highlands and around what is now the diocese of Kakamega. It has been there ever since. The work was never the kind that draws attention: small schools where there had been none, simple […]
Who the Society stands with The Kachi Kohli are a tribal people of Sindh, in southern Pakistan, many of them held for generations in bonded labour, with little access to land, schooling, or a voice. Mill Hill missionaries have lived among them, learned their situation, and worked to open a way out that begins, as […]
A school in Pakistan In the Sindh province of Pakistan live the Kachi Kohli people, families who for generations have known little but bonded labour, and whose children have rarely had the chance to learn to read. Fr Rebenie Madar has been working to establish a simple tuition school for them, at Shakirim, so that […]
Who they are today For most of the Society’s history, a Mill Hill missionary set out from Britain, Ireland or the Netherlands. That has changed, and the change is the most hopeful thing about the Society today. Mill Hill now serves in around 19 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America, and increasingly the missionaries […]
Why the Society came The Society’s Latin American mission was not an old colonial inheritance but a deliberate, modern choice, made in answer to a Pope’s appeal. The Church across the region was vast and under-served, and the need was for priests willing to live among the poor of the cities and the countryside rather […]
Where it began The early decades were hard, and there is no point pretending otherwise. The first missionaries buried their own to fever and built what they could by hand. They learned the languages slowly, opened small schools and simple clinics, and trained local catechists, men and women who could carry the faith in their […]
Where we came from The Society was founded in 1866 by Herbert Vaughan, a London priest who later became Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. He began with a single student in a house at Mill Hill, in north London, and a conviction that the Catholic Church in England owed something to the wider world rather than […]
Where it began The Society was founded in 1866, in the high noon of the British Empire, and in those years missionary work and imperial expansion often moved in step. The missionaries who went out did so with real conviction and real compassion, but they moved within a world of empire, and the assumptions of […]
What is happening, and why The crisis has its roots a long way back, in the way the country was divided in the colonial era into a French-speaking majority and an English-speaking minority in the North-West and South-West. For decades the Anglophone regions felt their language, their courts and their schools pushed to the margins […]
Pray with us The first and most natural way to support the missions is to pray for them. It is not a lesser kind of help, offered to people who cannot give money. In the Society’s understanding it comes first, not last, and it holds the rest up. Pray for our missionaries, and for the […]
One Church, one body It is easy to think of the missions as someone else’s concern, a good cause far away that has little to do with life in a British parish. The Church does not see it that way, and never has. When a mother in northern Cameroon cannot get her child to a […]
