Donal Lamont

Donal Raymond Lamont O.Carm. ( Born July 27, 1911 in Ballycastle ( Antrim ), Northern Ireland; † August 14, 2003 in Dublin, Ireland) was an Irish, Catholic missionary bishop in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

Life

Donal Raymond Lamont joined in 1930 the Congregation of the Carmelites at and received on 11 July 1937 in Rome the priesthood as religious priests. As one of the first three Carmelite missionaries, he was sent in 1946 to the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia and intended for local mission superior of the Carmelites.

Pope Pius XII. appointed Donal Lamont on February 6, 1953 to the Prefect Apostolic of Umtali (now Mutare ) in Rhodesia and on 15 February 1957 to the bishop of the newly established Diocese of Umtali on the border with Mozambique. He received his episcopal consecration on 16 June 1957, the Apostolic Delegate in South Africa, Archbishop Celestine Joseph Damiano; Co-consecrators were the Archbishop of Salisbury, William Francis Markall SJ and a native of Switzerland, Bishop of Gwelo, Alois Häne SMB.

Bishop Lamont stood in opposition to the racist policies of the ruling white minority government since 1965, the Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith. He was sentenced in 1976 to a ten -year prison sentence because he provided medical aid black resistance fighters and refused the government to announce the location of the guerrillas. Due to protests the sentence was reduced to four years. After a short time he was interned in a hospital in Salisbury, Donal Lamont was withdrawn in 1977, the Rhodesian nationality and he expelled from the country, after which he settled in his Carmelite convent in the Irish capital Dublin. Bishop Lamont in 1978 was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and the Kenyan government gave in 1979 in his honor issued a stamp. After the independence of Zimbabwe in 1980, he returned at the invitation of Robert Mugabe by Umtali, who welcomed him as a hero, leaving issue a stamp with a portrait Lamont. Bitterly disappointed by the supported by the new government violence and corruption, but he left the diocese a year later a local successor, and returned to Dublin. His resignation was accepted on November 5, 1981, Pope John Paul II. Since then he has lived in the Terenure College, a branch of the Carmelites in Dublin, where he died at the age of 92 years in 2003.