A PIONEER MEMBER OF STAFF OF STAMS

On the 9 th July 1964, some 21 young men from five different countries were ordained priests by John Carmel Cardinal Heenan for the St. Joseph Mill Hill Missionary society. Among them were Fr. Peter Naben and Fr. Alphonse ter Beke, and also Fr. Henri Peeters, aged 24, whose uncle, Bishop Jules Peeters had received ordination in that same chapel 26 years earlier, and was then serving as the second residential bishop of Buea Diocese. On the young Fr. Henri’s ordination card was written a quote: “Go now to all those to whom I send you and proclaim whatever I command you” (Jer 1:7). These words will drive his missionary impetus. Fr. Peeters would have started his missionary in Zaire (now DRCongo), but the civil war there made him to be sent rather to the Alliance Française in Paris, to study French, and later at the Institute Catholique de Paris, where he obtained a Licentiate in Theology. In June 1967, he took to his first appointment of teaching Philosophy and Theology at Mill Hill College in Roosendaal for six years, before coming to join the formation team of the newly opened Regional seminary in Bamenda, Cameroon in 1973.

50 years of STAMS coincides with 50 years of loving service of Fr. Henri Peeters as a permanent formator and Professor of Dogmatic Theology and Liturgical Latin at STAMS Bambui. This means every seminarian ever enrolled in Bambui in the last 50 years, would have tasted Fr. Henri’s erudite command of the truths of the faith, accompanied by his daily formative counsels, captured in wise “rules of thumb”, accumulated over the years, and handed to every new generation. Yet the fact of counting 7 bishops among his past students did not make him swell in pride. In many ways, Fr. Peeters encapsulates the ecclesial vocation of a Theologian, for the simplicity and dedication of his life shows that the Christian faith is not just a set of truths to be believed, but a mystery to be celebrated, and a life to be lived: lex credendi, lex orandi, lex vivendi. This does not gainsay the fact that every seminarian has their experience of who Fr. Peeters as a formator is: he a human being with limitations, like anyone else. Many who only see him today barely able to stand through an entire Eucharistic celebration would find it hard to believe that this was once an agile lawn-tennis player, alongside Br. Hans Rafferiner, Fr. John McCluskey, Fr. Maurice McGill and also Fr (later Archbishop) Cornelius F. Esua. From his first year in Bambui, Fr Peeters was appointed Library Master by Fr. (later Cardinal) Christian Tumi the pioneer Rector. This is perhaps the task he would be most remembered for, as this eloquent testimony of the late Archbishop of Bamenda recounts:

With utter self-giving and disinterestedness, with unrelenting and untiring industry, and with absolutely exemplary dedication to duty, Father Henri Peeters has built up our Major seminary Library from scratch to what it is today. In June 1974, less than one year after the opening of our Major Seminary, I visited my Alma Mater, Bigard Memorial Seminary, Enugu, together with Bernard Fonlon, also a past student. To my greatest surprise, I discovered that as far as Reviews, Periodicals and Magazines were concerned, our own library at Bambui was in less than one year, miles and miles ahead of the library at my Alma Mater, which in 1974, was celebrating the Golden Jubilee of its existence. In 1979, Father Bernard van Hagen, Professor of Metaphysics at the Pontifical Urban University, paid an official visit to our Major Seminary in the course of a visit that he was making to those African Major Seminaries that had been granted the status of Affiliated Institutes. After seeing our Major Seminary Library, he openly said that he rated it as the best he had seen so far, on the African Continent. (Mgr. Paul Verdzekov, St. Thomas Aquinas’ Major Seminary, Some Notes on its Origins, Bamenda 2005, par 37).

When Archbishop Verdzekov wrote this note in 2005, the seminary library had just over 49,130 volumes. At the time of writing it has over 100,000 volumes and is open for consultation to both students and non-students of STAMS. May this legacy be maintained and even increased, to assist STAMS in its mission of training priests who are saints and scholars.

Spiritual Director in St Thomas Aquinas' Major Seminary, Bambui from 4th September 2016