Maryknoller brings wealth of teaching experience to students in one of Africa's newest nations

A classroom in the African nation of Namibia is just the latest in a long line of teaching positions for Maryknoll Father Richard Albertine. In addition to working overseas in his 32-year mission career, Albertine has done mission education work from coast to coast in the United States and taught theology at Maryknoll seminary in Ossining, N.Y., St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, St. Francis in Milwaukee, St. John's in Camarillo, Calif., and a major seminary in Nigeria on the western coast of Africa.

"He is one of the best teachers I ever had," says Maryknoll Father Joseph Thaler, praising his seminary professor. "He was always challenging us with probing questions and pushing us to ask questions ourselves and not just take things for granted."

Albertine brings this wealth of classroom and overseas mission experience to his new job of teaching theology to students for the priesthood and counseling university students in this new nation that gained independence from South Africa in 1990. While the graying, curly-haired missioner is the first Maryknoll priest to serve in Namibia, he is not the first Maryknoller to serve there. He joins Maryknoll Sisters Imelda Bautista, Aida Manlucu, Anastasia Lott and Rebecca Macugay, who have been serving in the country since 1994.

Born in 1939 in Hazleton, Pa., Albertine is the eldest of four sons of a coal miner family. He attributes his missionary vocation to Sisters who came to his home parish of St. Mary in Beaver Meadows to teach religion to public school students. "I don't even remember to what order they belonged," he says. After his freshman year in public high school, he applied to Maryknoll and was sent to the mission society's minor seminary in Clarks Summit, Pa., to study Latin. "There I was, a teenager, studying with many veterans who decided to become missioners after coming home from the Korean War," he recalls. "They impressed me immensely."

Ordained in 1966, Albertine was assigned to the Maryknoll mission in Caracas, the rapidly growing capital of Venezuela. "We had to cope with the challenges of urban ministry," he explains, "compared to the rural work of most of the other Maryknoll missions at that time." Recalled for graduate studies, he earned a doctorate in systematic theology from St. Michael College in Toronto in 1972. After rotating for a time between classroom work in the States and assignments in Venezuela, Albertine was appointed director of education at the Maryknoll seminary in Ossining, N.Y.

He later taught for two years at St. Paul's Seminary in Nigeria, founded by the bishops there to train future priests to do mission work in Africa and abroad. "Many of those 150 African missioners who have been ordained, some of whom are serving here in New Orleans and Houston, are my former students," he says. "I'm very proud of having had a part to play in their priestly formation."

Based at various times in the Maryknoll houses in Washington, D.C., Chicago and Los Angeles, Albertine has told the story of world mission from hundreds of pulpits and podiums from the Carolinas to California. "He's a born teacher. He knows how to get a message across in a church as well as a classroom," says Father Robert Carleton, Maryknoll's co-director of promotion. "He'd often take a globe into the pulpit and pass it around the congregation to let people get a 'feel' for the world around them. He's tops in getting people to respond, to get involved in mission themselves."

Albertine took up his twin assignment as seminary professor and chaplain for Catholic students at the University of Windhoek in January. The country's three Catholic bishops established their first national seminary in Windhoek, the capital, two years ago. "They want to train students for the priesthood in their own country so they don't lose contact with their own people and their own culture," Albertine says.

He reports that the country is making progress in education and health care, thanks to a healthy economy based on diamond and uranium mining in its vast desert land. The missioner, however, says there are "two Namibias," one white, less than 1 0 percent of the population but controlling two-thirds of the wealth, and the other black, eking out subsistence living by herding sheep and goats and growing sorghum and millet. Most of the Catholics, who number 270,000 in a population of 1 .7 million, are poor.

"I want to foster a missionary spirit in diocesan priests and university graduates," says Albertine, "by encouraging them to reach out to people in spiritual and material need at home and beyond."

Dick's Biography             Dick's Reflections

     View the Namibia Photo Album    

Maryknollers in Namibia