The Roman Catholic ecclesiastical province of Kingston (comprising the three Roman Catholic dioceses in Jamaica — Kingston, Mandeville and Montego Bay) is to have a new metropolitan bishop.

He is His Grace Archbishop-elect Kenneth Richards, a Jamaican who was born in Linstead, St Catherine. Richards has served as the Roman Catholic bishop of St Johns, Antigua, for the last four years.

Born in August 1958, Richards attended the same St Catherine High School that Prime Minister Andrew Holness (who was born in 1972) would attend about a decade-and-a-half later. The young Kenneth Richards was a basketball enthusiast and represented one of the local clubs in basketball, even as a young priest in the immediate years after his ordination in September 1985.

It was his pastoral duties that forced him to bring his basketball playing to a halt. By his own account, Archbishop-elect Richards’ story of his calling to the priesthood is very interesting indeed.

All over the world, in the various dioceses of the church, there are aspirancy programmes to bring about an interest in the priesthood. There are regular meetings, and in the summer the young aspirants to the priesthood travel around with priests to observe pastoral work.

Kenneth Richards, as a teenager for most of the 1970s, attended mass at St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Spanish Town. He initially showed no interest in the aspirancy programme for priesthood when it was advertised throughout the Roman Catholic churches in the archdiocese of Kingston.

But a group of teenaged boys from St Joseph’s went regularly to the Sunday meetings of aspirants to the priesthood at Holy Trinity Cathedral on North Street, in Kingston. The director of the aspirancy programme was the then Father Charles Dufour (now archbishop emeritus of Kingston and apostolic administrator-elect of the Diocese of Mandeville).

Being youngsters, as soon as the meetings of the aspirancy programme were over, the aspirants would have races down Emerald Road (now George Headley Drive). They would then go to the movies before heading back to Spanish Town.

In these days of DVDs and other computerised gadgets, including cellphones from which we can watch movies, people under 30 years of age might not appreciate that a great part of weekend entertainment up to 30 years ago was to go to a movie at a cinema.

While the teenaged Kenneth Richards was not originally a part of the aspirancy group, some of the aspirants were his friends. They told him about the movies after the meetings that might not have been available at the cinema in Spanish Town, which was not quite as urban as it is today. So, Kenneth Richards went along to the aspirancy meetings just to go to the movies with his friends, and also to run in the races down Emerald Road.

True, it was considered dangerous to be racing on a public road, but Emerald Road then would, under normal circumstances, have had next to zero traffic on a Sunday afternoon.

But in attending the aspirancy meetings, Kenneth Richards felt the call to be a priest. Interestingly, of all the aspirants from St Joseph’s in the 1970s, Kenneth Richards is the only one who was ordained to the priesthood. My point here is that God works in mysterious ways on different occasions and this includes His way of choosing His priests.

After ordination in 1985, Archbishop-elect Kenneth Richards served as associate pastor at Holy Cross Church in Half-Way-Tree, pastor of St Patrick’s Church in Waterhouse, pastor of St Benedict’s Church, Harbour View, before becoming rector of Holy Trinity Cathedral where he oversaw the restoration in time for its 100th anniversary in 2011.

In 2009, Father Richards became an honorary prelate, which carries with it the title of Monsignor. In December 2011, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Kenneth Richards as bishop of St Johns in Antigua.

While the Roman Catholic Church teaches that the work of bringing about social justice in the world is primarily the duty of the laity, I would like to see Archbishop-elect Richards publicly encourage those of us who work to bring the co-operative movement back to its original aim of providing social justice to all, which is in line with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

It was only last week that my column was entitled ‘Co-operative democracy being eroded’. In response to that article, a fellow Jamaica College student of the 1960s, Raymond D Grant, wrote on the

Jamaica Observer Online about something that I have been advocating in both the print and electronic media for at least 27, years: that the co-operative movement should be in the tourism industry. Raymond, please email me at the address below.

The credit union movement, which was founded in Jamaica by the Roman Catholic Church, is, together with all other co-operatives, under threat of being watered down in such a way that they would no longer be co-operatives. How will co-operatives empower the poor if some people succeed in getting parliament to amend the law to limit the democracy of its members by stopping nominations from the floor for its standing committees?

Those people who wish to change the law are the same ones who want the post of registrar of co-operatives to be abolished altogether, in addition to the Department of Co-operatives and Friendly Societies. And it appears that the co-op department does not know that this plan would put them out of their jobs, in addition to depriving the members of every co-operative of a defender of their rights as members of co-operatives.

In a society where most of the social legislation and other actions of Government of the 1970s were taken straight out of Roman Catholic social teaching, it should not be hard for the new Roman Catholic archbishop to proclaim the words of Jesus Christ who, in Luke 4: 18, quoted Isaiah 61:1 that he was sent “to give the good news to the poor”.

ekrubm765@yahoo.com