Behind
[the] decision [to be a missionary] was something older, something [Father
Anthony Corcoran] learned on his knees as a child. "From there I went into
the novitiate. I had always dreamed of becoming a missionary. When we were
children, we prayed every day, three Hail Marys for the conversion of Russia,
as Our Lady of Fatima had asked. I suspect that allowed Mary to get into my
heart and my soul, to prepare me for coming to these people."
He
earned a degree in political science from Marquette University, a master's in
international political economic development from Fordham, and, later, a
licentiate and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Weston Jesuit School of
Theology. He was ordained a priest on June 8, 1996, at Spring Hill College in
Mobile, Alabama. By then, history had already answered his childhood prayer, in
its own way. "When I was ready to be ordained a priest, the Soviet Union
had just collapsed, and Saint John Paul II asked for priests to go. My
community sent me to Russia, to Siberia at the beginning. From there I got to
know Kyrgyzstan, and was assigned here," he relates to Fides.
He
would spend more than twenty years in Russia as vicar general in Novosibirsk,
then as major superior of the Jesuits' Russian Region in Moscow, where he
professed his final vows in 2002. In 2017, Pope Francis named him apostolic
administrator of Kyrgyzstan.
Looking
back on the whole arc of it, he resists tidy explanations. "Of
course," he affirms, "it is all God's Providence: when we try to say
yes to one step, however imperfectly we do it, that step leads us somewhere.
It's not so important for us to know exactly where and how. What matters is to
know with whom—with God. That's how I got here."
Article
by Marie-Lucile Kubacki of FIDES missionary news service of the Pontifical
Mission Societies. Please remember the
Pontifical Mission Societies of the Diocese of Ogdensburg INC. when writing or
changing your will.
