Donal Lamont

Donal Raymond Lamont O. Carm. (* July 27, 1911 in Ballycastle (Antrim) , Northern Ireland ; † August 14, 2003 in Dublin , Ireland ) was an Irish Roman 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 ordination as religious priests. As one of the first three Carmelite missionaries, he was sent to the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1946 and appointed as the Carmelite missionary superior there.

Pope Pius XII appointed Donal Lamont on February 6, 1953 as Apostolic Prefect of Umtali (today Mutare) in Rhodesia and on February 15, 1957 as Bishop of the newly founded Diocese of Umtali on the border with Mozambique . He was ordained bishop on June 16, 1957, by the Apostolic Delegate in South Africa, Archbishop Celestine Joseph Damiano ; Co-consecrators were the Archbishop of Salisbury , Francis William Markall SJ and the Swiss-born Bishop of Gwelo , Alois Häne SMB.

Bishop Lamont was in opposition to the racist policies of the white minority government of Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith, which had ruled since 1965 . He was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1976 for providing medical aid to black resistance fighters and for refusing to disclose the location of the guerrillas to government agencies. Due to protests, the sentence was reduced to four years. After briefly interned in a hospital in Salisbury, Donal Lamont was revoked his Rhodesian citizenship and expelled from the country in 1977, whereupon he settled in his Carmelite religious house in the Irish capital, Dublin. Bishop Lamont was nominated for the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize, and the Kenyan government issued a stamp in his honor in 1979. After Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, he returned to Umtali at the invitation of Robert Mugabe , who welcomed him as a hero and had a postage stamp with Lamont's image issued. However, bitterly disappointed by the violence and corruption supported by the new government, he left the diocese to a local successor a year later and returned to Dublin. His resignation was granted on November 5, 1981 by Pope John Paul II . He has since lived at Terenure College, a Carmelite branch in Dublin, where he died in 2003 at the age of 92.

Web links

• Entry on Donal Lamont on catholic-hierarchy.org
• Biography of Donal Lamont on the side of the Irish Carmelite Province (English)
• Obituary in the Daily Telegraph, September 6, 2003
• Obituary in the New York Times of September 2, 2003

predecessor	Office	successor
---	Bishop of Umtali 1957–1981	Alexio Churu Muchabaiwa