In his 40th year as a priest, U.S.-born Father Michael Moran is serving for the first time at a U.S. parish, having taken over as administrator at St. Margaret of Scotland in Seat Pleasant and Capitol Heights, Maryland, in 2020. The 69-year-old priest of the Society of African Missions spent most of his career in assignments in Africa, with another 15 years in leadership for the SMA. But never, until now, had he been assigned to a U.S. parish.
A life in African missions is exactly what he envisioned for himself even as a child, Father Moran said in an interview with the Catholic Standard at St. Margaret. “I decided for Africa in the 1970s because of the Biafran War,” he explained. The civil war in Nigeria lasted from 1967-1970, during which between 500,000 and 2 million civilians died of starvation. News of the brutal war, famine and rising death toll reached around the world, in part because of church-led efforts to raise funds to airlift aid to stricken people.
“That’s what I wanted to dedicate my life to,” Father Moran said, adding: “you can’t complain if you get what you ask for.”
Born in Rhode Island, Michael Moran mostly grew up in California before spending his high school years in Missouri, his family’s home base. He was one of a dozen children in the Moran family. “I’m number 5,” he said, explaining a complex family system under which every member is assigned a chronological number to help everyone keep track of each other across generations and marriages. Whenever there’s an occasion for the family to gather “we make a little ceremony of everyone calling out their number, to check in.” At last tally, there were well over 100 people in the extended – and numbered – Moran family lineup, he said.
Before leaving Missouri, he worked on the family farm and in a Rawlings Sporting Goods factory (where he painted football helmets) and went on to Conception Seminary College in Missouri. From there, he found his way to the Society of African Missions, known by an acronym, SMA, for its name in Latin, a society of apostolic life, similar to a religious order. The society was founded to serve Africans and people of African heritage, such as in U.S. parishes including St. Margaret of Scotland, with predominantly African American parishioners.
The Biafra crisis that lured him to Africa had passed by the time he arrived in Tanzania in 1978 for the practicum portion of his studies with the Maryknoll School of Theology. His time in Africa eventually spanned 23 years. Father Moran was in fact ordained by Tanzanian Bishop Castor Sekwa, then-head of the Diocese of Shinyanga. His 1981 ordination took place in Tenafly, New Jersey, the U.S. base of the Society of African Missions, and the newly ordained priest promptly returned to Tanzania for another three years.
His next 18 years in Liberia included serving as the regional superior for the Society of African Missions from 1989-2001. His move from a more remote outpost to the capital city, Monrovia, in 1989 brought him to the welcome features of running water and electricity.
“All the time I’d been in a mission, we never had running water or electricity,” he recalled. During those years, when he returned to the U.S. to visit his family, “my mother would find me sitting in the dark and remind me ‘we have electricity here.’”
The treat of modern utilities in the capitol was short-lived, however. “I got to Monrovia and six months later the country was at war and they cut off the water and electricity.”
That was a turbulent time in Liberia. In October 1992 five U.S. women religious, members of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ who were working in Gardnersville, were brutally slaughtered. Father Moran was asked to help officials of the U.S. government recover the sisters’ bodies. He also organized the evacuation of SMA members from Liberia twice during the war. In a 2005 interview with The Catholic Advocate, newspaper of the Newark Archdiocese, Father Moran told of being shot at, accused of spying for Israel and of sheltering people from atrocities in the church compound.
Beginning in 2002, he returned to the United States to head the SMA office of justice and peace. He was elected to SMA provincial leadership in 2004, became provincial in 2007 and served in that office until 2019. His assignment to St. Margaret of Scotland in 2020 came amid what he expected would be a sabbatical year.
“Interestingly, I’ve never served in a parish in the United States,” he said, explaining that as a part of the SMA leadership team he had a hand in decisions about which members of the order would be assigned to the three SMA parishes in this country. But for learning about the day-to-day functions of a suburban U.S. parish, Father Moran said he has relied heavily on the staff and parishioners of St. Margaret.
“They’re good people here,” he said. In learning about the parish during the coronavirus pandemic, he’s seen that “they have a strong sense of caring for each other.”
Father Moran said he was looking forward to getting better acquainted with parishioners now that vaccines are more common and coronavirus restrictions on socializing are lifted.
“It’s all been a new experience for me,” he said. “Every day brings something interesting, especially if I get people talking about the history of the parish. I love to get to know people and the gifts they bring to parish life.”
