Rev. Alphonse Elsbernd SVD
1 media/Rev Alphonse Elsbernd_thumb.jpg 2020-09-23T09:22:05-07:00 Society of the Divine Word Chicago Province Archives 6cf8a3cefe11c9d4c533bd04865769f3cf7d3ec9 37706 3 Rev. Alphonse Elsbernd SVD served as a missionary in Ghana for 33 years until his retirement to the SVD community in Epworth, IA in 1977. plain 2020-10-02T08:46:27-07:00 Personnel files collection on Reverend Alphonse Elsbernd, SVD 20200921 120218 Society of the Divine Word Chicago Province Archives 6cf8a3cefe11c9d4c533bd04865769f3cf7d3ec9This page is referenced by:
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media/Rev Charles Schneider SVD.jpg
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First Divine Word Missionaries arrive in Ghana
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The American-led mission in Ghana focused on education and helped to erect the country’s first Catholic diocese
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2020-10-16T18:13:50-07:00
10/13/1938
The Society of the Divine Word’s mission to the West African nation of Ghana, at the time the British colony of Gold Coast, began in the late 1930s. After the Society of African Missions (SMA) could no longer staff its mission in Accra, the Vatican handed responsibility to the SVDs. This would mark the Society’s second foray into West Africa. The first, its missions in Togo and Mozambique, ended after German religious were expelled in 1914 due to World War I. Due to growing discord in Europe, Britain (and thus the Vatican) stipulated that no Continental European missionaries be attached to the new mission.
Rev. August Gehring SVD, a German ex-Togo missionary, was the first priest selected to the Gold Coast mission exploratory party. In keeping with the Vatican’s requirement, the geographically closest non-European priest, American Rev. Alphonse Elsbernd SVD, was sent from England to assist him. Elsbernd recalled learning of his new assignment two days before his official appointment: “One evening, at meal, I sat next to a visiting Father. He enquired whether anyone knew of a certain Father Elsbernd, who was to accompany him to the Gold Coast. I was sitting next to him – and that’s how I learned of it.”[1]
They arrived in Accra on 1938, but health problems forced Gehring to depart that December to seek treatment. This left Elsbernd as the sole SVD on the continent for over six months. His three reinforcements, who arrived in toward the end of 1939, each turned out to be quite remarkable in their own way: Rev. Harold Rigney would go on to play a major role in the final years of the SVD’s mainland China mission; Brother John Dauphine was the first Black American SVD to mission overseas; and the mission’s superior, Rev. Adolf Noser.
The mission initially faced resistance due to an established Anglican presence, but the SVDs were able to lay the groundwork of their mission by establishing elementary schools in Accra and nearby villages. The popularity of the schools helped the mission to grow and flourish. Within three years they had doubled the size of their mission and sextupled the number of baptisms. Additionally, Fr. Noser founded the Accra Catholic Press, which provided the SVDs even more visibility in the area, and in 1948 Brother Cletus LeSage SVD arrived in Accra to manage it.
Fr. Noser, who was previously given six months to live by a doctor if he was sent to the Gold Coast, was named apostolic prefect of Accra in 1944 and vicar apostolic in 1947, for which he was ordained a bishop. His consecration at Techny on August 22 of that year marked a real maturation of the SVD foundation in North America. In April 1950 Accra was officially established as a diocese, with Noser as its first head.
Rev. Joseph Bowers SVD, the first Black Catholic bishop consecrated in the United States, succeeded Noser in 1953 after the latter was assigned by the Vatican to Papua New Guinea, where he would eventually be named the first Archbishop of Madang. Bowers, a native of the Caribbean island of Dominica, was a graduate of the Black SVD Seminary of St. Augustine in Bay St. Louis, MS. Ordained in Bay St. Louis in 1939, Bowers arrived in Africa in January 1940. After laboring in the Ghana mission for 13 years he was appointed bishop.
It was during Bp. Bowers’ tenure that Ghana attained independence. The Society continued to focus on its educational apostolate, founding high schools, technical schools, and teaching colleges. Seminaries were also founded to train Ghanaian men to become Divine Word Missionaries.
In the decades following Ghana’s independence, the Catholic Church there began to Africanize. In the 1960s American SVDs began to step down and retire, and the central SVD governing body began turning over existing missions to native Ghanaian SVDs. Bp. Bowers led through example in this regard, resigned from his position as bishop in 1971 in order to appoint Rev. Dominic Andoh, a native diocesan priest Bowers had ordained 1956, as Bishop of the Diocese of Accra. While the American SVD presence in Ghana has decreased substantially over the past four decades its impact and legacy remains very much intact.
Bp. Bowers continued his episcopal duties in his native Caribbean, where his assignment led to a new SVD mission discussed elsewhere in this exhibit. He returned to his beloved Ghana in retirement, dying in 2012 at the age of 102.
[1] Rev. Alphonse Elsbernd SVD, The Story of the Catholic Church in the Diocese of Accra. Manuscript. pg 29, Personnel files collection on Reverend Alphonse Elsbernd, SVD
