Priest
The son of pub managers was self-motivated to join a religious order whose focus was on helping poor people all over the world. Little did he know that he would go on to lead the first worldwide civilian aid response to save over 1,000,000 children and adults from starvation.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Dermot Doran (“DD”) was born near Dublin, Ireland. His parents owned and managed a pub. Years later, one of DD’s brothers founded one of New York City’s most popular Irish bars.
EDUCATION
DD entered the novitiate (from the word ‘novice,’ denoting the first step of formal preparation to join a religious order) of the ‘Spiritan’ order of the Catholic Church. Their mission for over 300 years has been to evangelize the poor and marginalized all over the world.
DD graduated with a degree in philosophy from University College Dublin. He spent three years as a prefect at St. Mary’s College in Port of Spain, Trinidad, before returning to Ireland to complete his religious studies, where he was ordained a priest in the Catholic Church.
FIRST CAREER PATH NEVER A BINDING COMMITMENT
Father Doran’s first church assignment following his ordination as a priest, was to serve as the principal of a Catholic high school. Later, the church reassigned him to work as a teacher in a ‘developing’ country, Trinidad, and eventually in Nigeria, where he learned to appreciate the African Igbo culture, which, with its rich storytelling traditions and its history of intense suffering under English rule, seemed to resemble the historic Irish experience under British rule.
RALLYING HUMANITARIAN AID DURING A WAR
Father D was one of about 1,000 priests and nuns who had been working in Africa when fighting broke out after the Igbo people of Nigeria’s southeastern states seceded to form the independent Republic of Biafra. The Nigerian Army almost immediately attacked, and soon had a blockade around the region, leaving 14 million residents to starve.
The effects of the blockade were immediate and devastating, especially after Nigerian forces captured Biafra’s oil-rich coast. Residents of Biafra got most of their protein from dried fish; without it, children quickly developed ‘kwashiorkor,’ a protein deficiency that caused their bellies to swell. At the worst part of the crisis, about 10,000 people died each day, according to Red Cross estimates.
“It’s something you don’t expect to meet in your life,” said Father D for a documentary produced many years later.
Overnight, the priests and nuns pivoted from their peacetime roles as educators to aid workers during one of the 20th century’s worst humanitarian crises. Father D was later described as the ‘linchpin’ who rallied the world for aid in an airlift of food and medical supplies. Overall, the Biafran airlift brought 60,000 tons of aid to the region, at the time the largest mobilization of aid by civilians in history. Between 500,000 and two million noncombatants died because of the blockade – but an estimated one million others survived because of the airlift.
Said Father D later, “I was sent there, and they (the Igbo people) became my people.”
Among Father D’s initiatives to rally the world to assist included sneaking in and out of Biafra to locate the first planes and hire the first pilots for the airlift. He went to New York City to arrange the first aid shipments, mapped out the logistics of moving thousands of tons of supplies from Europe and North America to an island south of Nigeria that was then under Portuguese rule. He accompanied many of the flights from there into Biafra, coordinated supply distribution, caught up with locals and other priests, then left to tell the world what he had learned.
Father D “had a way” with the news media, befriending, among others, well known news anchors from CBS and the BBC. He testified before the U.S. Senate, leaving a lasting impression on many Senators, who became leading advocates for Biafra in the U.S. Congress.
“He never did anything half-way,” said a retired overseas director for Catholic Relief Services. “He was always programming and planning, then he went back and told the story.”
In a debate with Father D on CBS, the Nigerian ambassador to the United Nations claimed that the airlift was supporting the rebels and, by prolonging the war, driving up the death toll. Father D said in response, “If you call innocent children and babies a few days old, and babies a week old or a month old who are dying of starvation – they have no milk, no food – if they are rebels, I don’t think they know it.”
Father D was the leader of efforts which successfully mobilized aid organizations including Roman Catholic, Protestant and Jewish groups, including Catholic Relief Services, gathered under an umbrella effort called ‘Joint Church Aid,’ which collected supplies for transit through the airlift. The pilots nicknamed the planes utilized as ‘Jesus Christ Airlines.’
“It’s a fantastic example of ecumenism,” said Father D. “We mightn’t be agreed on theology – but we agreed on bread.”
CAREER SATISFACTION
The Biafran airlift is widely considered a watershed moment in international humanitarianism. It was the first time nonprofit businesses and private citizens led the response to a crisis – previously governments had led such efforts, but governments – with many concurrent priorities – had been slower to react than an individual who could quickly mobilize like-minded, humanitarian focused groups with less ‘red tape’ (bureaucratic) regulations to negotiate.
Following his success with the Biafran airlift, Father D was then assigned to work as a communications officer with Catholic Relief Services in New York, from which he was dispatched to disaster zones worldwide, including Bangladesh and India.
“He was everywhere,” observed the head of Catholic Relief Services, “He got more out of a day than anyone I ever knew.”
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This career story is based on several sources including an obituary written by Clay Risen, published in The New York Times on July 20,2023 plus internet research.
