Credit: The Irish Catholic
Fr Michael Walsh C.S.Sp. died in August 2026. He was aged 89.
A native of Co. Offaly, Fr Michael was ordained in 1965. He had spent time in Trinidad while still a seminarian and would serve in Nigeria before the Biafran War. However, he is best remembered for the more than half-a-century that he spent on mission in Zambia since first arriving there in 1971 as one of a small group of pioneering Irish Spiritan missionaries.
At Fr Michael’s Requiem Mass in Zambia where he died, Right Rev. Bishop Raphael Mweempwa, Bishop of Monze, noted that Fr Michael ‘served with gentleness and humility’ and that he did not simply work in the Diocese of Monze but ‘became part of its history’.
