A family archive, growing page by page
The Pascall Scrapbook
Rev. Fr. Michael Pascall · 1930–1994
The Rev. Fr. Michael Pascall was a Spiritan priest from Belmont, Trinidad, who gave his life to people the world had written off. Formed in Canada and Ireland and ordained in 1956, he spent ten years as a missionary in Akpu, in Biafra, building a young farmers club from nothing, until war and a near fatal illness ended that work. Sent to Cedros, a forgotten fishing village in Trinidad’s deep south, supposedly for two weeks around 1968, he looked at the broken roads, the dry taps, the leaking school roofs and the rotting fish, and he simply stayed. He became Cedros’s voice and its lever: he put his own name on the bank overdraft behind the fishermen’s co-operative, fought for cold storage and a community centre, refused to pay the phone bills of a village the phone company ignored, and in 1970 led the villagers in a protest mas’ all the way to Port of Spain to shame the government in the streets. The newspapers called him the people’s priest, and in 1971 Trinidad and Tobago gave him the Hummingbird Medal for it. He finished his ministry in Toronto, serving the Caribbean community he came from, and the Express had it right: you will never meet another man like Michael Pascall.
These are the press clippings Fr. Michael Pascall kept of his years in Cedros, Trinidad — the protest mas’, the fishing co-operative, the neglected peninsula he refused to let the country forget — together with the letters, editorials and profiles that surrounded them.
Each clipping has been photographed from his scrapbooks, cleaned, and transcribed in full. This site is a work in progress: Book One is complete below, and more will be added as the remaining pages are digitised.
His life in brief
- 1930 — Born in Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad.
- 1946 — Sails for Canada at sixteen to join the Spiritans; a year of novitiate in Quebec.
- c. 1947–56 — Philosophy at Kimmage, Dublin; teaches three years at St. Mary’s College; theology in Ireland.
- 1956 — Ordained a priest.
- c. 1957–67 — Ten years at Akpu parish in Nigeria, until the Biafran war ends the mission.
- c. 1968 — Posted to Cedros, in Trinidad’s far south-west, for two weeks. He stays.
- 1970–71 — Leads the Cedros protest movement the newspapers in this scrapbook chronicle.
- 1971 — Awarded Trinidad and Tobago’s Hummingbird Medal (Silver) for community service.
- 1975 — Arrives in Toronto to run the Caribbean Catholic secretariat at 862 College Street.
- 1977 — Profiled by SPEAR magazine: “Father Pascal — the people’s priest.”
- 1994 — Dies, leaving these scrapbooks behind.
