(LifeSiteNews) — Irish nun and missionary Sister Miriam Duggan has died.
Sr. Duggan was a Franciscan Missionary nun known for her work in Africa, including her program that drastically reduced HIV in Uganda by promoting abstinence instead of contraception. She died peacefully in the Mount Oliver monastery in Dundalk, Ireland.
She spent over 55 years of her life in service to the Catholic Church in Africa. During her time in Uganda, her program promoting abstinence outside of marriage instead of the use of condoms helped to reduce the HIV rate from 26 percent to 6 percent. Her program was adopted by the government, and it was one of the most successful AIDS reduction campaigns in all of Africa.
“The only real solution to stopping AIDS was to go back to God’s Law, if you like, of no sex before marriage and faithfulness in marriage,” Duggan told LifeSiteNews in 2022.
In her latest mission, Sr. Duggan was working to buy land on which to rebuild the Mother Kevin Community School she runs in Huruma, Mathare North, a disadvantaged suburb of Nairobi, Kenya. The school, which educates and feeds poverty-stricken children from the slums, was irreparably damaged by floods which ravaged the area in late April.
“Our negotiation at the moment is to buy land higher up,” said Duggan in 2024. “Most of the land is 40,000 U.S. dollars. Also, we want to build a schoolhouse to continue to help these poor children.”
LifeSiteNews’ Editor-in-Chief John-Henry Westen visited Sr. Duggan and the Mother Kevin Community School in 2022 and remarked that the school had remained faithful to Catholic teaching despite the temptation to put that aside for the sake of grants from ideological colonists.
Meanwhile, the school had great success in equipping its children for employment. Children from the primary school could choose to go on to high school, and those who excelled there could get government scholarships to university. Children who didn’t do well in their exams could work with Sr. Duggan to get the skills they need to train for good trades. Duggan told Westen that 89 percent of the school’s graduates were working in stable jobs.
Impressed by Duggan’s anti-abortion activism and abstinence program that successfully combated AIDS in Uganda, readers of LifeSiteNews have generously supported her work with Kenyan children in recent years.
The work that the Irish nun began still goes on, and LifeSiteNews invites all its readers to support our LifeFunder to help Sr. Duggan address poverty in Kenya. The money raised for this campaign will be used to sponsor more youth into technical colleges and to assist them with finding employment afterward.
https://www.lifefunder.com/help-sr-miriam-address-poverty-in-kenya/
