Fr Theophilus Verstraeten- the priest who saved Lerwick from smallpox

Upon his arrival, Father Theophilus was able to celebrate the Eucharist in a chapel dedicated to Saint Anne. It had been set up the year before by Father Stefan Djunkowsky, a Russian priest and member of the North Pole Mission who occasionally visited Lerwick, and was in the basement of the lodberry (now Pete’s coffee shop) which in those days was reached from the beach. Later the land was reclaimed and an extension, present in the 1860s, has been demolished. Eventually Mass was celebrated in the Zetland Hotel, now the Shetland Times Bookshop.

Fr Verstraeten’s arrival was not appreciated by everyone. Three hundred years after the Protestant Reformation, in Scotland the North Pole mission was considered as ‘papist aggression’. In Shetland  the mission was preached against and one night a fanatical opponent set off a gunpowder explosion around Father Verstraeten’s lodgings, blowing out the windows. Nevertheless, he worked hard to reverse this hostility, until his untimely death at the age of 39 years.

In 1871, Le Phare, a Belgian fishing smack, had anchored near Lerwick. A year earlier, in 1870, a pandemic of smallpox had broken out in Europe, the largest outbreak since the introduction of smallpox vaccination at the end of the eighteenth century. The news that a sailor on the ship was sick with smallpox caused a quick response in Lerwick where people could probably remember the horror of previous outbreaks, in which some islands had almost been completely depopulated. The ship was quarantined and any communication between population and ship was prohibited.

Father Gerald Fitzgibbon, a former Lerwick parish priest, who published Father Verstraeten's story in 1994 (Shetland Life No162), says the ship had dropped anchor in the wrong place. Fr Verstraeten was approached on this issue by the Procurator Fiscal Baillie Duncan, who acted as the Belgian Consul. Then, Fr Fitzgibbon writes, he made the 'unusual' decision to voluntarily go onboard and persuade the captain to move his ship out of the nearby bay. The result was a tragedy: "Though Father Verstraeten's visit onboard Le Phare had secured the town from infection, it proved fatal for him." He had given a sick crew member the last rites and got smallpox himself. The crewman recovered, but he died a short time later, “victim of his zeal and self-denial.”

Immediately after his death, his house was thoroughly cleaned and disinfected. Other residents had to remain in quarantine and were not allowed to communicate with others. A guard was put it in front of the door. Father Verstraeten's body was immediately placed in a lead coffin. A short time later, the ship, which he had boarded some days previously as a healthy man, brought his body to Ostend and from there to Bottelaere near Ghent to be buried there.

A few words from the Belgian consul in his obituary make it clear that Fr Verstraeten had left a strong impression in the ten years of his ministry in Shetland:
"It is impossible to describe the sadness that this sad event has caused in the town where it is seen as a general disaster. Our friend had acquired the affection of all classes in society through his kindness, his godliness, his great and also moral charity, always willing to do all possible services, even in a land of strict Presbyterians, who do not tolerate the Catholic Religion.”

A few days later, the minutes of the Burgh Town Council read:
“Before moving to Business, the Meeting deemed it due to the memory of the lamented Mr Verstraeten, late resident Catholic priest, to put on record their deep sense of the loss of one who during a residence of nearly ten years among a community of strict Protestants had not only lived down all religious prejudice but had personally won the respect and esteem of all classes by the unobtrusive discharge of his professional duties, and his amiable disposition, and who latterly fell a sacrifice to his praiseworthy endeavour to protect the community from the plague of smallpox."
These minutes can be read on a plaque which was placed in honour of Father Verstraeten in St Margaret's Church in Lerwick.
Fr Verstraeten's body was taken back to his home village of Bottelaere in the Diocese of Ghent (Belgium) and he was buried next to his mother outside St Anne's church. The grave has now gone, replaced after the second world war by a military cemetery.

Fr Verstraeten’s labours in the islands, 150 years ago, laid the foundations of the modern parish of St Margaret’s in Lerwick. It would be over eighty years before Shetland had another resident priest. He had been fundraising for a Catholic chapel in Lerwick and by the time of his death had banked donations of £1,246 (more than £100,000 at current values). This was invested and ultimately contributed to the building of the present St Margaret's Church which was opened in July 1911. Fr Verstraeten was remembered even then by a correspondent of the Shetland News who refers to him as "the tall dignified gentleman with the gold-rimmed spectacles".

St Margaret’s parish celebrated its Centenary in 2011, and more of the above story was rediscovered and put on the Parish website.  At the same time, in Belgium, Pieter De Clercq was asked by his mother to sort through family papers and he discovered an obituary card for Fr Theophilus Verstraeten. On it is written the story of his Shetland ministry, but no-one had any idea who he was, and eventually Pieter looked online and found the story. There followed an email and information exchange, and eventually in 2019 St Margaret’s parishioner Hilde Bardell, Belgian by birth, met up with Pieter De Clercq, visited Bottelaere and St Anne’s church where Fr Theophilus was buried. Finding his grave was no longer there, she left a message in the intentions book about the Shetland connection, leaving an email address.

In 2020, a Bottlelaere parishioner, Lieve Orye, read the message, and discovers that no-one in Bottelaere knows anything about Fr Theophilus, not even the parish archivist, so Lieve emailed Hilde. Their correspondence led  to Lieve writing three articles about the Lerwick-Bottelaere connection for the local church magazine. In February 2023 Hilde and Pete visited Bottelaere again, meeting Lieve and local parishioners and parish council members, and Lieve also visited Shetland. Fr Ambrose, parish priest of St Margaret's, Lerwick, had previously suggested a memorial plaque to honour Fr Theophilus and to give thanks for his service in Shetland. There was an enthusiastic response, resulting in the appointment of a local specialist stone carver to make the monument (www.catholicshetland.scot/monument). The memorial plaque was unveiled at St Anne's Church, Bottelaerere during a visit to Belgium in October of this year by a small pilgrimage group from Shetland.

St Margaret’s Lerwick wish to honour a man who laid the foundations for our church building, but even more importantly, courageously laid foundations for respectful relations and connections between people who through misunderstanding and prejudice forgot about compassion, humanity and love, the value of which never fades. The parish hope that even 150 years later they can build on his foundations and work together in ministry for our very needy world.

BY HILDE BARDELL