Reggie Donnelly

Life

Reggie Donnelly was born in 1939 in West Belfast and lived there for nearly all of his seventy-eight years. A devout Catholic with a quiet, organising temperament, he made his first pilgrimage to Medjugorje in the mid-1980s, soon after the Marian apparitions began, and returned home convinced that what he had seen there had to be shared.

In 1986 he founded Our Lady Queen of Peace Pilgrimages and began leading groups out of Belfast to Medjugorje. Over more than thirty years he brought thousands of pilgrims to the village — through the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the war that engulfed Bosnia, neither of which ever stopped him.

During the Bosnian War he founded the Good Shepherd Foundation and 'Operation Santa', shipping container after container of toys, clothing and supplies from Northern Ireland to children orphaned by the conflict. He became one of the principal Irish benefactors of Mother's Village at Medjugorje — the orphanage and home for abandoned children founded by Father Slavko Barbarić — and is widely credited with helping raise several million pounds for that work over the course of his life.

He served on the committee of Followers of the Cross, the Lourdes group with which his pilgrim community had long-standing ties, and was an active member of the Marian Movement.

Reggie Donnelly died on Easter Saturday, 31 March 2018, at the age of seventy-eight, after a long illness. He is not the subject of any canonisation process; he is included here as an inspirational layman whose Belfast friends and pilgrims asked that his service to the poor and to Our Lady of Medjugorje be remembered.