prayers across the ocean

In the early 1950s, the Irish Christian Brothers were invited to Montevideo. Parents in the exclusive neighbourhood of Carrasco were keen to provide their sons with a private, Catholic education and had been encouraged by the success of the prestigious Cardinal Newman College in Buenos Aires, founded by los Hermanos Cristianos the decade before. The Brothers arrived in 1955 and established Stella Maris. Ten years later, ex-pupils, eager to continue enjoying the rugby they had played at school, formed the Old Christians.

From the beginning, rugby was an integral part of life at Stella Maris. According to Old Christians team member Nando Parrado, in his book Miracle in the Andes, ‘To the Christian Brothers, rugby was more than a game, it was … a moral discipline. At its heart was the … belief that no other sport taught so devoutly the importance of striving, suffering and sacrificing in the pursuit of a common goal’. The Brothers passed on their love of the game, and their ex-pupils played ‘proudly wearing the bright green shamrock’ on their jerseys.

In October 1972, a plane carrying the Old Christians crashed in the Andes. Parrado, who was on the flihght, attributes their subsequent survival in small measure to their time at Stella Maris. The survivors responded to their situation ‘in the way … (they had) … been taught by the Christian Brothers – as a team’.

The Old Christians, with a number of supporters, had been travelling to play an exhibition match in Santiago, Chile. Bad weather had forced them to stop overnight at Mendoza. They resumed their journey the following day, Friday the 13^th. In poor conditions, the plane ploughed into a ridge and came to rest on a glacier on the east side of a mountain.

Including crew, there were 45 people on board Flight 571. Thirty-two survived the crash.  With no medical supplies, the badly injured had no hope. For those who lived on, their means of survival is well known. They were sustained only by eating the flesh of their dead fellow passengers.

By late November, any food they did have had run out (Parrado describes how a single chocolate peanut lasted him for three days. Its chocolate coating provided the first day’s nourishment. One half of the peanut was consumed on each of the following days; he savoured the last half in his mouth for hours before finally eating it).

In December, Parrado and a team-mate Roberto Canessa set off to seek help. ‘Now let’s go die together’, said Canessa. In ten days, in a state of almost permanent exhaustion, they pair trekked for more than 110 kilometres across the Andes.

In all, sixteen passengers survived. The rescue received worldwide attention. In Ireland, the principal of the Christian Brothers College in Cork city gathered his students together to pray and give thanks for the safe return of the surviving passengers. Some months earlier, Brother John (Dicey) O’Reilly had first asked for his students’ prayers when Flight 571 was reported lost in the mountains. Most of the players had been his pupils when Brother O’Reilly had taught at Stella Maris in Montevideo some years before.