Three years ago he lay dying on the hard earth of a shanty town. As his life blood gushed out he stumbled away, trying to escape the men who had just shot him at point blank range.

"The third shot was like a fist going right up into my body. I really felt that," says the mild-mannered Belfast priest with a shudder. He pauses for a moment, licking his lips.

"I felt so alone … abandoned," states Father Kieran Creagh, as he remembers the night in February 2007, when a criminal gang attacked his South African hospice.

"They just rang the bell outside in the courtyard and I thought, 'oh, something must have happened in one of the wards'. I didn't realise these guys were inside. I opened the door … and that's when they grabbed me."

Leratong – the name means "place of love" in one of the six local languages spoken here – had been set up by Father Creagh in 2004, a single-minded effort to help tackle the massive HIV/AIDS crisis crushing the nation. With its hospice beds, drug clinic and creche, it was at the physical and spiritual heart of the community.

A member of the Passionist religious order, Creagh had spent over a decade seeing his congregation succumb to the deadly disease. In the overcrowded, poverty-stricken township of Atteridgeville, about an hour west of the capital Pretoria, he had watched as old men lay dying in filthy shacks, unable to move; attended by wives who were scarcely less sick.

He felt passionately about bringing dignity to the dying: it was his vision and determination, despite funding problems, political obstructions and the South African government's refusal to provide anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs), that had led to Leratong's birth.

The irony was that he was now facing the end of his own, most extraordinary, life.

*

Kieran Creagh was born during a troubled time in Ireland's history. His father was a leading newspaperman covering the various towns of the North, before joining Ulster TV as a senior manager. One of his brothers, Liam, also rose in the journalistic ranks, becoming a reporter for GMTV and then Sky News. But it was to the priesthood that younger sibling Kieran felt drawn.

"I never told anyone," confides the 47-year-old Catholic priest, as he walks around the streets of north Belfast during a rare visit home. People still come up and greet him warmly, from the cleaners in his local church to one of the Brothers in the attached monastery. "It was something I just felt in my bones since I was four years old. I was going to be a priest one day." No-one else had much of an inkling of that calling, and he says that his choice was never easy. "I'd seen so much pain, so much violence during 'The Troubles', that I just wanted to do something to heal those divisions."

At eight years old Creagh saw his first riot. Catholic and Protestant neighbours were busy tearing each other apart. "There I was, coming home from our holidays on the coast, and I saw all these people fighting on the Crumlin Road [a dividing line between the communities in north Belfast]. 'Mummy,' I said, 'what's that?' She didn't know what to say." Then came the house burnings. "The Protestants were burning their houses so the Catholics wouldn't get them. They'd come up and down in these lorries looking for new homes to occupy. Your parents wouldn't let you outside," says Creagh with a small shake of his head.

Death, it seems, was always lurking. At 14 he witnessed the IRA murder a taxi driver and passenger outside his house: the gunman shot at him, too, as he stared from the street corner, whilst his sister cradled one of the dying men in her arms. A short time later Creagh narrowly avoided being killed when the local petrol station he'd just visited was bombed. Despite being proud 'Irish' stock and having schoolmates who would later go on to join the IRA (one served a life sentence for murder), Creagh grew up abhorring violence.

By his late teens the future priest was enrolled in a business studies course at his local college, had a girlfriend, enjoyed pubs and was spending most of his free time helping disabled youngsters and volunteering as a Scout leader. He would even visit the house of a notorious Loyalist (Protestant) paramilitary, 'Mad Dog' Johnny Adair, to collect Adair's disabled sister as part of his voluntary work. "Of course, then we didn’t know he was Mad Dog … but he knew I came from the Ardoyne [Catholic area]," Creagh confides.

Although he enjoyed his social life well enough – he was so popular that he was voted head of his college student union – Creagh's studies suffered. When the offer of a job with the Bank of Ireland came through, he cut short his diploma.

"And that should have been that," he smiles. "But there was this niggling that grew. I knew in my heart I wanted to be a priest – I just didn't know how to tell anyone." He shrugs. "I didn't just want to do social work … I guess there was a deeper calling."

Creagh's path into the priesthood took several more tortuous years. "I didn't want a wife, either," he admits, when describing breaking the news of his decision to his girlfriend. "There were tears, of course, but I'd always been honest with her. I don't personally have a problem with priests being married but it wasn't for me. Anyway, I do have a relationship: to God. It’s an on-off relationship, but we talk." He then chuckles: "Sometimes he even listens!"

It was his voluntary work at a Dublin hospice that had perhaps the greatest impact on Creagh. "I saw the Sisters work there with such dignity, such love, it was amazing," he says. "This Sister – Sister Laborie – would be cleaning this old man and he'd be sick, or soil himself, and she'd just start right over again. Just so that he could be clean and comfortable; so that someone could see their grandfather at the end of his days and know he was loved."

Creagh also spent a year in Botswana, surviving a crash with a truckload of SWAPO guerrilla fighters (engaged in a bush war with South African troops). When the call then came to replace a sick priest in the South African township of Atteridgeville, near the capital Pretoria, he jumped at the chance.

"I'd been thinking about what to do with myself … even considering buying one of those one-way tickets to travel the world, and this came up. So I thought, 'ok, I can do that, it's just six months'. Little did I know what I'd got myself in for!"

*

Eleven years later, Father Creagh can now take stock of the massive changes he has seen sweep through South Africa. From his early days as a parish priest, when he was afraid to leave his flat, to the slow infusion of his Mass with a joyous African flavour (ceremonies can last hours, backed by highly-competitive choirs), Creagh has come to know and love the community of Atteridgeville.

But it hasn't been easy. One of his predecessors, an Irish priest who'd been badly beaten outside the parish church, told him: "They'll kill you, Kieran. Kill you." Most white South Africans have never visited a township – and never would. With high levels of crime, poverty, illiteracy, disease and tensions simmering between rival tribal and ethnic groups (which in 2008 erupted into race riots), they are usually viewed with fear. Anyone else may have stayed away. But not Kieran Creagh.

Early on in his tenure a member of the ANC infiltrated his parish council and caused tremendous problems for a time, accusing him of racism and fraud, perhaps upset at Creagh's determination to bring change. Creagh was cleared at the highest level of all charges. One of his own priests, a fellow Passionist, later died of AIDS. And then there was the never-ending series of funerals for the pauper AIDS victims, and stories of people trudging home to their villages to die.

"I cannot accept that people are dying in cardboard boxes," is how his friends remember the deep-thinking priest talking about the AIDS crisis. Highly-conservative African society viewed those infected as sinners, unclean, and women were often infected by errant husbands who had multiple partners. Many were simply left to die in their own filth or turned to traditional healers – Sangomas – who would simply 'bleed' them or feed them herbal emetics, often telling them they were cursed. Even the Government refused them life-saving drugs.

"Having seen and lived through all the evil of 'The Troubles', I thought there had to be answer," Creagh tells me from the very courtyard where he was later shot. "People were dropping like flies, young girls who'd done nothing wrong. I couldn't just stand by and do nothing."

Creagh recalls taking one young woman riven with AIDS to the nearest hospice – 50 kilometres away. "Her mother later came to me and said she wanted to see her daughter: I said let’s go and see her. I called them, and they said no she wasn’t there, they didn’t know who she was. I said yes she is, I took her there myself! It turned out she had died three weeks ago and I had to tell this woman there and then her daughter was three weeks dead. That was hard."

The hospice he vowed to build as a result now cares for hundreds of patients a year; not only that, it has just won South Africa's top clinical award for palliative care. It even brings life – in the form of anti-retroviral drugs – to those who would otherwise die of their disease. Creagh recruited almost entirely from retired female nurses living in the local community; many of them were grandmothers, worshippers at Atteridgeville's parish church of St George. Creagh now calls them affectionately "my six mothers". To pay for it he did everything himself: from fundraising right down to shopping at the cash and carry for the hospice kitchen. Notwithstanding that, he also doubled up as an ambulance driver, and acted as guardian to a teenage orphan. Later he became guardian to a second boy, after his terminally-ill mother (dying of AIDS) begged him to care for her son.

When Leratong finally opened at the end of 2004, Father Creagh had become the first person in Africa to trial an AIDS vaccine, for which he won an International Person of the Year award (from Irish charity Rehab). Leratong, the "place of love", clings to a rocky outcrop above the crowded township and its brand new church, together with clinic and creche, literally shines like a beacon to the people of the township – particularly its helpless and sick. Set around a shaded courtyard, the 16 beds are a place where patients and their families can find respite from the desperate grind of their all-too-short lives, in a country where public hospitals are under-funded and shame (or poverty) all-too-often causes the sick to ignore life-saving healthcare.

One of the first patients he remembers was called Goodwill. He was a 33-year-old local man with terrible lesions and sores caused by the cancer he’d caught as a result of his AIDS (cancers are a frequent problem for AIDS sufferers). He was dying and Creagh would watch the nurse massage his feet, which were causing him great pain.

"They were an inhuman mass of cauliflower shapes and oozing blood, juice and pus. He looked like the Elephant Man but he was a lovely human being. One day he asked me to massage his feet, and after a big gulp, I did," he says, "using double gloves. I asked if there was anything he wanted to make him more comfortable: he said 'brandy'." So Creagh bought a bottle of brandy and the two would share a double shot together in the evenings, just sitting and talking or enjoying the silence and companionship.

Creagh continues: "At one stage Goodwill was vomiting up tissue – but he could still keep down the brandy! Then one night, after a bad day, I left Goodwill – who had finally fallen asleep. But he'd made me promise to stay with him by his side all night. I had told him ‘ok’. It was about 10pm. I told the night duty nurse to call me at my house [on the hospice compound] if anything happened. So I went to bed, woke up the next day and went to check in on Goodwill. ‘Has Goodwill had a good night?’ I said to the nurse. ‘Oh he’s happy today Father.’ ‘That’s great,' I said, 'where is he?’ ‘Oh, he died last night.’ ‘What?! You didn’t tell me? I told you to call me if anything happened!’ ‘.. we .. didn’t know whether to disturb you … sorry Father … ' I really felt as though I'd let him down, left him alone to die."

Such compassion marked Leratong as a most unusual haven, ensuring its fame spread. So when Creagh was stripped, beaten and shot three times at point-blank range by robbers in 2007, it came with the ultimate sense of betrayal. He had poured so much love, so much effort into this community, but the gang that somehow got inside Leratong cared little for that. Drugs and cash were what they were after. The fact that Creagh lived under a vow of poverty mattered little.

An English doctor staying at the hospice at the time failed to come to his aid; his nursing staff had locked themselves inside the wards with the terrified patients, refusing to let him inside; hiding in the pantry, then calling for help from the kitchen balcony as his life leaked away, Creagh was prevented from leaving for treatment by the local police (who insisted "this was a crime scene"). Even the ambulance which eventually arrived had no oxygen and the priest was left out on the roadside, feeling abandoned – Was this it? he thought, as the night life of the township passed him by.

"My blood was pumping out, I was almost naked. Is this how my parents were going to learn of their son's lonely death?" muses Creagh today with a troubled look. "I didn’t want that. I was more scared of that than dying. But there was no voice from God. No angels. No Jesus. No signs. There was just … nothing. It was an immense sense of loneliness and betrayal of the trust I had invested for all those difficult years into the community."

By the time he did get to hospital, his left lung had collapsed and he was to die – only to be resuscitated – on the operating table. He should have stayed dead but as he later discovered, with (literally) only a minute or two left to live, a thorassic (chest) specialist arrived and whisked him off to a private hospital. Later, when he was recovering, his doctors would tell him that his survival was a miracle: somehow the third bullet, which had entered his gullet at point-black range and pierced his lung, had inexplicably turned away from his heart at the last moment. He should have perished from the infection alone, or a second collapsed lung, but something – or someone – kept him alive.

Ironically, the shooting put Leratong on the map. Father Creagh appeared on TV shows across Africa and back in Europe, and at home in Ireland during several months of recuperation, where his plight generated a huge amount of sympathy. Fundraising efforts redoubled, famous politicians came to visit and when he finally returned to South Africa at the end of 2007, he was moved to tears by the songs of the children and staff.

*

"Father, Father!" they cry. Everywhere he drives today, across the ochre-coloured roads of Atteridgeville, past the shacks which litter the hillside opposite the hospice, Kieran Creagh is heralded as some kind of saint, a good-luck charm for the people of the township.

Today he sings out another body, a lung cancer victim who has just died in one of the two rooms used for a patient's final moments. His staff join hands and also sing, and prayer is repeated in the local tongue.

"Duumu leyla Laaaa'feyla," the women keen, voices lilting from elderly throats, as the grandchildren of the deceased look on. "Everything is fine."

The priest doubles over coughing for a moment – thanks to his injuries he has been left with the lungs of a 75-year-old – and there is now a nervousness, an anxiety for every unexplained noise that wasn't there before. "The staff took turns to stay with me in the house after I came back," he says, softly. "They always called out 'ko-ko' when they arrived, so I'd know it was one of them."

Last year he faced two of his attackers during a trial which lasted most of 2008. They're now serving 25 years in prison; three others were sentenced for another attack; but the rest are still at large. And just as South Africa prepares to welcome the World Cup next year, it also remains one of the most violent nations on earth. Sexual behaviour has yet to change and it tops the league for sexual violence (rapes).

"I get 60 or 70-year-old women coming in here with AIDS," Creagh continues, speaking sadly. "I'm angry, aye, that the men don't change."

And his anger extends to the Church in Ireland itself and the scandals of its sex abuse years. "We need to mourn as a nation, we need to repent, we need sackcloth and ashes," he claims with some bitterness. "We need our own Wailing Wall or some monument of atonement."

Meanwhile, Creagh looks to his own future with both excitement and uncertainty. A further attack on one of his neighbouring priests, a 76-year-old Irishman, has left him feeling "sickened" – four other Passionist priests have been attacked here in recent months and a nun raped in Botswana – and he admits to feeling more vulnerable since his own shooting.

But Leratong is here to stay, he maintains. "Too much love has gone into it; too much need remains," says the priest, looking out over the crowded valley as the sun dips to the horizon. With that he smiles once more, the years dropping away from care-worn features, and the man everyone here calls simply "The Father" stands and heads out for his evening rounds once again.

This story was commissioned for Reader's Digest (UK) © 2010

Photos: Kieran Creagh , the "Father" ©Marc Shoul

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