Father Ninian Doohan, 44, raised a chalice during a Mass celebrated 17,598 feet up from the Khumbu valley at Mount Everest Base Camp, using a hewn stone as his altar.  

The liturgy — Missa pro Pace, the “Mass for Peace” — capped an eight-day ascent from Lukla, in fulfillment of the promise he made to Sherpa trekking guide Gele Bishokarma when he baptized him at St. Patrick’s Church in Edinburgh on Christmas Day 2023, saying he’d “meet him on his own native soil.” The priest added, “I’d like to help the Church there ..., at least to just see our Catholic faith lived out in the highest point on Earth.” 

Father Doohan, a priest of the Diocese of Dunkeld, arrived in Nepal on May 2, hauling medical supplies for St. Ignatius’ Church in Kathmandu, then set off with Bishokarma and a small porter team toward Everest Base Camp — 4 vertical miles higher than Scotland’s Ben Nevis. 

“Heaven has once again come down to Earth at its highest point,” he told fellow climbers at the base-camp Mass. “It’s certainly the first Holy Mass here in the nascent pontificate of Pope Leo XIV.” 

The altar Father Doohan used was hewn by one of the porters who happened to be a Hindu, so this was an evangelical moment for the porter, who received an explanation from one of his fellow countrymen about the significance of the altar.  

In a population of 29,000,000 in Nepal, Catholics make up about 8,000, or .03% of the population. However, this number is growing. 

Father Doohan was also able to bless the roughly 20 other people present at the Mass with relics that he had brought with him to the mountaintop. 

The trek was anything but effortless, Father Doohan admitted. Even the most fit climbers discover their limits on Everest — your “body is constrained by every possible element,” he said. These include thin air, brutal cold, aching muscles and the ever-present threat of altitude sickness. Sometimes it’s just “one foot in front of the other.” But he said there’s “a sense of gratitude, amidst the exhaustion.” 

Father Doohan wore his cassock the whole way — an embodied reminder that the climb was a pilgrimage, not just a sporting feat. 

Prior to his arrival, back home, parishioners launched a “JustGiving” page to raise £750  (about $1,000) for St. Ignatius’ Jesuit mission, which runs mobile clinics and a school for children with special needs. Donations topped £5,000 (about $6,700) before Father Doohan even reached the “rooftop of the world.” 

Father Doohan also jokes that he thanks God, but additionally thanks the dog that gave him puppies, which he was able to sell to his parishioners in order to pay for his flight, since priests in Scotland live a life of what one priest describes as “genteel poverty.” 

While Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first climbers of Mount Everest famously buried a crucifix blessed by Pope Pius XII on the mountain’s summit in 1953, Father Doohan’s celebration of the Eucharist is the highest recorded Mass on the Mount Everest present-day base-camp site.
 

Faith Foundation 

Father Doohan grew up in challenging circumstances — his father’s addiction led to divorce and frequent moves, leaving him largely in the care of his mother and grandparents — but Glasgow’s tight-knit Catholic enclave rooted him in the faith. Baptized at St. Margaret Mary’s, in Rutherglen, he discovered a love for the Eucharist early on, and daily, before-school Mass became routine after the family emigrated to Australia when he was 12, where a vocation eventually blossomed.  

In 2002, while attending Mass with the Blessed Sacrament Fathers in Sydney, the celebrant preached, “Perhaps today there is somebody here present that is called by God to be a priest. They just need to say ‘Yes.’” Doohan — then the only young man in a congregation of “pious old ladies” — knew the invitation “had to be answered,” he explained in a vocational video. 

Father Doohan threw himself into parish life after that “Yes.” His Scalabrinian pastor put him straight to work: counting the weekly collections, visiting migrant families, and taking on whatever apostolic errands needed doing. The Missionaries of Charity then tutored him in street ministry — serving hot meals in the soup kitchen, reading Scripture to the visitors, combined with offering short practical “homilies,” and learning, as he puts it, “how not to be overly pious in situations that require exceptional prudence.” This was combined with reading the works of Pope John Paul II, internalizing his call to bring Christ to the world. 

Father Doohan advises in that account, “Like any relationship, you have to put time and effort into it. And certainly, in the relationship with God, it requires us to respond to the grace he’s already giving. So, he’s making the first step towards us. God is ever faithful even when we are not so.” He adds with a touch of humor, “Too many people might think it’s like ... those old Hollywood movies ... somehow there will be a very distinct instruction given to you at a very specific moment, almost like a lightning bolt. ... I think it often happens that God reveals a call gradually and over time.” 

He first weighed diocesan priesthood against Augustinian life, drawn to the blend of pastoral outreach and monastic prayer. A 12-year stint with the Norbertines followed. He entered their house in Manchester and was vested in the white habit of St. Norbert on the feast of St. Augustine. Ever thorough, he even tested Cistercian and Carthusian waters before returning to the Norbertines in Antwerp. He was ordained to the diaconate as a Norbertine of the Abbey of Tongerlo on Sept. 8, 2014. He was ordained at 34 to the priesthood in St. Andrew’s Cathedral for the Diocese of Dunkeld.  

After his first Mass, as he offered the traditional new-priest blessings, he made a very specific point to ask the people to pray in a particular way for whatever came to mind. “And so I asked them to pray for things like, pray that I may always love the poor and pray that I may be faithful to celibacy and holy chastity, pray that I may be a good confessor, pray that I may devote myself to schools and children — anything that came to my mind,” which the faithful often remind him that they are still praying for. 

Even as a diocesan priest, he still prizes the Norbertine charism of reconciliation, stating, “It’s such a wonderful gift to be able to restore to full friendship those who have fallen away in small or even great things with their God.” 

He now serves St. Patrick’s in the Cowgate part of Edinburgh’s Old Town and two Edinburgh hospitals. He is working and discerning whether to found Scotland’s first Oratory of St. Philip Neri. 

For now, he remains grateful about his historic climb for Mass.