“It Is But My Duty” The Priesthood of Rev. Fr Cosmas Lee

When my family and I moved from Sandakan to Kota Kinabalu, St Simon Catholic Church in Likas first became our go-to church for practical reasons – mass times that worked, a familiar language, even a garden that invited lingering – before slowly, almost without our noticing, becoming home. Fr Cosmas was the Rector: steady, familiar, unhurried and quietly present.

My children took to him immediately, which I later learned was no small endorsement. They listened to his homilies because they were never watered down. Thoughtful, layered, sometimes cutting but never cruel, they trusted even the young to think, wrestle, and grow.

We grew closer in an unexpected way when we invited Fr Albert Musinguzi from Uganda to Sabah during a month-long sabbatical. Watching the two priests together was quietly delightful. They discovered shared roots in Rome and deeper affinities – a love for the liturgy, a respect for history, and an instinct to remember martyrs, whether in Uganda or North Borneo. Their conversations drifted easily across continents and centuries, as though geography were merely footnotes to faith. Read: https://www.theborneopost.com/2025/07/26/martyrs-of-one-fire-witnesses-in-two-lands/

What drew me most to Fr Cosmas, however, was not only the priest, but the reader and the writer. He loved books, ideas, and history enough to rescue it from forgetfulness. His 2025 book, Ultimate Sacrifice, is the fruit of 15 years of painstaking research into the wartime deaths of Catholic missionaries in North Borneo.

To my surprise, he also took an interest in my own tentative writing, encouraging me to contribute to Catholic Sabah and The Herald. His editorial feedback was characteristically concise. “Joe,” he once said, “your writing is laced with ‘bunga-bunga’.” I chose to hear it as a smile disguised as a sentence – a reminder that clarity matters as much as colour, and that there is always room to grow.

As he stepped into retirement, I promised myself I would write this story – not as publicity, nor merely as biography, but as tribute and gratitude: a witness to priesthood as a lifelong vocation, offered in thanksgiving to God for the gift of Fr Cosmas Lee.

And so, over a cup of kopi-O, we sat down recently to talk – to listen, to reflect, and to fine-tune this story together. There will be time, I hope, for a fuller and unabridged telling of his life when his Golden Jubilee arrives. For now, this is the story.

Priest with a Different Charisma

There are priests whose service is measured in concrete and steel – funds collected, buildings raised, halls extended, chapels refurbished. There are others remembered for programmes – committees formed, calendars filled, initiatives sustained.

And then there are priests whose deepest work resists measurement. They leave behind people – steadied, reconciled, quietly strengthened in faith. Their influence is traced not in structures completed, but in consciences formed and communities that learn how to remain together.

Fr Cosmas Lee embodies all these dimensions of priestly service. Yet it is this last, quieter legacy – the shaping of people – that speaks most enduringly of his vocation.

On a Sunday evening in Likas on 28 December 2025, parishioners gathered for a Farewell and Welcoming Dinner. There were speeches, a cake, choir performances, and a video montage marking nearly five decades of priesthood. Beneath the warmth and applause, however, lay a deeper recognition: a priest defined not by visibility or volume, but by presence, was stepping aside.

When Fr Cosmas rose to speak, he offered no catalogue of achievements. The old instincts of visibility had long fallen away. What remained was presence – and a single line, delivered without flourish or defence: “It is but my duty.”

In an age restless for recognition, it was a quietly disarming sentence. For Fr Cosmas, duty was never a lesser calling, but love without drama, service without self-reference. For those who had prayed with him, questioned him and grown under his care, the words rang true. That, perhaps, was his particular charisma.

Roots: Family Before Parish

Cosmas Lee Khod Min was born on 31 May 1950 in Kota Kinabalu – then still called Jesselton – to Francis Lee Yit Khee and Francesca Wong Yu Moi. He was the eldest of eleven children: nine boys and two girls. It struck me that the Lee household could, quite fittingly, field a full football team and still have substitutes to spare.

In families of that size, hierarchy is not negotiated; it is simply lived. Leadership is not taught through lectures but absorbed through daily life – through chores done without being asked, quarrels mediated before tempers flare, and the quiet expectation that the eldest will hold things together.

In such households, the firstborn learns early that authority is less about being heard and more about carrying weight. One learns to give way before insisting, to protect before explaining, to endure before complaining. Long before Fr Cosmas encountered seminary corridors or theological treatises, he had already been apprenticed into a form of priesthood at home – shaped by responsibility, patience and the unspoken burden of being first.

Fr Cosmas recounted how people would probe his decision to enter the priesthood with the kind of well-meaning stereotypes reserved for the vocation – “Why did you become a priest?” they asked, or more puzzlingly, “You don’t look, sound, or even smell like one.”

Years later, preaching on the Feast of the Holy Family, he would return to this origin with characteristic candour rather than nostalgia. “I’m the eldest of 11 children,” he told his parishioners matter-of-factly. “I spent a lot of time at Sacred Heart, especially with the priests. They were such wonderful fathers.”It was not praise delivered lightly. It was recognition born of observation.

Those priests, he explained, awakened something deeper than admiration. They helped him see fatherhood not merely as biological role or social function, but as vocation – a way of being present, steady and available. “I wanted to be the father not of just one family,” he said, “but of many families. It all started in the family.”

That insight – priesthood as fatherhood – would quietly shape his ministry for decades. Not the performative authority of titles or office, but the patient authority of presence. Not distance, but availability. Not domination, but care.

Leaving Home, Learning the World

At a youthful age of 17, Fr Cosmas left Sabah for St Francis Xavier’s Minor Seminary in Singapore. It was a decisive crossing – from home to elsewhere, from familiarity to formation, from the security of family into a vocation that would ask for lifelong surrender.

It was also an early lesson in obedience: not blind compliance, but the willingness to entrust one’s life to a call still only dimly understood. The years that followed would take him far beyond the shores of Borneo.

In 1971, he travelled to Rome to study philosophy at the Pontifical Urbaniana University, completing his Baccalaureate in 1973. Rome sharpened the intellect – trained him to think clearly, to argue carefully, to respect the long memory of the Church. Yet intellectual clarity alone does not make a priest.

So from Rome’s ancient stones, he moved north to St Joseph’s College, Mill Hill, London, where he trained with the Missionary Institute. There, amid post-war Europe and migrant communities, theology encountered flesh and blood. He completed his BD and MA (Louvain) in 1976, but more importantly, he learned that faith is never merely articulated – it is lived, often amid brokenness.

Rome refined the mind. London exposed the wounds of the world. Missionary formation taught him that belief, if it is to remain credible, must always be incarnated.

On 8 May 1976, Fr Cosmas was ordained a deacon together with his classmates. Later that same year, on 27 December just after the busyness of Christmas had passed, on the Feast of St John the Evangelist, whose name John, he had taken at Confirmation, he was ordained to the priesthood by the late Bishop Simon Fung. He was 26 years old.

From Performance to Presence

Like many young priests, Fr Cosmas began his ministry with energy, competence and a sincere idealism that was fuelled on high octane. He served across cultures, travelled widely, studied deeply, and did what earnest young priests often do – he gave himself fully, visibly and at pace.

Looking back, he often reflected with gratitude rather than pride. “Few priests have had the chance to study in so many places, live in so many countries, travel so much. God has been wonderful.” His formation and spiritual enrichment covered Singapore. Italy, UK, Indonesia, Taiwan, US and more.

One lasting lesson from his seminary years in Europe was this: beneath every skin colour, culture or creed, humanity is remarkably uniform – though, we come in only two real ‘sub-species’- the genuinely good and the not-so-good. Simple to understand, endlessly difficult to live.

Fr Cosmas loves to walk and walk he did, he has covered routes of Camino de Santiago (Way of St. James), a network of ancient pilgrimage routes across Spain and Europe. But he has never been one to romanticise youth. With disarming honesty – the kind that gently disarms others too – he named a temptation few clergy admit aloud. “When we were young priests, we liked to ‘temberang’,” he said, smiling. How many Masses. How many outstations. How full the diary. How visible the priest.

It was not arrogance he was confessing, but immaturity – the subtle desire to perform holiness rather than inhabit it; to equate busyness with fruitfulness; to confuse motion with depth. In those years, success could be counted, schedules filled and exhaustion worn almost like a badge of honour. That unlearning, as it turns out, takes time. Sometimes decades. Sometimes an entire priesthood.

St Simon, Likas: The Gift of a Small Parish

In 2008, Fr Cosmas was appointed Rector of St Simon Catholic Church, Likas. It would become not only the longest chapter of his parish life ie. 17 years, but the final and perhaps most formative season of his active ministry.

By his own admission, it was the smallest parish he had ever served. No sub-parishes. No outstations. One language. One compact, know-your-neighbour community. And something else increasingly rare in modern ministry: space. “For the first time in my life,” he said, “I could focus on the inner self instead of performance.”

Likas did not reward constant motion. What it gave instead was invitation – to stay, to listen, to notice. Silence was no longer an interruption; it became a teacher. Familiar faces were not a limitation; they were a mirror.

Over time, people did not merely attend Mass together – they learned how to belong to one another. “When we are comfortable with each other,” Fr Cosmas observed quietly, “it’s because we have become a community.”

The parish grew, but never noisily. A chapel building took shape. Stained glass caught the light. Quality wood found its place in altar and pews. Nothing extravagant. Nothing hurried. As his successor, Fr Michael Modoit, later noted, what emerged was not scale, but quality – the slow fruit of patience, taste, finesse and care.

At St Simon in Likas, Fr Cosmas learned and taught that presence outlasts performance, and that a small parish, when tended well, can become a spacious place for the soul.

Faithfulness and Honesty

Fr Cosmas has also never pretended that priesthood confers immunity from time. Celebrating his 43rd anniversary, he addressed the subject of ageing from the pulpit with characteristic candour.

“I’m getting old. Pray for me,” he said. “I don’t want to become a grumpy old man – a monster of a pastor!” The congregation laughed – not because it was merely funny, but because it was recognisably human. The humour disarmed, but the honesty stayed. Ageing, in his telling, was not a punchline. It was a shared condition, navigated best with humility and prayer.

That same homily turned, as many of his do, toward the family – the first school of faith. “The family is a domestic church,” he reminded them. “If you have a good family, you have everything.”

It was the father speaking again – pastor, parent and elder brother all at once. He understood that priesthood is not exercised above family life, but in deep sympathy with it; not as an abstraction imposed from a distance, but as accompaniment walked alongside.

From that same instinct flowed his understanding of parish leadership. To be a rector, Fr Cosmas reflected, is to make difficult decisions for the common good – decisions that will never please everyone. Popularity was never the measure. The only choices that mattered were those he was prepared to stand by, suffer for and, when necessary, bear criticism over, precisely because they were made for the good of all.

Through plain-spoken truth, Fr Cosmas modelled something increasingly rare: a priest unafraid to age honestly, to speak clearly, and to trust that faith remains credible only when it is lived and at times, gently laughed into being.

Remembering the Past, So It Is Not Lost

In March 2025, even as retirement approached, Fr Cosmas unveiled a different kind of treasure – not built in stone or glass, but bound in memory. Shaped from childhood by his grandparents’ stories of the Japanese Occupation, history for him was always lived, not archived.

His book, Ultimate Sacrifice, a 274-page account of the forgotten deaths of Catholic missionaries in North Borneo during World War II, was written not for prestige but for conscience. Drawn first into scholarship by pastoral duty while documenting the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart’s centenary in 2003, he was led into the wider, neglected history of the Church in North Borneo. What followed became a vocation within a vocation – 15 years of research, archives across continents, and names rescued from silence.

This was not nostalgia, but moral memory. For Fr Cosmas, faith without history is fragile. Remembrance itself is pastoral care – honouring those who gave everything, and strengthening the living by remembering the dead.

Knowing When to Step Aside

As he approached retirement, Fr Cosmas spoke plainly about his physical limits. He neither dramatised nor denied them. There was no performance here either – just discernment.

Canon Law requires a parish priest to submit his resignation at 75. Many are urged to continue. Some do, out of necessity or affection. Fr Cosmas chose to step aside. Because, he said simply, if he could no longer give his all, it would be unfair to the parish and to himself.

“I am at the end of my journey,” he admitted once. “It’s a little intimidating.” Not fear. Just truth. There is a particular courage in knowing when to leave especially for a man who has spent his life staying. To step aside before bitterness sets in, before strength is mistaken for obligation, is its own form of fidelity

Coming to Golden Jubilee

On 27 December 2025, as the Church marked 49 years of his sacerdotal ordination, the words offered to Fr Cosmas Lee – dedication, faith, service, fruitfulness – felt fitting, if still insufficient.

As we move into 2026, the count becomes 50. And when December comes again, alongside the celebration of Christ’s birth, we shall also give thanks for the Golden Jubilee anniversary of Fr Cosmas Lee’s priesthood – 50 years faithfully offered to God.

Half a century – more than 18,000 days – is a long time to keep saying Yes:

Yes, to service shaped by vocation and humanly doubts,

Yes, to people’s contradictions and confessions,

Yes, to God – even in seasons when God seems distant or silent.
And yet, anyone who knows the seasoned Fr Cosmas suspects he would gently wave such tributes aside – not out of false humility, but because they gesture toward something he has never considered the point.

If there is one phrase that gathers his life into a single line, it is not a slogan polished for anniversaries, but a disposition lived daily: ‘It is but my duty’.

For Fr Cosmas, duty was never cold obligation. It was love, stripped of drama. Faithfulness, practised quietly. Presence, chosen over performance.

If one day he stands before God and hears the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” no one who knows him would be surprised. After all, he has been practising for that moment his entire life. Truly a servant of the servants of God – quietly, sincerely and without fanfare.

And in doing so, he has left behind something far more enduring than buildings or programmes. He has left behind people – steadied, reconciled and quietly strengthened.

To God be all glory and praise. Ad multos annos.