Konknni speaking Malankara Orthodox Christians

 In the following video New Star Brass Band, Brahmavar, Udupi district of Karnataka presents “Axirvad Zôddlølo’ in honour of St. Roche Lopez Noronha (1847-1936).  The trumpet solo is by Winston Suares, the troupe leader. Who is this St. Roche L. Noronha? To know him you must read the following brief historical note:

Konknnis (Konknni speakers) migrated from Goa to coastal Karnataka and Kerala from 13th century onwards for various reasons. Catholic Konknnis migrated from Goa to Coastal Karnataka 1570 onwards. They were under the Goa Archdiocese and served by the clergy of Goa. Goa archdiocese was under the jurisdiction of Padroado, namely, the Portuguese King or queen appointed the bishop and supported the maintenance of the clergy. 

Brahmavar is a small town located in the Udupi district in the State of Karnataka in India. The town is 13 kilometres away from Udupi. In the year 1678, a Roman Catholic Church dedicated to Our Lady of Milagres was established in Kalyanpur by the Padroado Missionaries who were under the authority of the Portuguese king or queen. The Church was destroyed by Tippu Sultan in 1784, but was reconstructed in 1806.

In 19th century a few prominent Catholics residing in Mangaluru city wrote to Propaganda Fide of Vatican and complained that diocesan priests from Goa have neglected and not rendering their service to local Catholics who are inhabitants in Coastal Karnataka. Rome intervened and segregated the Coastal Karnataka areas from the jurisdiction of Padroado and brought them under the Propaganda Fide and began to appoint bishops and priests. Local Catholics who were used to the clergy from Goa, wanted to be under the Padroado jurisdiction. But finally, most of the parishes accepted the jurisdiction of Propaganda Fide. 

The power struggle between Portuguese missionaries and Propaganda Communities had its effects on Brahmavar. The majority of the people supported the Portuguese Missionaries and the Padroado Community. They strongly opposed the Propaganda Fide and Pope. Those who supported the Propaganda Fide built Mount Rosary (1856) Church, which is only one kilometre away from the Milagres Church of Kalyanpur.

In 1886 a Concordat was signed between the Papacy and the Portuguese King by which the Milagres Church of Kalyanpur became part of the Propaganda Fide. Brahmavar Christians petitioned both the Pope and the Portuguese King to reconsider the decision, but Rome did not reply favourably. A number of Catholic families who were in favour of Padroado jurisdiction felt that the response from Rome was not at all satisfactory and it was an insult to them. As a result, many families of the Milagres Church, under the leadership of Fr Roche Lopes Noronha, protested against the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Later, Fr. Roche too was disowned by the Archdiocese of Goa. 

Brahmavar Orthodox Church is a split faction from the Catholic Church formed under the leadership of Fr Antonio Francisco Xavier Alvares (1836-1923). Fr. Antonio Alvarez who was a Roman Catholic priest of Goa at the time, opposed the Vatican policies and interference of the Government in Church administration. His pro-Independence periodicals which were also critical of the Roman Catholic Church were banned. He was excommunicated. He left the Church with some hundreds of Konknni speaking Catholic families from Goa, who were settled in the vicinity of Brahmavar, and joined the Malankara Orthodox Church.  He understood the situation in Brahmavar and organised the discontented believers. Fr. Antonio Alvares was ordained as the first Orthodox Metropolitan of Goa, Ceylon and Greater India in 1889 A. D. by Paulose Mar Athanasius and Geevargheese Mar Gregorios of Parumala at the Orthodox theological seminary, Kottayam in the state of Kerala.

A new Church was built for the split group in Brahmavar. Fr Noronha was influenced by Fr Alvarez and he was very well attracted towards the teachings of the Orthodox Church. Fr. Noronha was given the leadership of the Brahmavar Orthodox Church, which had a membership of 4,000 families. In the year 1889 on Easter Day Fr. Noronha celebrated the Holy Mass in the newly built Orthodox Church. The split group of Brahmavar Konknni community has come into existence since then as a part of the Indian Orthodox Church. Presently, they are under the Brahmavar diocese. During my boyhood they were labelled as schismatics by the local Roman Catholics.

The little known Brahmavar Orthodox Community has a very special status in the history of the Malankara Orthodox Church. The Indian Church which for centuries had been confined within the boundaries of Kerala obtained a national outreach when the former Roman Catholic Priest, Antonio Alvarez from Goa and his community united with the Mother Orthodox Church and he received episcopal consecration as Metropolitan of the Diocese of Ceylon, Goa and India (Malabar excluded).

Fr. Alvarez was the first person to reunite with the Orthodox Church from the Roman Catholic Latin Rite in India. He devoted most of life serving leprosy patients and poor sections of society but he also fought a brave war to protect the Orthodox faith irrespective of the opposition inflicted on him and his followers by the Roman Catholic Church. Sadly, he died in reduced circumstances and was buried in Sant Inez, Panaji, cemetery, without receiving either an Orthodox Christian funeral or the traditional burial accorded to an Orthodox prelate. Today he is regarded as the hero of the Reunion Movement in India. Later his relics were recovered and moved to St Mary’s Orthodox Church at Ribandar, Panaji in 1979 under the direction of His Holiness Mar Thoma Matthews I, Catholicos of the East.

Fr. Noronha was born in Goa in 1850. After completing basic education, he joined the Rachol Seminary in Goa, having been awarded a scholarship. After completing his seminary education, he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest on 12 March 1881 by Bishop Thomas De Almeda. He served as the assistant vicar of Salvador do Mundo Church. Later Fr. Noronha became the Vicar of Ribandar Church and finally reached Brahmavar, where he was united with the Orthodox Church.

Fr. Noronha was a multi-functional personality. He was a great educator, a spiritual father, writer, and social reformer. Joining the Orthodox Church gave Padre Noronha great trouble. He was always threatened by the Roman Catholic Church but he was very much loved by the Brahmavar residents. He was very particular and strict about the Orthodox faith, especially the prayers and sacraments. He encouraged many people to participate in prayers through house visits. On many occasions the Catholic Church tried to entice Brahmavar Orthodox Christians to join the Roman Catholic Church by offering them rosaries, pictures of saints and other valuable gifts, but Fr. Noronha successfully blocked all attempts and confirmed his flock in the Orthodox faith.

He showed great vision in establishing educational institutions, and founded a school which was the first basic educational institution in Brahmavar. The school attracted many students irrespective of caste, creed or sex. Fr. Noronha provided great relief for many people who suffered from different kinds of diseases and treated many people, providing them with food and shelter. Hundreds found relief under his care.

Towards the end of his life, he suffered from diabetes. The Roman Catholic community tried to force him to come back to the Roman Church. Two years before his death it is recorded that a cross appeared on his back and on 23 July 1936 Fr. Roche Noronha died. He was buried at St Mary’s Orthodox Cathedral in Brahmavar. It is reported that a large number of people, especially non-Christians, have received blessings by his intercession after his death and even today many still seek favours at his tomb.  

Fr. Alvares and Fr. Noronha who were both excommunicated by the Catholic Church in Goa, now have become the heroes and saints of the Malankara Orthodox Church and their feasts are celebrated!! Those who are considered as villains in one community, are recognised as heroes in their new community. History has many such examples. Saul who was an ardent Jew who hated and persecuted the Christians of the first century has become St. Paul and the great saint of the  Christians.

Brahmavar Orthodox Christians have a number of peculiar characteristics with regard to their culture, tradition, life style and prayer habits. Along with the orthodox feasts (Perunnal), they also celebrate the memorial feast of Metropolitan Julius Alvarez (September 23) and Fr Noronha (July 23). All Orthodox prayers have been translated into Konknni and Kannada languages. There are two feasts which are celebrated as part of the Latin tradition, Memorial service of All Saints (1st November) and memorial service of All Souls (2nd November). The person who sponsors a major feast is known by the name ‘Sirginth’. He wears special dress and carries an artistic metallic stick during the procession.

Due to marriage relationships many Malankara Orthodox Church members have returned to the Roman Catholic church. Today there are around 850 Orthodox Christian families surviving in Brahmavar diocese of the Malankara Orthodox church. Their religious services are conducted in Konknni and Kannada. They have married clergy. But they have to marry before their diaconate. However, the bishop is chosen from the celibate priests only. Due to historical and ego problems the Konknni Catholics of Brahmavar area got divided into Roman Catholics and Malankara Orthodox Christians!!! 

Pratap Naik, SJ

09 July 2021

St. Peter Faber

Saint Peter Faber

Death: 08/01/1546

Nationality (place of birth): France

St. Peter Faber, SJ, a founder of the Society of Jesus, died  in 1546. Faber was a theologian and a gifted preacher who worked tirelessly for the reform of the church in Germany and Portugal. An active participant in the controversies of the Reformation, he counseled Catholics to maintain good relationships with Protestants: If we want to be of help to them we must be careful to regard them with love, to love them in deed and in truth, and to banish from our own souls any thought that might lesson our love and esteem for them. We have to win their good will so that they will love us and readily confide in us. The man who can speak with [Protestants] on a holy life, on virtue and prayer, will do far more good for them than those who, in the name of authority, set out to confound them by sheer weight of theological argument. —In The Quiet Companion , Mary Purcell

 Pray St. Peter Faber’s prayer for detachment: Cast from me every evil that stands in the way of my seeing you, hearing, tasting, savoring, and touching you; fearing and being mindful of you; knowing, trusting, loving, and possessing you; being conscious of your presence and, as far as may be, enjoying you. This is what I ask for myself and earnestly desire from you. Amen.

The text is copied from "An Ignatian book of days" written by Jim Manney

Following is the letter of Fr General Adolfo Nicolas written in 2013

With profound pleasure I am writing to the whole Society on the occasion of Pope Francis’ proclamation that Peter Faber, “the silent companion” of the first generation of Jesuits, is a saint. On day coinciding with his birthday, our Holy Father wanted to present to the universal Church a gift that is very significant and precious to him.

The canonization of Peter Faber happens to coincide with another great event of our time – a Jesuit Kairos: the Bicentenary of the Restoration of the Society (1814). Without any doubt our beloved Savoyard companion can provide us incentive and drive for a dynamic restoration of our lives as Jesuits, personally as well as corporately, lives which are never complete for we are always on pilgrimage. That transparent, spontaneous, and childlike faith that Faber showed can help us persevere as “companions in His Company,” convinced in an Ignatian way that “it is the Lord who does all things in us, and for whom all things operate, and in whom they all exist” (Memorial, 245).

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits. Peter Faber chose this beginning verse of Psalm 102 to humbly open the door of his heart in his Memorial. It sums up in a few profound words the essential stance of Faber before life and before God: blessing, memory, and gratitude.

Although the human and religious stature as well as the great deeds of some of his Jesuit companions (Ignatius, Xavier, Laínez, Borgia, or Canisius) may have led us to overlook or even ignore the person and accomplishments of Faber, today we recognize in his life and legacy a way of proceeding that is genuinely Ignatian and profoundly rooted in the person of our Lord; Faber was truly a companion of Jesus.

On the first day of August 1546 Faber passed away in Rome, barely forty years of age. He was the second of the First Companions of Paris to die, following Jean Codure who had died in August 1541. Faber had arrived in the Eternal City from Coimbra a few days before, arriving exhausted by the long and hard journey. Although his friends Laínez, Salmerón, and Le Jay were waiting for him in Trent with hopes of seeing him, word began to spread in Europe: “Master Faber is now found at a better Council, because he passed away from this life on the first of August” (Monumenta Lainii I, 52).

What does “Master Faber” continue to teach us almost 470 years after his death in that manner so much his own, a pedagogy in a soft voice? And what can we personally learn if “we open our heart and let Christ occupy its center”? (Memorial, 68)

Providentially, at the end of September 1529 three university students came to live together on the third floor of the Collège Sainte-Barbe as students of the Arts: Peter Faber, Francis Xavier, and Ignatius of Loyola. After five years of course work and shared experiences, at Montmartre on the 15th day of August 1534, Faber presided at a Eucharist at which the first seven “friends in the Lord” fixed their eyes and hearts on the same desire: Jerusalem. It was the beginning of an unanticipated project, the Society of Jesus, which continues with vitality and surprises today.

When Ignatius left for Azpeitia, his birthplace, in March of 1535, “Master Faber” remained “as our elder brother” (Lainez to Polanco, FN I, 104), overseeing the welfare and growth of the group. What type of leadership did Peter Faber exercise at that time? Thanks to his attention and friendship, the “least Society” did not cease to grow in number and virtue. By means of conversation and the Spiritual Exercises he first incorporated Claude le Jay, Jean Codure, and Paschase Broët in the group. In later years Francis Borgia and Peter Canisius joined the Society. The fire that was already burning in his heart began to light other fires. In Faber we recognize the brother who watched over and cared for the “union of souls,” the conservation and the growth of the body, the construction of the building that would be his beloved “company of Jesus,” for which he constantly desired “a birth in good desires of holiness and justice” (Memorial, 196).

In 1577, near the end of his life, Simon Rodriguez remembered Peter Faber who had died thirty one years earlier: “he had the most charming gentleness and grace that I ever saw in my life for dealing and conversing with people…. With his modesty and charm he won for God the hearts of those he dealt with.” Faber is for us a Master of the rhetoric of the divine, someone who “in whatever subject and without disturbing anyone found material for thinking and talking about God” (Monumenta Broetii, 453). At the beginning of 1534, he made the Spiritual Exercises with Ignatius in the neighborhood of Saint Jacques in Paris. From that time on, as no one else, Faber penetrated the inner understanding of this method of conversation between the Creator and the creature, which he so delicately and accurately shared with others. Ignatius said of him that “he had the first place in giving the Exercises” (Luis G. de Câmera, Memorial, FN I, 658). In Faber we recognize a man of the Ignatian charism, molded by the method of the Exercises, disposed to look for and find God in all things, and always creative when the opportunity arose for “providing a method and order” for prayer to quite different people in the most diverse situations.

His conversation bore fruit because it sprang from an inner life inhabited by the presence of God. Getting inside Faber we discover the mystic in history and in the world, rooted in time but living from the gift that always and in all things “descends from above” (Spiritual Exercises, 237). For Faber any circumstance, place, or moment was an occasion for an encounter with God. Master Faber was, above all but without claiming to be so, a Master of prayer. He understood that his friendship with Jesus was based on the mysteries of the Life of Christ, “lessons of the Spirit” for his vocation and his Christification, which he contemplated piously and from which he knew how “to reflect on so as to obtain some benefit.” Faber prayed in constant colloquies with Jesus and Mary, with the angels and the saints, with the martyrs and his “private saints,” among whom he counted his great tutor and master of his youth, Peter Veillardo, whom he considered a saint. He prayed about the elements of nature or the passing of seasons, about obstacles, about infirmity. He prayed for the Church, for the Pope, the Society, for heretics and persecutors. He prayed with his body and his senses. He was a believer in continual prayer, in a life infused by Mystery; he was convinced that God had made him a temple, and he remained in constant dialogue with Him.

Perhaps it is in this spirit, rooted and grounded in Christ, that his apostolic activity, so varied and fruitful, makes sense: teaching catechism to children, preaching in court, giving colloquies in Germany, founding colleges in Spain (Alcalá, Valladolid) and Germany, teaching lessons of theology in Rome. Faber was given the experience and desire for being what another companions would later call a “contemplative in action.”

Among his other activities, Faber stood out as a Master of Reconciliation. Ignatius knew Faber’s extraordinary gifts for conversation and did not hesitate to send him to the very center of a Europe in conflict. His was one of the most significant examples of that ministry to which the first Jesuits gave themselves so generously: “reconciling the estranged” (Formula of the Institute, 1550, 1). Similar to the spirit of our last General Congregation, Faber worked hard to maintain unity and to establish peace in a Europe that was theologically convulsed and challenged by religious questions and political-ecclesial conflicts: Worms (1540) and Ratisbon (1541) were some of the places where Faber sought understanding and harmony, which he saw with sorrow becoming ever more distant. And Faber united piety and erudition so naturally – a wise and discreet spiritual manner of expressing a deep theological foundation– that he was able to make the appropriate gesture or “say the right word.” He carried deep within himself one of the guiding principles of the Exercises: “to try hard to save the proposition of one’s neighbor” (Spiritual Exercises, 22): “whoever would like to help the heretics of this time should have much charity towards them and love them truly,” communicating “with them familiarly” (Monumenta Fabri, 399-402). At the Society’s origin, Faber’s manner expressed our contemporary vocation of being present at the frontiers and being bridges of reconciliation.

Following the footsteps and example of his beloved companion in Paris, Faber was also a Pilgrim who embodied the mysticism of travel so proper to the first Jesuits. “It seems that Faber was born to never remain still in any one place,” wrote the Secretary of the Society (Monumenta Ignatiana, Epistolae I, 362). He traveled thousands of miles throughout the Europe of his time, a sign of his abnegation, availability, and obedience. He was frequently found engaged in “so many travels and exiles” (Monumenta Fabri, 419-420) that as a “perpetual stranger… I will be a pilgrim wherever the will of God leads me as long as I live” (Monumenta Fabri, 255), a will to which Faber spontaneously bound himself with his sense of obedience, making himself an echo of those words of the Centurion to Jesus: “come and he comes, go and he goes” (Mt 8:9). “For Him alone – for Jesus – have I changed houses many times […] not infrequently have I gone to stay in places contaminated and dangerous for my body,” there was cold, fatigue, intemperate weather, and poverty, but Faber always knew how to maintain his contemplative outlook: “may he be blessed forever who protected me and all those who were in the same situation I was” (Memorial, 286).

Today, with serene happiness and “internal joy,” we have reason to continue to see in Peter Faber our “elder brother.” His manner of being present is a blessing for us; he is a reminder to be humble and to constantly return to our “least Society;” staying close to him, we distance ourselves from temptations to empty triumphalism or the powerful forces of arrogance. Faber is a call to a life of “having before our eyes first of all God our Lord,” looking always to do His will in this His Institute (cf. Formula of the Institute, 1). Faber is a call to the care and attention to the Body of the Society, a call to dialogue and unconditional openness, of obedient availability and confident surrender. With Faber nearby, judgment is enlightened; “You have given all to me – to You, Lord, I return it.”

On the occasion of the canonization of this humble “friend in the Lord,” we once again recognize, with “true happiness” (Spiritual Exercises, 329) and grateful wonder, the nearness of God to his Society of Jesus. Today his Infinite Goodness reaches and blesses us with the memory and presence of Peter Faber among us.

The current season of Advent is a call to make level the ways of the Lord and prepare his coming. May the Lord Himself give us light to bring to action the best we are for the generous service of the Church.

Sincerely yours,

Adolfo Nicolás, S.I. Superior General

Rome, 17 December 2013