by Filomena Saraswati Giese (originally published in The Global Goan January 2026 [47-48])

Extinction of the First Cause for Beatification and Canonization of
St. Joseph Vaz
St. Joseph Vaz, Apostle of Sri Lanka and Kanara (India), died in 1711 after an arduous missionary life of twenty-seven years under persecution in Kanara and Sri Lanka. He had a reputation as a living Saint and many miraculous events and signs were attributed through his intercession. A ‘Cause for Canonization’ was started for him in 1713 by the Jesuit Bishop of Cochin. However, it fell victim to the effects of persecution and general neglect of the causes of native saints in Rome. It eventually suffered extinction when the Portuguese Masonic Government suppressed all Catholic religious orders in 1835.
Funds and testimony of living witnesses were lost. The Cause had to be abandoned in the mid-nineteenth century and became extinct.

Pope Leo XIII sends an Apostolic Delegate to India to found a General Papal Seminary in India.

It should be noted that the King of Portugal had founded the College of St. Paul in Goa in the early sixteenth century to train European priests which he offered to the Jesuits. It took in some native Indian seminarians. The general opinion of the European missionaries was that native Indians were not suitable for the priesthood and even to be made pastors in charge of parishes or missions. Native priests educated at the College of St. Paul like Father Joseph Vaz, were few in number and had only one option which was to become assistants to European pastors of parishes.

It was Pope Leo who sought to start a Papal Seminary in India for a Native Clergy. Before he was elected Pope in 1878, Leo XIlI gained experience with founding seminaries besides educating and forming the clergy while he was Papal Nuncio in Belgium. When he was elected Pope in 1893, he immediately turned his attention to forming a Native Clergy on the vast Indian subcontinent. He conceived the idea of one National General Seminary under the Pope and the Propaganda Fide for the whole of India.

He issued the Papal Encyclical Ad Extremas: The Call for an Indigenous Indian Clergy in 1893.

He immediately sent Polish Mons. Ladislas-Michel Zalesky in 1893 as Apostolic Delegate to India with the mission to establish a General Papal Seminary for the Indian subcontinent which we now call South Asia.

What Pope Leo XXIII’s Apostolic Legate did to rescue the extinct Cause of Ven. Fr. Joseph Vaz…
→ Mons. Zalesky looked for a site on the Indian mainland, but he also visited the large island of Ceylon which is called Sri Lanka. He ended up establishing the Papal Seminary at Ampitiya, Kandy, Sri Lanka, which was transferred to Pune in 1855.

• While there, he encountered pictures of “the Apostle of Sri Lanka and Kanara (India)” in every Ceylonese home and a tradition of Father Joseph Vaz having re-founded the persecuted Church of Sri Lanka.
• He found out that Father Joseph Vaz had offered to go to Sri Lanka after the Calvinist Dutch had ousted the Catholic Portuguese from their Sri Lankan territories and had started to effectively suppress the Catholic religion from that island in 1656.
• Mons. Zalesky became a devotee of Father Joseph Vaz and an admirer of his twenty-seven years of underground mission work under persecution, first in Kanara and then in Sri Lanka, to rescue and re-build those two churches. He published a Life of Father Joseph Vaz in 1896 and spread it in Europe.
  → Mons. Zalesky also found out that a Cause for Canonization started in 1713 for Father Joseph Vaz by the Jesuit Bishop of Cochin two years after his death had fallen victim to the effects of persecution and general neglect of the causes of native saints in Rome.
  → It was Mons. Zalesky who proposed that a new Cause be started for Ven. Father Vaz in 1911, the two hundredth death anniversary of Fr. Vaz. And he did not hold up colonial European missionaries who had little faith in the suitability of Indians as clergy, missionaries or members of religious orders, as a model.
  Rather, he held up the native Indian-Sri Lankan Father Joseph Naik Vaz as their model of what a priest and missionary should be.
  Thus, we owe the present-day Canonization of Indian-Sri Lankan, hence South Asian Saint Joseph Vaz to Mons. Zalesky, the Apostolic Delegate sent by Pope Leo XIII that is the Pope whose name and inspiration our present Pope Leo XIV has taken to guide his Papacy.