From the Joseph Naik Vaz Institute, California
by Filomena Saraswati Giese, Founder of the Joseph Naik Vaz Institute
January 16, 2022 – 44th Annual Mass in California
The tradition of making an Annual Mass in the San Francisco-Bay Area for the Beatification and Canonization of Saint Joseph (Naik) Vaz, Apostle of Kanara and Sri Lanka, and of Ven. Fr. Agnelo of Pilar, Goa was started in 1978 by two immigrant Goan sisters, myself (Filomena) and my sister, Ligia Britto, living in the Berkeley area.
Ligia and I grew up in Singapore hearing about the extraordinary life of Father Joseph Vaz from my father. This Goan “Servant of God” was born in Benaulim, Goa in 1651, and brought up in Sancoale and Benaulim. He then went to the University of Goa, and later studied at the Dominican and Jesuit Colleges seminaries in Old Goa to become a priest. As a young priest, he was sent to rescue and re-build the Catholic missions in Kanara, the coastal region around Mangalore. The Dutch, who were Calvinist and anti-Catholic, had displaced Portuguese power and control of the area and had worked with Hindu rulers to ban all Portuguese and foreign missionaries, and to destroy Catholic churches, schools and colleges. As a non-European missionary, he was allowed to minister to the abandoned Catholics there. He spent four years reviving the faith and re-building churches and schools in the Mangalore and surrounding region. Thus he’s very much a part of the rich Mangalorean Catholic experience.
But St. Joseph Vaz’ major missionary life was in Ceylon, today known as Sri Lanka. The Dutch had driven out the Catholic Portuguese from Ceylon in 1656 and banned the Catholic faith and missionaries. The young Father Vaz smuggled himself into the island, dressed as a coolie in 1685. My father had even visited Colombo and Kandy to see where Father Vaz had lived, evangelized under Dutch persecution, and died in 1711 in Kandy, the capital of the Buddhist Kingdom of Kandy, without ever returning to his homeland. Generations of Goans, Mangaloreans, and Sri Lankans had been enthusiastic about Father Joseph Vaz and his heroic and extraordinarily holy life. They often lamented why his Cause, first started in 1713, had never been acted on for so many centuries when Causes of European saints appeared to mostly just sail along quickly.
In 1975, my sister, her husband, and children migrated from Singapore and Australia to the San Francisco-Bay Area where I had married and settled. In 1978, her family and she attended Mass at the Carmel Mission which took up a collection for the Catholic University of America. She came back and started talking about why didn’t we still have a single Goan Saint. We re-visited the topic that greatly concerned my father and generations before him and that he had handed down to us.
Unknown to me, she had come to California, armed with the famous biography of then Venerable Father Joseph Vaz written by Sri Lankan Jesuit Fr. S.G. Perera S.J. that my father had given to her. She loaned it to me. It made a deep impression on me to read of the immense sacrifices that Father Joseph Vaz had undergone under Dutch persecution to minister to the abandoned Catholics of Sri Lanka and to make many new converts.
More importantly, I was greatly impressed at his way of evangelizing. It was peaceful and not associated with colonial conquest. He displayed full respect for the cultures and way of life of the people of the land.
I strongly felt that the time had come for us Goans to take a more proactive role in getting the action on his Cause that was apparently stalled in Rome. I decided that a campaign of prayers, Novenas and Masses, and some letter writing to the Vatican might show the Pope and the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of the Saints that there were good lay people who were keenly interested in beatifying an Indian priest who worked under Dutch persecution to re-build the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka.
At that point, we started our Annual Masses, wrote letters, and collected and sent signatures for Petitions to the Pope for his Beatification.
In 1980, I founded the Joseph Naik Vaz Institute to move the Cause of Ven. Fr. Joseph (Naik) Vaz forward. I decided to incorporate his pre-Christian Hindu family of Naik to identify him as Indian, not Portuguese, to signify his Indian roots, and to show that he did not follow the Portuguese custom of taking away the native names of their converts, their way of dress, and their culture and traditions.
One of the important goals of the Institute was to carry on the tradition we started in 1978 of an Annual Mass in honor of our two Goan candidates for the sainthood, Ven. Fr. Joseph Vaz and Ven. Fr. Agnelo.
Another well known Bay area Goan immigrant and co-founder of Goa Sudharop, George Pinto, joined the Joseph Naik Vaz Institute to carry on this work in the year 2000. Mangalorean Jesuit, Rev. Fr. Olvin Veigas, S.J. joined us in 2016 and has been managing our website since then.
Our Annual Masses played a role in the Beatification and Canonization of St. Joseph Vaz
We contacted Fr. Quintus Perera, the Sri Lankan Postulator of the Cause of St. Joseph Vaz in 1980. Part of his work was to document the history of devotion to St. Joseph Vaz in the historical document called the “Positio Historica” that he had to submit as part of the Beatification process. That’s where our Novenas and Masses and articles figured as part of the history of devotion in the “Positio Historica” for the Beatification.
St. Joseph Naik Vaz was beatified by Pope St. John Paul II in 1995. We sponsored the celebration of his Beatification at St. Mary’s Cathedral of San Francisco with Bishop Sevilha from Seattle presiding.
We continued our Masses and Petitions for his Canonization after that. In the year 2000, George and I took a Petition to Rome for his Canonization in the year 2000 for the Grand Jubilee of Christianity.
In 2014, we began a series of monthly Masses requested by Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith of Colombo for Pope Francis to take the final step and canonize St. Joseph Vaz. I flew to Rome in September 2014 with a Petition and many signatures to Pope Francis to canonize St. Joseph Vaz. It was just at the time when it was announced that the Pope had decided to canonize our first Goan-Mangalorean-Sri Lankan Saint. The Postulator for the Canonization, Fr. Thomas Klosterkamp, O.M.I. said that he had been asked to establish international devotion to get the Canonization approved. Once again, our Masses and Petitions with the signatures that we had collected, were accepted as proof of the international devotion to St. Joseph Vaz and made part of the historical record.
Pope Francis canonized St. Joseph Vaz in Colombo in 2015 in a beautiful outdoor ceremony at Galle Face. Bishop Michael Barber, S.J. of Oakland presided at the Mass we organized at Oakland’s Cathedral of Christ the Light in 2015 to celebrate that Canonization.
After the Canonization, we continued our Annual Masses at St. John the Baptist Church in the diocese of Oakland. Last year, we arranged for Virtual Masses in addition to the live Mass because of Covid. Masses said by Cardinal Gracias of Bombay and other Archbishops and Bishops in India were livestreamed.
We co-sponsored a Mass for the victims of the bombings in Sri Lanka in 2019 in San Jose and have also been working with the ethnic pastoral program in this diocese. So this year we decided to celebrate the 44th Annual Mass in the diocese of San Jose, which is in the heart of Silicon Valley where many Indian and Sri Lankans live and work.
Why it’s important to expand the tradition of an Annual commemoration of our “Servants of God”
We have expanded our original Mass Intention to include the Beatification of our new “Servants of God” in the Goa-Mangalore-Sri Lanka geographical region which is historically connected to the life and work of St. Joseph Vaz. One of them is Fr. Raymond Mascarenhas, Founder of the Bethany Sisters in Mangalore, India. The three new “Servants of God” from Sri Lanka are: Fr.Anthonypillai Thomas, Cardinal Thomas Cooray, and stigmatist Sister Helena of Gonawila-Chilaw.
We are expanding our original Mass Intention to include our new native “Servants of God” because we have learned from our 44-year-old experience in the Cause of St. Joseph Vaz that establishing a history of devotion to them and miracles and favors received through their intercession is of the greatest importance for their Beatification and Canonization.
Readers may have heard that what’s trending in Goa among Goan Catholics today is the spread of devotion to St. Padre Pio, the Italian stigmatist, and praying for miracles to get the canonization of other foreign saints. While they may be outstanding saints, our praying to foreign saints for miracles will not get us a native “Servant of God” of ours like Ven. Fr. Agnelo of Pilar, Goa, Fr. Raymond Mascarenhas of Mangalore, or Sister Helena of Sri Lanka beatified and canonized.
The only logical path to getting our own native candidates the honors of the altar is to pray for the intercession of our own native saints to get the miracles required for their Beatification or Canonization!
We should take a lesson from the Keralite Catholic community that has worked assiduously to get their own candidates beatified and canonized by spreading devotion to them and documenting the favors and miracles through their intercession! ”
We have recently invited our Goan, Mangalorean and Sri Lankan organizations to start making similar Annual Masses for St. Joseph Vaz, the only native Asian Apostle and the greatest native missionary that Asia has produced.
So far, one Goan organization here, Californian Goans, offered a Virtual Mass in honor of St. Joseph Vaz on January 16, and another is considering doing the same. We have also heard from a Sri Lankan Catholic in Australia who would like to organize a Virtual Mass to make St. Joseph Vaz better known. We will be helping and collaborating with these organizations. We also hope that they’ll consider expanding our Mass Intention to include our newer “Servants of God.”
We hope that many Goan-Mangalorean-Sri Lankan Catholics and their organizations will email us and join our campaign to share our unique spiritual legacy and history with others!
Filomena Saraswati Giese
Joseph Naik Vaz Institute. www.josephnaikvaz.org
Email: [email protected]