By A.J. Philip

New Delhi, June 26, 2020: It was in Patna in the eighties that I first met Jose Kavi. He was at that time with the United News of India (UNI). He had come to the city — earlier called Pataliputra, the capital of the Magadh Empire, larger than British India — as a guest of my friend and Jesuit, the late Fr Jose Kananaikal. It was the first time I spent time with two Joses.

After I returned to Delhi for good in 1990, I met Jose again. He was at that time head of the New Delhi office of the Hong Kong-based UCA News.

All that I knew about computer those days was that it was a glorified typewriter which could also do some calculations but to make it functional one should know the language called DOS. By then, Jose was a master of computing.

UCAN used to publish a fortnightly printed bulletin that had features and opinion pieces from journalists from places as far apart as Kathmandu, Singapore, Colombo and Dhaka. Jose asked me to write a commentary, as it was called, for UCAN. I seldom say no to such assignments.

I wrote it and found to my pleasant surprise that the published piece had been shorn of all its flesh. Fortunately, my photograph that appeared had some flesh in it, not just the 206 bones that I am composed of. I recognized Jose as a master sub for whom “despite” is the word, not “in spite of” which has three words.

I did not know that the assignment Jose gave me was actually my initiation into the world of UCAN. Thus began my little association with the news-agency whose reports from the whole of Asia appeared in Christian, nay Catholic, journals all over the world.

Hong Kong had by then passed into the hands of China. It had become some sort of a news hub. Nowadays, anyone with a good smart phone can start a television company. Those days, Hong Kong was from where most Indian private TV channels uploaded on satellites their video clips. I visited the huge uplinking facility Star TV had established in the city.

One day, when Jose invited me to a dinner at his house across the Yamuna on the occasion of the visit of the founder-cum-chief editor of UCAN Maryknoll Father Robert Astorino, I accepted it with alacrity. What if Jose changed his mind!

When I reached his house that evening, I found it swarming with people. They were mostly Jose’s friends, UCAN staff and their spouses. It was a terrace party. Liquor was flowing like the Yamuna when she is in spate. Deep-fried fish, especially pomfret with its chewable bones, and an assortment of snacks, mostly non-veg, were being served as frequently as possible.

While we were all devouring the delicacies, the Maryknoll father sat “alone in the crowd” like Aravindan’s cartoon strip in the Mathrubhumi. In the words of Pope Francis, Maryknoll fathers and sisters emulate “a church that is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets.” It’s a century-old American missionary group.

Father Astorino chose to be a missionary in China like the parents of writer Pearl S. Buck. Nobody knows when exactly he found that his vocation was journalism, not theology. Small wonder that he preferred to be in Hong Kong, rather than in mainland China.

As most of Jose’s guests gulped hard liquor like good old Malayalis who did not know when to stop once they started drinking, Father Astorino was patience personified. He kept holding his glass of juice with an occasional sip and politely declined the snacks every time it was offered to him.

He had a vision and that vision was to develop UCAN into a frontline global news agency which reported in depth all that happened in the Church in Asia, which was growing as fast as it was declining in Europe.

Father Astorino knew that communication was as vital to missionary enterprises as free flow of oxygen is to a Covid patient, to use a modern phrase. Saint Teresa of Kolkata remained just a nun doing good work, when writer and humorist Thomas Malcom Muggeridge brought her into the public consciousness.

He had no airs about him as he sought my views on how best UCAN’s reach could be increased. He was a frugal eater like all good foreigners who knew that stomach ailments were just a sip of Delhi water away.

I met him the second time also under similar circumstances at Jose’s house. This time I did not have to be introduced to him, as he knew my writing also. Father Astorino was present when Jose and his colleagues organized a function to celebrate UCAN’s 10th anniversary at the India International Centre at Lodhi Eastate.

Years later, I contacted Father Astorino when I started a web-based journal for permission to publish photographs and stories of Indian interest from UCAN. He gladly gave me the permission with the proviso that I should pay him when I became a newspaper magnate.

That never happened. I continued to check UCAN on the Internet. More often than not, it carried reports about a nun’s body being found in a well or a priest being arrested for misappropriation of funds. Of course, nobody could accuse UCAN of suppressing such uncomfortable news.

Sometimes, I even felt that UCAN relished such reports. I also wished that UCAN had carried investigative reports that revealed the truth of the charge that an old Catholic nun in Jharkhand with an impeccable record of service to humanity sold a baby to a wealthy family in Kolkata, instead of spreading such accusations.

Technology has also made outfits like UCAN a misfit when, as I mentioned, a person with just a mobile phone can pontificate to the world on what Prime Minister Narendra Modi should or should not have done in the context of the Chinese incursions.

It was Jose who WhatsApped me in the morning about the death of Father Astorino at a hospital near the mission society’s headquarters in New York state in the US. He was 77. I never saw him in his cassock. I saw him only as a down-to-earth journalist.

Fr Astorino was like another Jose, Father Jose Luis Carreno, an outstanding missionary, writer and scholar. As an aside, in 2003, I received the Indian Catholic Press Association Award, instituted in memory of this Jose whose work on the shroud of Turin encouraged me to buy a painting that today adorns the wall in my flat.

In the death of Father Robert Astorino, the world of journalism has lost a visionary for whom the Word was God.

(ajphilip@gmail.com