Matters India Reporter
Port Moresby: Pope Francis on May 13 appointed a missionary priest from India as the bishop of Aitape, a diocese in Papua New Guinea, a country in Oceania.
Bishop-elect Siby Mathew Peedikayil is a member of the Heralds of Good News, an India-based congregation.
The 50-year-old priest is the current vicar general of the diocese of Vanimo.
The Aitape is a suffragan diocese of the Archdiocese of Madang. It was established in 1952.
Peedikayil is its sixth bishop. The first four prelates were Franciscans. The Indian’s immediate predecessor was Bishop Otto Separy, a native who was transferred to Bereina diocese in 2019.
The country has five archdioceses and 17 dioceses.
The bishop-elect came to Papua New Guinea in 1998 and served as the rector of St John Vianney Diocesan Minor Seminary of Vanimo diocese for five years. He also taught in St Charles Borromeo Major Seminary under the same diocese from 1999 to 2004.
He was the vocation director of the diocese for five years. He was the national director of Universal Living Rosary Association of Papua New Guinea for four years from 2000. He had earlier served as the diocese’s vicar general for a year in 2003.
Peedikayil also served as the parish priest of St Bruno Parish under the Vanimo diocese.
He also served as the pastoral episcopal vicar of the diocese and a member of the college of the diocesan consulters.
In 2015, he was appointed professor at St Charles Borromeo Major Seminary of the diocese. He is also the member of the diocesan financial committee and spiritual director of the Legion of Mary.
He is currently a member of the congregation’s Sandaun province in Vanimo.
He was born on December 6, 1970, to Mathew Varkey and Annakutty Peedikayil, a Catholic family in Meloram near Peruvanthanam in the Idukki district of Kerala. He was ordained priest on February 1, 1995.
After ordination, he was the spiritual formation in-charge and procurator of St Joseph’s Major Seminary in Khammam, Andhra Pradesh, for a year. He was appointed the rector of the seminary in 2004, a post he held for four years. He then served as the parish priest of Pallegudem parish under the diocese of Khammam.
He served as the general councilor to the congregation’s pontifical commissary for two years from 2006. He also served the congregation as the head of its St Paul province during 2008-2014.
The Heralds of Good News is a missionary society, started in the diocese of Eluru, India, on October 14, 1984. It became an Institute of pontifical right in 1999.
The society aims to promote vocations to priesthood, train seminarians and provide missionaries to the dioceses in India and abroad that experience shortage of priests.
It was founded by Father Jose Kaimlett with the approval of Bishop John Mulagada of Eluru.
Papua New Guinea comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and its offshore islands in Melanesia (a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean north of Australia). It is the world’s third largest island country. It is also one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world. It has 851 known languages. The country is one of the world’s least explored — culturally and geographically.