By Molly Fernandes
Navelim, Nov 25, 2021: The Holy Family of Nazareth Sisters, a Goa-based religious congregation, has celebrated the 128th birth anniversary of its founder, Father Faustino De Souza.
“Great were the virtues that adorned the life of our dear founder,” said Sister Liberata Fernandes, the headmistress of Perpetual Succour Convent High School at Navelim, some 40 km southeast of Panaji, the state capital, where the November 24 celebrations were held.
Sister Fernandes garlanded Father D’Souza’s bust in the campus after a prayer service where the founders various virtues were recalled. The headmistress urged the students to imbibe the founder’s virtues to walk the path of holiness.
The students sang about the life journey of the founder.
The school organized several programs to help students learn about the founder. The kindergarten students elaborated the founder’s teachings while theose in the primary section filled their value education books with his great sayings. The secondary students answered an online quiz based on the founder’s life and the work done by the congregation.
On November 23, the school organized an inter-class calendar making competition that portrayed the founder’s sayings in an innovative manner.
Father Gabriel Coutinho, parish priest of Our Lady of Rosary Church blessed and inaugurated the School Electronics Lab and Apparel Made-ups and Home Furnishing Lab.
The headmistress said the school has applied for Information and Communication Technology Labs for Schools.
She described the project as “very good” taken up in the interest of the students as ICT would be helpful when they graduate from the school.
Father D’Souza was born November 24, 1893, as the sixth among seven children of Romualdo Salvador das Chagas de Souza and Preciosa Cristalina Ludovina de Souza, at Anjuna, northern Goa.
After philosophy and theology studies at the Patriarchal Seminary of Rachol, he was ordained a priest in 1919 at the Pilar Monastery.
He was instrumental in bringing back Catholic religious congregations to Goa, almost a century after the Portugal colonial rulers banned them from all their colonies.
Father D’Souza wanted the congregations back to care for orphans and the destitute, the aged and socially marginalized. After the regime change in Portugal a century later, the Church began to experience freedom. Perceiving the winds of change, Father D’Souza mobilized for the re-establishment of religious congregations in Goa.
Father D’Souza sent some young women who wanted to become nuns to Mangalore in 1933 for religious formation. They took their first vows on June 16, 1935, at Sancole, some 25 km south of Panaji. Thus began the the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth” as pious union. It was canonically ereced as religious congregation in 1962,
Father D’Souza died March 26, 1975.
Is this some new trend, celebrating the birth anniversary of a founder? It’s a known fact that traditionally, only the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ and his Precursor, John the Baptizer is formally [i.e., Liturgically] celebrated by the Catholic Church. As for the rest it is their death that is commemorated (in certain instances even CELEBRATED) as their rebirth in Heaven and that is why the feast of such individuals who are beatified or canonized is generally marked by an observance on or around the date of demise.
Just how long will it be before we as believers understand certain basics of the Faith?