By Anand Mathew
Varanasi, April 3, 2022: The Indian Missionary Society has a new pan Indian service team for the coming six years headed by Father Prasanna Raj.
They were elected at a week-long general chapter that ended March 1 at Vishwa Jyoti Gurukul, Christnagar, Varanasi, the mother house of the society.
The chapter elected Father Alok Nag as assistant general and Fathers Yesudeep Sandhu, Shailendra Rodrigues and Vimal Arockyam as councilors.
Father Raj has served as the congregation’s administrator general since September 2021 after the resignation of Father Mahendra Paul, the superior general. Father Raj has been a charismatic preacher and superior of the congregation’s Retreat Centre at Alapuzha in Kerala until three years ago.
Earlier, he served as the congregation’s Delhi provincial. He is qualified to teach English phonetics and language and had taught in various institutes. He is also an accomplished Bharatnatyam dancer and a poet. While rendering pastoral services in USA, he won gold medals and certificates for being the best poet of America. He is a trained psychological counselor. He hails from Edackalathur in Kerala’s Thrissur district is also trained in psychological counseling.
Father Nag has been a professor of Philosophy in six major seminaries in northern India. He also served as the superior of the congregation’s Ranchi region. He has a doctorate in Philosophy from Urbania University, Rome. He is a native of Tainser in Simdega diocese, Jharkhand.
The new chairman for the commission for Missions is Father Yesudeep Sandhu, a missionary serving in Udhampur in Jammu and Kashmir. He did his Masters in Theology from Vidyajyoti College in Delhi. He is a well-known preacher and a writer of six spiritual books in Hindi language. He is a native of Dhariwal in Gurudaspur district in Punjab.
Father Rodrigues is elected to animate the formation programs of the congregation, which is renowned for its missionary formation for pioneering evangelization grounded in the multireligious and multicultural Indian context. He has a doctorate in Heidegger’s philosophy from Dharmaram Institute in Bangalore.
For the past few years, Father Rodrigues has been teaching Existential Philosophy in St. Pius Seminary, Goregaon, Mumbai. He is also a visiting professor in many seminaries all over India. He has written six books related to characters in the Holy Bible. Hailing from Vasai in Maharashtra, he contributes his reflections for the Bible Dairy in English and Marathi published by St. Paul’s Publications.
The congregation’s Finance Commission will be animated by Father Arockyam, a former Varanasi provincial. After obtaining an M Phil in Community Health, he worked in Catholic Health Association of India, as its assistant director. In the recent years, he has been serving as a spiritual director to the seminarians in St. Albert’s College, Ranchi. A native of Salem in Tamil Nadu, Father Arockyam has served the missions in Manipur, Varanasi, Fatehpur, Kanyakumari and Trichy.
The congregation’s 13th general chapter started with retreat guided by Bishop Francis Kalist of Meerut. The chapter addressed the theme “Demands of Religious Life in our Context.”
The delegates made some amendments on the congregation’s governance with a view to help the leadership to become servants and stewards. It resolved to deepen the congregation’s community life and to become pro-active in their various ministries to make them effective in the multireligious and multicultural context where they work as pioneer evangelists.
The chapter also resolved to renew and re-live the society’s charism of pioneering evangelization, in these difficult times of the nation and to live their consecrated life radically by disciplining themselves with a greater commitment. The chapter directed the new service team to invest the society’s human and material resources for a meaningful and fruitful missionary service in cooperation with all like-minded people and organizations in building up a harmonious society and for the reign of God.
Renowned theologian Fransalian Father Jacob Parapally and Father Dona Rajashekhar Velankanni, a canon law expert, facilitated the capitulars in the amendment of the constitution and other deliberations.
The Indian Missionary Society founded in 1941 in Varanasi, has two provinces — Varanasi and Delhi — and a region centered in Ranchi. It has 280 members, including 54 members in formation.
Its 220 priests and six evangelist brothers serve as pioneer missionaries all over India and abroad in pastoral care, ashrams, retreat centers, communication and media, education of the poor, caring for children in distress, social and cultural upliftment of villages and towns, environmental care, service to the handicapped, HIV/AIDS patients and mentally challenged people.