By Vincent Pereppadan
Kozhikode, Dec 4, 2022: The Church in India has mourned the death of Jesuit Father Abraham Adappur, a renowned thinker and writer who drafted Pope Paul VI’s address to India.
Father Adappur died December 3, the feast of St Francis Xavier, at Christ Hall, the headquarters of the Jesuits’ Kerala province in Kozhikode, a major town in the southern Indian state of Kerala. He was 97.
The body of the Kerala Jesuit province was kept at the Christ Hall for the public to pay their respects at 4 pm December 5. The funeral is scheduled at 10:30 am on December 5 at the Christ King Church cemetery near Christ Hall.
“With the passing away of Fr Abraham Adappur … the Catholic Church in India, especially in Kerala, has lost not just a Jesuit writer and intellectual, but the most seasoned voice of the Church that had the reputation of an authentic Christian thinker, theologian, speaker, and activist,” says Father E P Mathew, head of the Jesuits’ Kerala province.
Father M K George, Father Mathew’s predecessor, hails Father Adappur as “an amazing personality” who was “brilliant, courageous and ready to pay for his convictions.”
According to Father George, Father Adappur’s bold analysis and critique of Marxism was highly appreciated even when Marxism was at the heights of power and popularity.
“He studied, reflected, wrote and spoke on issues crucial to ordinary men and women. He remains one of the illumined witnesses to the tradition of intellectual dimension of the Jesuit Mission,” Father George told Matters India.
Father Mathew says Father Adappur’s death would create a deep void in the secular world that always turned to him to listen to “an authentic spirit” of the Church.
Father “Adappur represented the Christian faith in its original form refined for our times. He mentored several judges, intellectuals, professors, writers, and activists, and influenced hundreds of independent thinkers. He kept a warm relationship with everyone whom he encountered with no prejudice or discrimination, even if they disagreed with his ideas and thoughts. Moreover, he accompanied closely and compassionately those who were close to his heart,” the Kerala provincial recalled.
Father Adappur was born in 1926 as the first of six siblings of Adappur family at Arakkuzha, a village in the princely state of Kochi.
He joined the Society of Jesus after his high school in 1944 and was ordained a priest in 1959. He mastered in counseling psychology from the Marquette Jesuit University in Massachusetts, United States, and earned his doctorate from Strauss University in France with a French government scholarship.
His first assignment was in the ecumenical efforts at Thiruvalla in central Kerala. Later he was called to Rome to serve as the regional secretary for South Asia at the administrative office of the Jesuit General in Rome. Then he worked with Jesuit Father Jerome De Souza, a member of the Constituent Assembly of India.
The provincial said Father Adappur spent his most vibrant five decades at Lumen Institute, Kochi, making it an intellectual hub of the socially committed thinkers and writers of Kerala. He was at Christ Hall, Kozhikode for the last three years.
Father Adappur has written 30 books on various subjects, including spirituality and cultural fields. He started writing in ‘Sandesham,’ a publication from Kozhikode.
He was a member of the Anglican-Catholic International Commission for seven years from 1983. He learned Latin, Italian, French, and Greek languages. He also served as a teacher at St Michael’s High School in Kannur, Kerala.
His years in Rome coincided with the Second Vatican Council. He reported the developments at the council from its aula as an official reporter for Mathrubhumi, a widely circulated intellectual Malayalam weekly that helped the Kerala Church and the general public keep pace with the radical dynamics of the Council.
“In his writings, Adappur maintained a deep ethical and faith-based Catholic position, often defending it against then popular Communist ideologies. Thus, he was known as a defender of the conservative Catholic Church against the trendy liberation theology of that time. Later, he criticized the Church from the same stance when he found the Church leaders were drifting away from the Jesus of Nazareth and His Gospel,” Father Mathew recalled.
It was Father Adappur who drafted the Pope Paul VI’s address in India incorporating the Upanishad mantra of “Asatoma Satgamaya” (guide us from ignorance to knowledge.) The Pope visited Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1964, the first head of the Catholic Church to visit India.
In Kochi, he served as the chaplain of Newman Association’s Kerala chapter, an active platform of intellectual debates on current topics. He used to bring experts and authentic voices on the most appropriate and relevant topic of the time to the Newman’s floor to speak.
Father Mathew says Father Adappur was uncompromising with truth and values that many in power, including those in the Church, found his challenging interventions quite uncomfortable. When the Church-owned Deepika daily was undergoing a crisis, his sharp and timely writing compelled the authorities to take appropriate decisions to reclaim its ownership.
He was grossly critical of the Church when it disowned T J Joseph, a professor in a Catholic college, after his hand was chopped off by Islamic fundamentalists in 2010.