Rev Fr Desmond de Sousa C.Ss.R (Porvorim/Saligao) b. 27-07-1939 d. 14-05-2016.
A Liberal, Caring and Justice-Driven Face of Goan Christianity
FN
Someone reading him online once accused Desmond de Sousa of
being an "angry young priest", possibly even a young upstart who
was critical of the Church in Goa. But Demi, as he was known
to his friends, clarified, without missing the irony: "Let me
assure one and all, I'm 73 years old this September [2012],
54 years a Redemptorist and 46 years a priest.... Among my
many illustrious students who have become my superiors over
the years are bishops, including the present Archbishop of
Goa, with whom I enjoy a very cordial relationship."
[http://bit.ly/1ZZ8xAg]
Demi came from a priviledged background, yet he spoke boldly
and without mincing words -- like the prophets of old --
against injustice and for the poor. His family has played a
prominent role in village affairs in Saligao (I remember the
'Saligao Bulletin' sold for 15 paise in the 1960s and a book
called *Floreata Saligao* authored by his septuagenarian dad
C. Hubert de Souza). And yet he was one of the few priests at
the frontlines of the ramponkar agitation in the 1970s in Goa.
If you saw him cycling along the humid roads between Porvorim
and Saligao (as he did till a few years back), you would
hardly guess that he had been the globe-trotting Executive
Secretary of the Office of Human Development (OHD) of the
Federation of Asian Bishops (FABC) for over 10 years during
the 1980s and co-ordinated the Asia-Pacific national offices
of Caritas Internationalis.
Demi passed away suddenly and without any
prolongued illness on May 14, 2016, on the
operating table, during emergency angioplasty,
after suffering a massive heart attack just a few
hours earlier. "Those of us who knew him well and
met him often are in shock at how suddenly and
unexpectedly it all happened," wrote Mario
Mascarenhas, activist who had been an associate of
Demi decades ago.
He was a friendly, concerned, helpful and outspoken man. When
he had something to say even about the Church, he said it
without mincingi words; you would scarcely guess that the
criticism came from a man of the cloth. In a 2012 article he
wrote for Goanet Reader [http://bit.ly/1TdilrN], titled 'The
Challenge to the Church in Goa: Revivalism or Renewal?' Fr
Desmond de Sousa CSsr acknowledged the colonial roots of the
Goan church and wrote:
...The clergy generally find it extremely difficult
to accept a more participative, co-responsible and
socially committed Church with the laity.... The
laity however, are deeply divided about the pace
and direction of change that renewal demands. A
paradigm shift in faith formation is needed. They
need a more inductive reflection on the daily
realities of life to discover the challenge of God
acting within these realities, rather than the
traditional deductive process of learning abstract
truths of faith by heart.
...Some of the more enlightened laity support and
participate in the renewal process as a genuine and
necessary expression of the Catholic Church in Goa.
But the vast majority are caught up in the
revivalist spiritual awakening that is sweeping Goa.
...Will the Church in Goa continue to operate as a
decrepit, colonial Church or become transformed
into a vibrant, indigenous Church? Renewal of the
Church or Revivalism in the Church -- that is the
question. The caliber of the Church's leadership
will be severely tested by the question of whose
perspective will ultimately triumph!
He worked at the grassroots and on picket lines, and he
understood it. Elsewhere, Demi narrates his experiences in
meeting the young Matanhy Saldanha, the
activist-turned-politician who ironically played a crucial
role in helping the BJP return to power in Goa in 2012. He
says: "In the early 1970s during a retreat to college
students in Belgaum, I first met this rather shy, aloof,
silent 20 plus-year-old, who immediately struck me as
different. His friends made fun of him because he had dreams
of entering politics when he returned to Goa. Which
20-year-old is so focused in life?"
"Immediately I recognized his rather unusual name when
reading the news about the leader of the agitation against
Zuari Agro Chemicals polluting the land and then the sea
around Velsao. In 1975, when I was transferred to Goa, I made
it a point to renew our acquaintance. By 1977-78, I was
heavily involved with him in the Ramponcar agitation."
[http://bit.ly/1WBQnq7]
Some time around 1980, Fr Demi motivated a group of about
half-a-dozen young nurses, many if not all trained at the
prestigious St Martha's of Bangalore known for creating
nurses with a commitment. He got them to take their skills to
the rural area of Pernem in northernmost Goa. In those times,
health care facilities were even more unequally spread out
over Goa, and transport was not easy to come by either.
Some of these nurses still recall the times they put in
there. Their mission was not to push for religious
conversions, which Christians often get accused with in
today's Indian discourse, but to take succour to the poor.
Writes Sr Dorothy pbvm from Patna: "In his later years, being
at Porvorim, Goa, he was disturbed with influx of young women
as domestic help from a remote district of Odisha, Gajapati.
So passionate was he about this phenomenon that he began to
explore the reason for it. He personally visited Gajapti and
found out that there was utter poverty in the villages which
forced the parents to send their daughters for work in other
parts of the country and the involvement of agents in
trafficking women and girls to the cities. With the help of
a religious sister he began to organize the women who were
brought to Goa and look into the menace of trafficking. He
began to rescue young women and put in place a system at both
the entry and destination points to check trafficking."
He held a Master's degree in Social Work, and taught Church
History, Social Analysis and Catholic Social Teaching.
In the 1990s, he became the Executive Secretary of the
Ecumenical Coalition on Third World Tourism (ECTWT), now
called Ecumenical Coalition on Tourism (ECOT), a coalition of
continental Catholic and Protestant churches. During his
tenure he participated in the setting up of ECPAT, formerly
known as the global network, campaigning to End Children
Prostitution in Asian Tourism, now renamed End Child
Prostitution and Trafficking.
Interestingly, the Goa government and some in the
tourism trade saw the protests in Goa of the 1980s
as a result of conspiracies seeded by touristic
rivals like Sri Lanka or Malaysia. The more likely
inspiration, at least in part, came from elsewhere.
It was men like Demi whose work helped concerned
citizens in Goa to understand what Protestant
groups were doing to study and cope with the impact
of modern mass tourism (including on the
environmental and economic fronts), rather than
just see it from a moralistic perspective alone.
He was a friend of Goanet too, as a search for his name
online would show. Most readily he would come along for our
meetings and share his insights, catching our attention with
interesting stories and experiences. Some years back, not
long ago, he was at the annual Goanetters meet. He offered a
perspective to counter the tendency of seeing the Goan past
with rose tinted glasses.
This is how I reported what he had said then:
Redemptorist FR. DESMOND de SOUSA gave another take
on "the past was better" logic that one often hears
about Goa. Their family lived in Bombay and "we
used to hate to come to Goa", he pointed out.
"There were two Customs posts to cross, at Castle
Rock and Collem. The old carreira took one from
Collem right home. Saligao of course had no
electricity." He said a rupee coin pressed into the
palm of the Customs cleared everything, something
he noticed in his childhood days.
He came to Goa as a young priest in 1969. "It was
still very difficult, because things were very
traditional. In society. And in the Church.
Everybody wanted to poke their nose and tell you
how to run your life in a certain way, because that
was how it was done in the past."
But after his 1969-71 stint, he returned in 1975,
only to see Goa with new eyes. "I saw it as a
challenge then. There were youth movements taking
place, and protest movements. We really began to
hope that people's power would change things in
Goa," he said. "I am still hopeful."
"The problem with people's power is that it comes
up only in fits and starts, when the people are
fighting some issue, or have their backs to the
wall."
After 13 years as the secretary to the Asian
Bishops Conference, he visited almost "every
country in the world".
Giving the example of the Cook Islands, the
largely-Maori 15 small islands that comprise the
"self-governing parliamentary democracy in free
association with New Zealand", he pointed out that
their population is below 20,000 (probably more
earlier). He says when he asked students there how
big they thought India was, they felt it could be
50,000 or maybe 100,000 inhabitants strong. "If you
think small, you're going to see everything else as
small," he suggested.
He said other countries often "seemed to have a
better impression of us Indians rather than what we
have of ourselves." He wanted to come back home, he
said, because he was tired of being termed an
outsider everywhere.
DeSouza argued the challenges faced here is
something many other countries had gone through
"till a time comes when (it is no longer acceptable
and) things start working out and change for the
better takes place".
"I've eaten raw fish, snake and what not in
different parts of the world I've been to," he
said, suggesting that change is the key to
surviving and understanding others. "I've eaten
everything except balut, in the Philippines," de
Souza mentioned. (A balut is a fertilized duck or
chicken egg with a nearly-developed embryo inside
that is boiled and eaten in the shell.)
He dramatically narrated how he just couldn't
stomach the idea. One day, at a bishop's breakfast
table, he was asked how he managed to cope with
balut, also commonly sold as streetfood in the
Philippines. "I told him I didn't eat it. Till the
bishop said I just had!" It was a battle to resist
throwing up on the spot!
This is a video of Demi which I just noticed today, quite
like him, making very deep points packaged in seemingly light
comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
You don't feel sad when someone like Demi passes away. You
feel privledged for having known the man!
###
Rev Fr Desmond de Sousa C.Ss.R (Porvorim/Saligao) b.
27-07-1939 d. 14-05-2016. Beloved son of late Hubert and
late Julia (nee Saldanha). Brother/brother-in-law of Neville
Joseph (Joey)/Mena; Thelma/late Maurice Britto; Greta/late
Raymond Noronha, a great uncle and friend. Passed away
suddenly on the 14th of May 2016.
FN
Someone reading him online once accused Desmond de Sousa of
being an "angry young priest", possibly even a young upstart who
was critical of the Church in Goa. But Demi, as he was known
to his friends, clarified, without missing the irony: "Let me
assure one and all, I'm 73 years old this September [2012],
54 years a Redemptorist and 46 years a priest.... Among my
many illustrious students who have become my superiors over
the years are bishops, including the present Archbishop of
Goa, with whom I enjoy a very cordial relationship."
[http://bit.ly/1ZZ8xAg]
Demi came from a priviledged background, yet he spoke boldly
and without mincing words -- like the prophets of old --
against injustice and for the poor. His family has played a
prominent role in village affairs in Saligao (I remember the
'Saligao Bulletin' sold for 15 paise in the 1960s and a book
called *Floreata Saligao* authored by his septuagenarian dad
C. Hubert de Souza). And yet he was one of the few priests at
the frontlines of the ramponkar agitation in the 1970s in Goa.
If you saw him cycling along the humid roads between Porvorim
and Saligao (as he did till a few years back), you would
hardly guess that he had been the globe-trotting Executive
Secretary of the Office of Human Development (OHD) of the
Federation of Asian Bishops (FABC) for over 10 years during
the 1980s and co-ordinated the Asia-Pacific national offices
of Caritas Internationalis.
Demi passed away suddenly and without any
prolongued illness on May 14, 2016, on the
operating table, during emergency angioplasty,
after suffering a massive heart attack just a few
hours earlier. "Those of us who knew him well and
met him often are in shock at how suddenly and
unexpectedly it all happened," wrote Mario
Mascarenhas, activist who had been an associate of
Demi decades ago.
He was a friendly, concerned, helpful and outspoken man. When
he had something to say even about the Church, he said it
without mincingi words; you would scarcely guess that the
criticism came from a man of the cloth. In a 2012 article he
wrote for Goanet Reader [http://bit.ly/1TdilrN], titled 'The
Challenge to the Church in Goa: Revivalism or Renewal?' Fr
Desmond de Sousa CSsr acknowledged the colonial roots of the
Goan church and wrote:
...The clergy generally find it extremely difficult
to accept a more participative, co-responsible and
socially committed Church with the laity.... The
laity however, are deeply divided about the pace
and direction of change that renewal demands. A
paradigm shift in faith formation is needed. They
need a more inductive reflection on the daily
realities of life to discover the challenge of God
acting within these realities, rather than the
traditional deductive process of learning abstract
truths of faith by heart.
...Some of the more enlightened laity support and
participate in the renewal process as a genuine and
necessary expression of the Catholic Church in Goa.
But the vast majority are caught up in the
revivalist spiritual awakening that is sweeping Goa.
...Will the Church in Goa continue to operate as a
decrepit, colonial Church or become transformed
into a vibrant, indigenous Church? Renewal of the
Church or Revivalism in the Church -- that is the
question. The caliber of the Church's leadership
will be severely tested by the question of whose
perspective will ultimately triumph!
He worked at the grassroots and on picket lines, and he
understood it. Elsewhere, Demi narrates his experiences in
meeting the young Matanhy Saldanha, the
activist-turned-politician who ironically played a crucial
role in helping the BJP return to power in Goa in 2012. He
says: "In the early 1970s during a retreat to college
students in Belgaum, I first met this rather shy, aloof,
silent 20 plus-year-old, who immediately struck me as
different. His friends made fun of him because he had dreams
of entering politics when he returned to Goa. Which
20-year-old is so focused in life?"
"Immediately I recognized his rather unusual name when
reading the news about the leader of the agitation against
Zuari Agro Chemicals polluting the land and then the sea
around Velsao. In 1975, when I was transferred to Goa, I made
it a point to renew our acquaintance. By 1977-78, I was
heavily involved with him in the Ramponcar agitation."
[http://bit.ly/1WBQnq7]
Some time around 1980, Fr Demi motivated a group of about
half-a-dozen young nurses, many if not all trained at the
prestigious St Martha's of Bangalore known for creating
nurses with a commitment. He got them to take their skills to
the rural area of Pernem in northernmost Goa. In those times,
health care facilities were even more unequally spread out
over Goa, and transport was not easy to come by either.
Some of these nurses still recall the times they put in
there. Their mission was not to push for religious
conversions, which Christians often get accused with in
today's Indian discourse, but to take succour to the poor.
Writes Sr Dorothy pbvm from Patna: "In his later years, being
at Porvorim, Goa, he was disturbed with influx of young women
as domestic help from a remote district of Odisha, Gajapati.
So passionate was he about this phenomenon that he began to
explore the reason for it. He personally visited Gajapti and
found out that there was utter poverty in the villages which
forced the parents to send their daughters for work in other
parts of the country and the involvement of agents in
trafficking women and girls to the cities. With the help of
a religious sister he began to organize the women who were
brought to Goa and look into the menace of trafficking. He
began to rescue young women and put in place a system at both
the entry and destination points to check trafficking."
He held a Master's degree in Social Work, and taught Church
History, Social Analysis and Catholic Social Teaching.
In the 1990s, he became the Executive Secretary of the
Ecumenical Coalition on Third World Tourism (ECTWT), now
called Ecumenical Coalition on Tourism (ECOT), a coalition of
continental Catholic and Protestant churches. During his
tenure he participated in the setting up of ECPAT, formerly
known as the global network, campaigning to End Children
Prostitution in Asian Tourism, now renamed End Child
Prostitution and Trafficking.
Interestingly, the Goa government and some in the
tourism trade saw the protests in Goa of the 1980s
as a result of conspiracies seeded by touristic
rivals like Sri Lanka or Malaysia. The more likely
inspiration, at least in part, came from elsewhere.
It was men like Demi whose work helped concerned
citizens in Goa to understand what Protestant
groups were doing to study and cope with the impact
of modern mass tourism (including on the
environmental and economic fronts), rather than
just see it from a moralistic perspective alone.
He was a friend of Goanet too, as a search for his name
online would show. Most readily he would come along for our
meetings and share his insights, catching our attention with
interesting stories and experiences. Some years back, not
long ago, he was at the annual Goanetters meet. He offered a
perspective to counter the tendency of seeing the Goan past
with rose tinted glasses.
This is how I reported what he had said then:
Redemptorist FR. DESMOND de SOUSA gave another take
on "the past was better" logic that one often hears
about Goa. Their family lived in Bombay and "we
used to hate to come to Goa", he pointed out.
"There were two Customs posts to cross, at Castle
Rock and Collem. The old carreira took one from
Collem right home. Saligao of course had no
electricity." He said a rupee coin pressed into the
palm of the Customs cleared everything, something
he noticed in his childhood days.
He came to Goa as a young priest in 1969. "It was
still very difficult, because things were very
traditional. In society. And in the Church.
Everybody wanted to poke their nose and tell you
how to run your life in a certain way, because that
was how it was done in the past."
But after his 1969-71 stint, he returned in 1975,
only to see Goa with new eyes. "I saw it as a
challenge then. There were youth movements taking
place, and protest movements. We really began to
hope that people's power would change things in
Goa," he said. "I am still hopeful."
"The problem with people's power is that it comes
up only in fits and starts, when the people are
fighting some issue, or have their backs to the
wall."
After 13 years as the secretary to the Asian
Bishops Conference, he visited almost "every
country in the world".
Giving the example of the Cook Islands, the
largely-Maori 15 small islands that comprise the
"self-governing parliamentary democracy in free
association with New Zealand", he pointed out that
their population is below 20,000 (probably more
earlier). He says when he asked students there how
big they thought India was, they felt it could be
50,000 or maybe 100,000 inhabitants strong. "If you
think small, you're going to see everything else as
small," he suggested.
He said other countries often "seemed to have a
better impression of us Indians rather than what we
have of ourselves." He wanted to come back home, he
said, because he was tired of being termed an
outsider everywhere.
DeSouza argued the challenges faced here is
something many other countries had gone through
"till a time comes when (it is no longer acceptable
and) things start working out and change for the
better takes place".
"I've eaten raw fish, snake and what not in
different parts of the world I've been to," he
said, suggesting that change is the key to
surviving and understanding others. "I've eaten
everything except balut, in the Philippines," de
Souza mentioned. (A balut is a fertilized duck or
chicken egg with a nearly-developed embryo inside
that is boiled and eaten in the shell.)
He dramatically narrated how he just couldn't
stomach the idea. One day, at a bishop's breakfast
table, he was asked how he managed to cope with
balut, also commonly sold as streetfood in the
Philippines. "I told him I didn't eat it. Till the
bishop said I just had!" It was a battle to resist
throwing up on the spot!
This is a video of Demi which I just noticed today, quite
like him, making very deep points packaged in seemingly light
comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
You don't feel sad when someone like Demi passes away. You
feel privledged for having known the man!
###
Rev Fr Desmond de Sousa C.Ss.R (Porvorim/Saligao) b.
27-07-1939 d. 14-05-2016. Beloved son of late Hubert and
late Julia (nee Saldanha). Brother/brother-in-law of Neville
Joseph (Joey)/Mena; Thelma/late Maurice Britto; Greta/late
Raymond Noronha, a great uncle and friend. Passed away
suddenly on the 14th of May 2016.
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