The De Souza family from Porvorim lived in Karachi since 1905. [Sitting L to R] Stanislaus, Ceveriano, Fr Anthony, Theodolinda, Fr Valentine (Vally). [Standing L to R] Fr Francis, Angela, Joseph, Philip and Louis. PHOTO COURTESY: Roland de Souza (USA)
(The writer was born in Karachi in 1927 and died in Mandal, Gujarat in 2020. The article is an exclusive memoir from the book “Goans of Pakistan, Footprints on the Sands of Time 1820-2020” by Menin Rodrigues, published in Karachi in 2020).
To while away the hours on a sleepless night, I began to total up the contribution of 14 Jesuits from Karachi to the growth of the then-nascent Gujarat Jesuit Region beginning in the early 1930s. It would have been an impossible task to try to evaluate it.
All fourteen of them of Goan heritage, born and brought up in British India Karachi, were ex-students of St Patrick’s High School. Ten of them studied under Spanish Jesuits of the Bombay-Aragon Province, the remaining three under the Dutch Franciscans.
Unsurprisingly in pre-partitioned India, all followed their former Jesuit teachers or parish priests to the new region of Gujarat.
* Edwin Pinto (First Bishop of Ahmedabad, Principal)
* Charles Gomes (Bishop of Ahmedabad, Provincial, Missionary, Principal)
* Anthony Lobo (School Principal/Founder, Jamnagar, Missionary)
* Aloysius Fonseca (Writer, Social Activist Delhi, Rome)
* Joseph Lobo (College Professor, School Principal, Missionary South Gujarat)
* Gerald Lobo (School Principal)
* Anand Lionel Mascarenhas (Lifelong Professor, Dogmatic Theology, Pune)
* Herbert de Souza (College Principal/Founder, Secretary of Education, Rome)
* Frank Lobo (Parish Priest, Bhavnagar, Sabarmati, Maninagar)
* Carl Fonseca (Principal, Rosary, Registrar Jnana Deepa, Pune)
* Augustine Lobo (Secretary, St. Xavier’s College)
* Ignatius Pinto (School Principal, Rosary, Gandhinagar)
* Freddy de Souza (School Principal, Rosary, Gandhinagar)
* Vally de Souza (Pioneer Missionary South Gujarat, School Principal/Founder)
Add that up: Two Bishops, one Provincial, one College Principal/Founder, nine High School Principals, two Founders of Schools, two Professors, two Assistant Delegates, and three Missionaries.
The figures indicate but hardly reflect the full value of their contribution to the development of the Gujarat Province. These men lived their lives and carried out their tasks with distinction. Their memory is fast fading from our collective consciousness. So, for the record, I write this before the embers of a fire they kindled finally die out.
INTERESTING FACTS: Among the 14 Karachi Jesuits were four sets of brothers: Carl/Aloysius, Joe/Gussy, Herbert/ Freddy, Frank/Gerry. In 1945, two sets of all the brothers in the family were members of the Society of Jesus in Gujarat: the Fonseca brothers (5) and the Lobo brothers, Joe, Gussy and Edwin (3).
This chapter in the history of the Gujarat Jesuit Province will soon come to an end. I closed the door on would-be Jesuits from Karachi. I did not choose to do it. A British lawyer, Cyril John Radcliffe, sixty-five years ago traced on a map of India a line running up the western borders of Kutch and Rajasthan to Kashmir. He gifted the land on the shores of the Indus, and the charm of the town of Karachi with its potential for Jesuits to droves of refugees that flooded the country we now call Pakistan.
Adios Karachi. We love you and remember your gift to us.
Ronald Rolheiser wrote, “Like Jesus, we too are meant to give our lives away in generosity and selflessness, but we are also meant to leave this planet in such a way that our diminishment and death is our final, and perhaps greatest, gift to the world.”
