Adaptability in a foreign land

Sometimes, priests of a different culture may work out fine in a host community, but in most cases, they do not.

Apr 27, 2017

By Robert Mickens
Sometimes, priests of a different culture may work out fine in a host community, but in most cases, they do not.

Just last week, Archbishop Tommaso Valentinetti of Pescara-Penne had to suspend a priest from India who is incardinated in his central Italian diocese. Fr Edward Pushparaj, 40, was ordained just four years ago.

Parishioners had been complaining to the archbishop for several weeks because the priest was constantly criticising Pope Francis.

Things reached boiling point on Palm Sunday, when Fr Pushparaj used his homily on the Feast of the Passion of the Lord to attack the Pope. Some worshippers even stormed out of church in protest, yelling, “Shame on you!”

According to Archbishop Valentinetti, he was serving up the usual anti-Francis fare that one finds in “clericalist and pseudo-traditionalist circles.”

What is so disturbing about this story is that this man was obviously not well vetted before being ordained. A simple background check, much of which could have been done through the Internet, should have set off alarm bells immediately.

Pushparaj went to the seminary in his hometown in southern India, beginning at the age of fourteen. He continued up through the study of philosophy and theology, but then discontinued his path towards priesthood — for about six years.

“God wanted me to continue my formation outside the seminary,” he said in a recorded interview in January 2013, just hours before Archbishop Valentinetti ordained him a deacon.

Pushparaj actually came to Italy in the autumn of 2008. Because? “God wanted me here,” he said again.

As a newly arrived thirty-one-year-old, he joined the Olivetan Benedictines in the northern Italian city of Ferrara, eventually moving to another monastery in Bologna. He said it was an elderly priest of Pescara-Penne, now dead, who got him to join the archdiocese.

No bishop is beyond criticism — not even the Bishop of Rome. But priests have no right to use the homily during the celebration of the Eucharist — especially during Holy Week — to have a go at the Pope!

But even if Fr Pushparaj was a great devotee of Pope Francis, there is something that is not right about his profile or the way he, and many other foreign-born priests, are imported to places with dwindling vocations. They are pawns in a cynical stopgap strategy that the bishops have employed. --La Croix International

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