Martyrs of AIR

Mission Sunday 2010 at Arrupe International Residence –Honoring Arrupeans who gave their lives for Others

Mission Sunday was given a special significance at the Arrupe International Residence this year.  It was an occasion to remember the two former Arrupeans who gave their lives for others: Scholastics Richie Fernando (PHI) who was killed in Cambodia on 17 Oct 1996, and Father A.T. Thomas (HAZ) who was killed in India between 24 – 27 Oct 1997.  Richie was killed during the attempt to calm an angry handicapped student who had menacingly pulled out the pin of a grenade he had at the meeting with school staff, and risking the lives of the other students at Banteay Prieb, the Jesuit’s school for the handicapped just outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia.   A.T. Thomas was led away by those seeking revenge for his work of justice amongst the Dalits, those lower than the lowest caste in Hazaribag, India, whom he had been working with. His decapitated body was only found on 27 October 1997.[1]

It is most befitting that these two alumni be remembered in this house-of-formation and held as inspirations for some 60 Jesuits-in-formation as the Arrupe International Residence celebrates its 20^th anniversary this year.

Mission Sunday 2010 coincided with Richie’s death anniversary (17 O ctober) and af ter the memorial mass joined by Richie’s parents and family members, two posters describing the selfless acts of Richie and A.T. Thomas installed strategically at the hallway at the main building, were blessed and dedicated to their memories.

Fr Jessel “JBoy“ Gerard Gonzales  (PHI), a secundus who was Richie’s “angel” in Richie’s first year in novitiate, celebrated the mass.  In his homily[2], Fr JBoy told of how it had been a fourteen years wait for him to be able to preach about Richie, with whom he had shared close friendship during their novitiate and Juniorate years. He recalled the friendship things that they did, and about the fire for the frontier of the Jesuit mission in Cambodia that Richie was planning to join Totet (Fr Jose Hildy Banayal (PHI)) at.  He spoke about how some people became “celebrities” through work or talents, but that Richie had “become famous not for doing something of value to civilization but for being” – “being someone of value” to others.  The “defining moment was not something that Richie imagined to ever happen in his entire life. Protecting his students had become his nature; it was who he had become when he joined the Jesuits”.

From the moving and “disclosure” homily JBoy drew fire for the frontier that General Congregation 35 places before each and every Jesuit. JBoy told of how the shock of Richie’s sudden death at 26 years of age instilled depth in his own Jesuit vocation.

“…after recovering from the experience of loss and tragedy, I remembered what I was and what I was meant to be. I was a Jesuit regent. I was meant to become a priest. And a Jesuit priest should die for the sake of another. What Richie died of, died from and died for was not in vain. The spirit of that dying epitomized what I should be. The Lord said that we had to die to ourselves so that others may live.”

JBoy would discover years later, when working as the Assistant Secretary of the Provincial of the Philippines Province, of people from “all over the world requesting to start a movement for his [Richie] sainthood.  One life given for the many, now multiplied. People from all over the world gained inspiration from what he had lived for and died for”.  It was a desire that Richie had held:  “I wish, when I die, people remember not how great, powerful, or talented I was, but that I served and spoke for the truth, I gave witness to what is right, I was sincere in all my works and actions, in other words, I loved and I followed Christ.” So in that defining moment, Richie was instinctively his true self – a Jesuit!

Will every Jesuit-in-formation in that chapel on Mission Sunday 2010 be that kind of Jesuit, who because of his years of forming himself in the image of Jesus, in the selfless Jesuit way of proceeding stands firm “when a bomb is thrown at your class” …or be “the first …to get out of there”?  The instinctive response would decide the newspaper headline: “32 students killed by a bomb blast; Jesuit teacher survived unharmed!” …or would it be that of a selfless act of another Arrupean who gave his life for others?

Contributed by: Sch Matthew Tan (MAS)