Another “First” for Asian Indian-Sri Lankan Saint Joseph Vaz?

“Patron Saint of First Responders”: Another “First”  

for  Asian Indian-Sri Lankan Saint Joseph Vaz?

by Filomena Saraswati Giese

President, Joseph Naik Vaz Institute

September 5, 2021

We all know that St. Jude is the Patron Saint of Desperate Cases.  Hayley Arceneaux, a cancer survivor and former patient of St. Jude’s Hospital who now works as a physician assistant at the hospital, is one of the four people on the Space-Ex flight.

In fact, one of the missions of the Space-Ex flight is to raise funds for the St. Jude’s Research Hospital in Memphis to help children dying of cancer.

There are many Patron Saints from the Biblical countries and Europe. We have St. Luke, Patron Saint of doctors because he practiced the healing arts.

St. Christopher is the Patron Saint of travelers.  But we still don’t have a Patron Saint from Asia from among our canonized Saints of the Catholic Church.

For the Asian Indian-Sri Lankan Catholic community, there is a great native Asian Saint who has figured prominently in the evangelization of India and Sri Lanka and who could well fit the bill.

This is seventeenth century Saint Joseph Vaz (www.josephnaikvaz.org) , descendant of the Hindu family of Naik and converts to Catholicism in Goa, worked in Kanara and Sri Lanka, and was canonized by H.H. Pope Francis in 2015.

Here is a list of his many “Firsts”:   

• He is the first Asian Saint to work under persecution to found a Church.
• He founded the first fully native religious Catholic Congregation in the colonial era and in our modern times. It is the Indian branch of the Oratorians that he founded in 1685.
• He is the first and only native Asian Saint to be canonized with the title of “Apostle” for his work in re-founding the missions in Kanara destroyed by the Dutch and for re-founding the Catholic Church in Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) from the ashes of Dutch persecution.
• He is the only Catholic missionary who was given refuge and protected by a Buddhist King, and later by his son, while he did his mission work and ministered to his underground Catholics.
• He is the first and only Asian Saint whose followers (the Oratorians from Goa) smuggled themselves like he had, into a country (Sri Lanka) whose Catholics were under persecution and ministered to the persecuted Catholics for the 150 years that they were cut off from Rome and any Catholic power.
• He is the first Asian Saint to found a para-liturgy in the native languages (Tamil and Sinhalese) of the mission country where he worked so the local Catholics could understand the Mass and devotions.
• He is the first Asian Saint to conceive of a Catholic literature in the native languages of his mission field and have it established by his brilliant disciple, Fr. Jacome Goncalves.
• He is the first Asian Saint who organized a Petition for Religious Freedom (in 1706) to a ruling power (the Dutch) that was persecuting Catholics.
• He is the first Asian Saint who risked his life from infection to nurse and care for the abandoned victims of a deadly infectious disease.  He was a First Responder in 1696 during the smallpox epidemic in Kandy.  Instead of leaving Kandy as the wealthy, the King and his courtiers did, St. Joseph Vaz and his nephew, Fr. Joseph Carvalho, stayed and nursed, fed, sheltered, and cleaned the pustules (sores) of abandoned smallpox victims who were thrown out into the streets and jungles to die.
• He founded the first hospital in Kandy to treat these abandoned and highly infectious victims during the smallpox epidemic.

Because of his clear response as a First Responder in the face of a deadly infectious disease like Covid, we have petitioned Pope Francis to make St Joseph Vaz “Patron Saint of First Responders and Victims of Infectious diseases” for our Covid times (see www.josephnaikvaz.org).

If St Joseph Vaz does get this special title from the Pope, it would be a definite “First” for a native Asian Saint.

Like St. Jude and other Patron Saints, it would do more to continue his mission to the Church, to the spirituality of compassion that Asia treasures, and to humanity than anything else we can do to preserve his spiritual legacy.

Please sign our petition on our website www.josephnaikvaz.org and email us if you would like to help have him declared our first Asian Patron Saint.

Filomena Saraswati Giese

Joseph Naik Vaz Institute

Email: josephnaik.vaz@gmail.com

About the Author:

Filomena Saraswati Giese founded the Joseph Naik Vaz Institute in 1980 to keep alive the memory of then Venerable Fr. Joseph Vaz and to work for his Beatification and Canonization.  She has a Master’s degree in Theology from the Jesuit School of Theology, Graduate Theological Union of Berkeley.  Her Master’s thesis was on the aspect of Indian Sannyasa in the life and missionary work of St. Joseph Vaz.