Faithful farewell beloved priest

More than 4,000 people turned up to bid a final farewell to celebrated Italian missionary Salesian Father Louis Gobetti in West Bengal’s Bandel basilica yesterday.

Fr Louis Gobetti, 91, who served Bengal Missions, died on September 22 at the historic 16th century Marian shrine of Bandel, where he served for 25 years.

Some 140 priests and hundreds of religious and faithful attended the Eucharist presided over by Coadjutor Archbishop Thomas D’Souza of Calcutta and Salesian Bishop Joseph Gomes of Krishnagar, another of Fr Gobetti’s proteges from Ranaghat.

The priest is better known for having settled hundreds of displaced families in Bengal, especially those who migrated to India after the 1971 Bangladesh war of liberation.

Before Fr Gobetti arrived in Bandel in 1988, there were about 150 Catholic families. Today that number has swelled to 565, plus another 350 families in the shrine’s substation, said Salesian Fr Thomas Gomes, one of Fr Gobetti’s former parishioners from Ranaghat.

The nonagenarian settled three congregations of religious Sisters, including the Salesian Sisters, to provide education, with an emphasis on schooling for young women.

Born on January 8, 1921, at Tarcento in northern Italy, Fr Gobetti arrived in India in 1936. Interned in the concentration camp at Dehra Dun during World War II, he later pursued his theology studies and was ordained on March 23, 1945.

In 2005, on the occasion of the diamond jubilee of Fr Gobetti’s priestly ordination, Nitika Don Bosco produced a documentary film entitled Mosaic of a Missionary.

It narrates the missionary life of Fr Gobetti who came to Bengal as a minor seminarian and worked for over 70 years in Bengal’s Krishnagar and Calcutta dioceses.

Besides several national and international awards, Fr Gobetti in 2008 received an award for outstanding pastoral contributions to Bengal by the Catholic Association of Bengal.

A prolific writer and editor of the magazine Our Lady of Bandel, Fr Gobetti authored several books of Christian inspiration.

The Indian Catholic Press Association recognized his outstanding contribution in the promotion of Christian literature during its national Convention held in Kolkata in 2004.

Source: ucanews.com