PROVIDENCE, R.I. (OSV News) — Father Vijay Kiran proudly sports two lapel pins on his clerical suit jacket: one for St. John Paul II and one for St. Teresa of Kolkata.
While most people would be blessed to have been in the presence of even a single future saint in their lifetime, Father Kiran has been doubly blessed to have interacted multiple times with both over the course of his formative and early years as a priest in India, his home country.
Those interactions with the two globally revered holy figures — as they were journeying on the living path to sainthood — have had a profound impact on his life. So much so that over the last decade, Father Kiran has amassed a trove of cultural and religious artifacts that honor the likeness of each saint, gathered by various means from around the world.
Honoring Virgin Mary, Sts. John Paul II and Teresa of Kolkata
Upon his retirement from active ministry in July, Father Kiran will return to his native Bangalore, the burgeoning capital and largest city of the southern Indian state of Karnataka — with an estimated population of about 14 million people. There, he plans to open a museum dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. John Paul and Mother Teresa.
Father Kiran — ordained a priest on July 23, 1986, for the Archdiocese of Madras and Mylapore — was on the second of two breaks he had taken to serve in the U.S. when he came from the Archdiocese of Baltimore to Rhode Island to preach a mission. He met Msgr. Ronald Simeone, who encouraged him to explore the possibility of serving in Providence, and in 2016, he went to St. Thomas More Parish in Narragansett to serve as an assistant pastor.
This spring, the priest, a full-time hospital chaplain, took Rhode Island Catholic, Providence’s news outlet, on a tour of a large room at the rectory of Blessed Sacrament Church in Providence, where he was in residence, to view hundreds of items of memorabilia commemorating both St. John Paul II and Mother Teresa.
Father Kiran has financed the project entirely from his earnings as a priest, and as he could afford to, he has been shipping boxes of items back to India for storage.
Used earnings as priest to fund project
“Everything I have earned as a priest is gone,” he said, but he knows it’s been money well spent: The materials he’s brought together will propagate the faith back home more than the spoken word can.
“Those are all beautiful memories,” Father Kiran said, with a peaceful and loving smile, as he displayed photos, beginning early in his priestly formation in the Archdiocese of Madras and Mylepore, of him accompanying both Pope John Paul and Mother Teresa on official visits to Catholic dioceses in India.
In the first, as a deacon holding a 35mm camera, now-Father Kiran is walking side-by-side with the pontiff as one of two organizing secretaries for the pope’s Feb. 5, 1986, visit to Madras. Later that day the group ascended a local hilltop where tradition holds that St. Thomas the Apostle became a martyr after bringing Christianity to India.
On that day, the pope preached about how religious freedom should be a right for all creeds, as well as the right to proselytize them — a momentous statement in an overwhelmingly Hindu nation (80%), where only about 2.5% of the population identifies as Christian. Muslims account for about 15%, with Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs making up the remaining single-digit percentages.
Christians are small percentage of India’s population
Despite the low percentage of Christians, that still translated into 20 million Catholics in a country with a 1986 population of 790 million people. Today, the total population of India is estimated at over 1.4 billion people, and the government still forbids open evangelization of faith. The small percentage of Christians remains about the same.
Father Kiran noted that despite their small percentage, Christians have an outsized influence due to their individual numbers overall. The Catholic Church has 172 dioceses, with more than 200 bishops, and 60% of the basic education in the country is provided by Catholics, he said.
In other photos he is seen greeting Mother Teresa and other religious of her Missionaries of Charity during several occasions in which Father Kiran encountered the “Saint of the Gutters” for the Albanian-Indian Catholic nun’s tireless ministry in serving the sick, poor and dying in the slums of Calcutta.
“She was a very simple person, always concerned about the poor and the needy,” he recalls of her.
He asked her more than once for a blessing, but she demurred, saying she would never offer a blessing upon a priest.
As priest, ‘you must bless me’
“You are a priest, you must bless me,” Mother Teresa would say as she bowed to him. “You have consecrated hands; you will have to bless me,” she told him.
Meticulously cataloged and arranged on tables throughout the room were collectible stamp and coin sets, books, photos and paintings, even a relic of St. Teresa encased in a monstrance, all which Father Kiran had collected during over the course of a decade.
Artifacts collected from around the world were already in the packing and shipping phase, which could cost $100 for a large box. It would take three months to arrive in India by container ship and be placed in safekeeping for the museum.
During a visit home a year ago, not even a planned surgical procedure could slow his enthusiasm. Father Kiran oversaw the setting up tables of statues of Blessed Virgin Mary with different titles. There were also fact cards about each statue for the people to read.
Long lines of schoolchildren for exhibit preview
The long lines of area schoolchildren and other people in Bangalore, who came out in droves to see a preview exhibit of some of the artifacts, served as evidence of the strong appeal for the full museum.
Father Kiran has also collected books about the two saints to start a library for the seminarians and women religious in Bangalore, which is home to two major Catholic seminaries and 56 religious formation houses for men and 124 congregations of sisters with more than 50 formation houses.
“So far I have collected 1,250 books on Saint John Paul II and more than 550 books on Mother Teresa,” he told Rhode Island Catholic.
This library, he said, will be incorporated into the museum, which will be housed in a small 2,000-square-foot building adjacent to his brother’s Bangalore home. His brother, who, with their mother, is very supportive of Father Kiran’s ambitions, took out a loan to purchase the building.
Father Kiran said he needs to raise a remaining $56,000 to outfit the museum for visitors; he’ll enshrine donors’ names on a plaque to be placed at the museum.
Museum a silent witness to the faith
He sees another important reason for creating such a museum: With an anti-conversion bill passing in the legislatures of several Indian states, it will offer a needed bulwark, promoting even a silent witness to the faith.
“In India today we cannot directly evangelize. We cannot preach anymore, officially,” Father Kiran explained.
“If anybody wants to be a Christian, they must go before a magistrate and must declare that on their free will they are going to become a Christian. After that it can be done,” he added.
“My museum, and this little library, will be a silent evangelization. People can come there to talk, visit and pray.”
Rick Snizek is executive editor of Rhode Island Catholic, the news outlet of the Diocese of Providence. This story was originally published by Rhode Island Catholic and distributed through a partnership with OSV News.
