By Subhasis Chattopadhyay –
One man of God changed the course of world history without performing any documented miracle when he was alive. That man of God was sought by the rich and the powerful of his time for advice. They vied with each other to help him during the European Reformation. That man of God did not seek the rich and the powerful, nor did he visit their homes, nor did he eat of the food of the rich. St. Ignatius of Loyola did not take academic and spiritual shortcuts; he was ridiculed and persecuted by many clerics for being headstrong. St. Ignatius wore sack-clothes and repented for his own sins and the sins of the world.
Another poor man of God in Calcutta, a son of St. Ignatius of Loyola, was ridiculed like St. Ignatius of Loyola for defending the Roman Catholic Faith by other clerics. This is the common thread between this physicist-turned-Jesuit Fr. Lawrence (Larry) Abello SJ, his Founder and many other Saints in the Roman Catholic Church.
Of this Jesuit Fr. Abello in Calcutta it was said, “he has more love for the unborn than the born”; “he has been able to get you [this author] in his fold”, “if he [this man of God] were to apply to become a Religious today, he would not be accepted”. Yet Saint Teresa of the Gutters trusted him so much that she often read in public what this man of God wanted told to the Senators and Congressmen in the US and their peers in India. Mother Teresa read at least two of her speeches as penned by this man of God, the most important being the one she read in front of Hillary Clinton against the Clinton administration’s genocide of unborn children. This author also knows that the Saint on one occasion called up the Late Pope Saint John Paul the Great on the behest of this poverello Fr. Abello to beg the Holy Father not to slacken the Papal fight against the murder of unborn children. The Saint herself told this to me when I visited her with the poverello at Mother House, Calcutta.
Fr. Abello took me thrice to meet the Saint of Calcutta: from them I learnt that there cannot be any Catholic education if the students of all religions (sic) in Catholic schools and colleges in India are not taught that killing unborn children is an evil as great as any genocide; being unchaste is wrong and evil, pandering to the rich is wrong. Mother Teresa accepted donations from the rich and the poor without judging them but never pandered to the rich. The Saint and her spiritual director both did not seek the rich in their hotel-rooms or their alcohol drenched parties in the name of God’s work. As the rich sought St. Ignatius of Loyola to help his work; Mother Teresa was sought by all to help her in God’s work. God sent all manner of people to her and her spiritual director, this Jesuit, but neither sought the rich nor did either adapt the Truth to suit the times, their audiences or locales.
Mother Teresa, Sr. Nirmala, Frs. van Exem, Horace Rozario, Augustine Cordeiro, Ruy Cordeiro, Joseph Remedios and the poverello had taught me that the Truth is one and essentially simple: murder in all its forms is wrong, morally reprehensible and evil. Catholic institutions must teach young wo/men the path of Saints Dominic Savio, Stanislaus Kostka and Aloysius Gonzaga.
Mother Teresa’s Spiritual Director
This man of God Fr Abello was introduced to Mother Teresa by Father Celeste van Exem SJ. I was told this by Father van Exem in his deathbed in the Jesuit infirmary at St. Xavier’s, Park Street, Calcutta. Fr. van Exem had occupied the room next to Fr. Augustine Cordeiro’s room or later Fr. Augustine Cordeiro had occupied that sick-room, I cannot remember exactly now. The point is that this poverello was esteemed by a Saint and by Fr van Exem who helped Mother Teresa frame the Rule for the Missionaries of Charity, yet this Jesuit was esteemed nought by his own in a repetition of what occurred long ago: the Nazarene too was esteemed nought by His own.
St. Ignatius of Loyola did not want monks for Jesus’s Society. He wanted autonomous intellectual Roman Catholic men to counter Satan. Fr. Abello who was active in various charismatic movements in Kolkata, helped out in Alcoholic Anonymous groups and was Mother Teresa’s spiritual director and later Sr. Nirmala’s spiritual director, was and is the only genius I have met in person. And I know he is (sic) indeed a Saint. A Saint who was a greater intellectual than the flamboyant Teilhard de Chardin SJ. At least, in the last century, the Catholic Church in Kolkata did not have a man of his intellectual and spiritual calibre. Some are holy but are not brainy. Some are merely intellectuals. Some pretend to be public intellectuals and play the holiness game. Fr. Abello alone was an intellectual and a holy man beyond compare. Like St. Ignatius of Loyola, Fr. Lawrence Abello did not perform miracles apparent to the public eye. Like St. Ignatius he was (is) proof that Elohim IS.
Poor and Austere Life
This poverello lived a life of strict evangelical poverty owning only two pairs of clothes and he stitched them himself to keep them from falling apart. He repaired his own watch and the watches of others in his community and he repaired his own shoe and the shoes of others in his community. This man of God posed such a challenge to the ambitious and the hedonistic that after his death they diluted his life-choices by saying that his poverty was in response to environmental concerns.
Contrary to simpletons and reductionists who have reduced the poverello to being an environmental-activist, Fr. Abello obeyed the command of the Man from Galilee: sell and give all to others and then follow Me [Jesus] in voluntarily choosing the life of the poorest of poor Indians.
This man of God found it so difficult to write for the public in non-scholarly media that he routinely got them corrected and simplified by Fr. Horace Rozario SJ. The Jesuits Frs. Rozario, Wavreil and Fowshow repeatedly told me about the poverello’s humility. This is astonishing since the poverello scored full marks in theology and separately in philosophy as a seminarian in an age where getting even 60% was unheard of in these subjects. Later this man of God helped some of our greatest physicists today.
I remember him being admonished repeatedly by Fr. Horace Rozario SJ who was his community’s rector then, for walking from Park Street, Calcutta to Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics daily in temperatures above 42 degrees Celsius. This peripatetic physicist-philosopher sacrificed his Nobel-prize track career because he was asked by the Nazarene to prevent the genocide of unborn children. I have heard lesser intellects speak angrily that this man of God was incapable of writing for learned journals and thus wrote only for The Herald. This poor physicist was never to be found in any jazzy seminar in Calcutta or abroad, as too his spiritual director, the linguist Fr. Mignon SJ was never to be found in any Biblical or literature seminars anywhere in the world. Frs. Mignon and this poor man of God changed the topology of scholarship and spirituality from their rooms at St. Xavier’s School and College, Park Street, Kolkata.
Fount of Knowledge
The poor Piedmontese French Canadian, Fr. Lawrence Abello SJ one noon at the Fathers’ refectory came over to me when I was in class seven. Frs. Rozario and Mignon were eating; and so was I with them in one of the circular tables in the Jesuit refectory at St. Xavier’s, Park Street, Kolkata. As was usual, I was speaking garbled nonsense to those two priests and fishing for compliments. Fr. Rozario was then the Rector of the Jesuit community and my spiritual director. Fr. Abello had a funny way of walking, moving his torso side to side and as soon as we three finished our lunch; ambling over, he said “hello, you are that Hindu boy, Subhasis, are you not?” From that day till he died of brain tumour, he and I were teacher and student, and became great friends. He journeyed with me in my rollercoaster life from that day on. He had me from the word hello. I owe my record under-graduate score in Calcutta University to Fr. Abello. His tutelage changed my life and I suspect, the lives of many other men.
Yet never did he succumb to my many invitations for dining at places of over-consumption; of taking cabs instead of walking non-stop. (He did not use the Fathers’ Residence lift ever even once; nor did he ever go for lunches and dinners with anyone at all.) Nor did he ever accept any gift howsoever small for himself from either me, or my then girl-friend (now wife) and her Jain family. My classmates in college who included a Sindhi girl and a Punjabi girl, and their business-families revered him for his sanctity then and even now. Before writing this blog-post, I contacted my English-major non-Christian batchmates who are now in the US and Canada. Fr. Lawrence Abello is the only Catholic priest they or their families choose to remember.
Fr. Abello taught me philosophy informally but with thoroughness during my under-graduate years while I was at college, all done in the parlour of St. Xavier’s, Park Street, Calcutta. He taught me Plato, moved to St. Augustine of Hippo, thence we ploughed through the entire Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas and then to Duns Scotus and finally we stopped at Martin Heidegger. His lectures were supplemented with the books in the Goethals Library where the entire works of all these and more philosophers were available. Then after teaching me about 3 days a week, he left for teaching Missionaries of Charity novices on the invitation of Mother Teresa and later, Sr. Nirmala M.C. After my English Major classes, I went out daily with my girlfriend (now wife), and after she left for home every evening, I took the keys of Goethals library from either Fr. Leeming (whose room was adjacent to the door of Goethals’ library) or from Fr. Ruy Cordeiro (who was the minister of the house then) and studied the primary sources of Fr. Abello’s lectures. Contrary to envious accounts of Fr. Abello’s limitations, he was very focussed as a scholar and knew all these philosophers and their subtle distinctions by heart. And lo and behold! he was a physicist who owned patents and had an invention which all his confrères knew is path-breaking and he suppressed it of his own free will. Not for nothing Mother Teresa, Sr. Nirmala, Frs. van Exem, Christian Mignon and Horace Rozario told this author that we have a Saint among us.
Hit by Illness
When Fr. Abello told me that he can no longer move or even lift his hand due to his brain tumour, I broke down. I used to call him over the landline at about 9.30/10 pm daily after I was married and posted out of Kolkata. Till a few weeks before he died we spoke daily. In his last days some nurse must have held the phone to his ear and over the phone he had urged me to study literature, philosophy and theology with precision. The informal classes I received from him during my college days carried on till 2012. Before he was paralysed, every year he went to the interior Sundarbans to teach poor foresters mathematics, grammar and science. He belonged to the Darjeeling Jesuit Province and was on perpetual loan to the Calcutta Province of the Jesuits. Through Fr. Abello I developed a friendship with the Canadian Jesuit Fr. Gerard Van Walleghem, popularly known as Fr. Van.
Fr. Lawrence Abello was in his youth a Communist and an atheist in Canada, Saskatchewan. Then he became a Quaker and finally he committed himself to Roman Catholicism. I know this from him and from Frs. Mignon and Horace. His vocation to the Jesuit life came to him one starlit night when he was moving in an open truck from Canada to the US. His life seemed meaningless to him and he felt compelled to present himself to the Society of Jesus as a candidate. He told me the experience had left him stunned. Before this epiphany, he had imagined for himself a life of academic and worldly excellence as a family-man. Yet YHWH told this (ex) Quaker to join the Society of Jesus when Larry Abello did not even know who the Jesuits were and where they were at the time of his conversion.
Like St. Paul after his conversion, Fr. Abello became one pointed in his defence of the unborn child. He seldom spoke to me about the evil of murdering unborn children; rather he taught me the joys of philosophy and literature but in his public life as a Jesuit, he relentlessly used his intellect to destroy all arguments that certain abortions are fine and not morally reprehensible. In their eagerness to please fund-providers and the wealthy, Fr. Abello SJ has been erased from collective Catholic memory in Calcutta. His life is too dangerous for the status quo. A man who knew Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and Sigmund Freud by heart, and the Upanishads and the Holy Bible, and he was sought after as a physicist, is (sic) too much for samsara. Mother Teresa being from and of God, the late Fr. Christian Mignon being a scholar more acute than Umberto Eco, and Fr. van Exem being guided by the Holy Ghost, understood that Fr. Lawrence Abello was sustained by the Nazarene for His vineyard in Kolkata.
One last thing, once Fr. Abello had to be operated at the posh Park Nursing Home for a boil which had turned infectious. He wanted to be operated in a cheaper place but Fr. Horace, being then his Superior admitted him forcibly to Park Nursing Home under holy obedience. I visited him during the evenings he was there and Fr. Abello was embarrassed that the Province had to pay his bills and sad that the poor do not have access to nursing homes like the one that Fr. Rozario had forcibly put him in.
Fr. Abello’s life reminds me of the life of the Servant of God, Fr. Canisius Thekkekara CMI.
Subhasis Chattopadhyay is a blogger and an Assistant Professor in English (UG & PG Departments of English) at Narasinha Dutt College affiliated to the University of Calcutta. He has additional qualifications in Biblical Studies and separately, Spiritual Psychology. He also studied the Minor Upanishads separately. He remains a staunch Hindu. He had written extensively for the Catholic Herald published from Calcutta. From 2010 he reviews books for the Ramakrishna Mission and his reviews have been showcased in Ivy League Press-websites.