When love flows

After the dedication of the new Church in April of this year, the parish family of St Jude in Malad East discerned as its mission statement the following; ‘The Judean Family, striving to witness to the love and service of Christ to all’. What we never envisaged was how seriously the Lord will take us on our mission statement to love and serve “all”.

On the night of the first of July, parts of a fifteen foot, two kilometre wall, built on a hillock to prevent further encroachments from a workers colony, came crashing down. Unknown to all, the incessant rain had collected behind these walls like a reservoir and when the foundations gave way death rolled down in a flash killing 29 people, severely injuring a hundred and completely destroying more than a hundred homes

Ambedkar Nagar and Pimpripada are literally in the backyard of our spanking new Church. In the midst of reaching out to our own parishioners whose homes were flooded that night, word came to us of the wall collapse. Fr David Castegnetti, a few youth and myself went to visit the site only to find ourselves in the midst of an unimaginable tragedy; homes destroyed, people buried under the rubble or simply washed away in the ‘nullah’ while thousands of onlookers whom I now call ‘tragedy tourist’ looked on.

Social media is a powerful tool given to us by God for the good of others and my first message went live on Facebook from the site, the second went to my brother priests on our priest whatsap group and then to the laity. What happened next has left me ever so humbled and grateful for the love we as Catholics have for the least and the lost. Within minutes, responses and calls flooded my phone. Friends in Orlem sitting down to a pound party mobilized their neighbours to action, priests of the Archdiocese of Bombay, religious brothers and sisters and our Bombay seminarians jumped in to help.