Jaffna's Fr. S. Peter remembered

Half a century has passed since Father Santhiapillai Peter, O.M.I., breathed his last, but the memory of the man lives strongly in the hearts and minds of many, clergy and laity, as in the magnificent edifices he left in many a parish that he served.

Hailing from the strongly Catholic village of Naranthanai, in Jaffna, Fr. Peter was a greatly revered priest, held in great esteem by many, as an ascetic, and a great source of moral strength and inspiration to anyone that came his way.

Counting some respected names among his forbears, full of energy, gumption, and promise, the young boy Peter, tall for his age, clever, and handsome, the envy of many a parent, seemingly destined for great success in secular life, however, at quite a young age, cast aside any aspirations to worldly glory, and would resolve to renounce the world to offer himself to serve God.

His favourite younger sister and my mother, Rosie, would nostalgically recount to us children, tales of his derring-dos as a young school-boy, some bordering on mischief - the remotest signs of a priest in the making, least an austere ascetic!

Once, to drive away eight-year-old Rosie's fear of the dark, he tied her to a tree outside the house one evening and ran to his desk, to seem deeply buried in his school home-work, until Rosie's wild screams alerted the father, who also pulled out his much-feared cane to lay it squarely on Peter's bare bottom!

Instilled

This was the boy who later took to robes, whose power of oratory in the pulpit instilled love and fear for their Maker in the hearts of the faithful, and the faithless, and won for God many a lost soul.

I had personally witnessed the power of his powerful sermons melting many hearts to tears on many an occasion.

It was time of the Madhu festival when Catholics and non-Catholics, Tamils and Sinhalese alike from all over Sri Lanka, go to the jungle shrine of Mother Mary, our Lady of Madhu, in the Mannar district.

As the District Superior of the Mannar District, the Very Rev. Fr Peter preached the sermon in both Sinhala and Tamil, on the ninth and last night of the Novena. The crowds extending deep into the jungle in every direction listened spellbound.

The vespers ended, and a man wended his way towards the front of the church, knelt before Fr Peter for his blessing, took off a large gold chain from his neck and put that chain on Fr Peter's neck. Fr Peter took the chain and placed it on the neck of the statue of Mother Mary that stood nearby. The man, a Sinhalese businessman, was so moved that such a powerfully blissful homily in Sinhala could come from the tongue of a Tamil.

Prayer service

The second of November is All Souls' Day in the Christian calendar, when the faithful visit the cemetery to remember their dead, and to pray for them. The local priest conducts a prayer service in the cemetery in the afternoon. Hardly a heart is left untouched, or not moved to tears, at the end of Fr Peter's homily Although Peter's calling came early in life, his entry to the priesthood was somewhat late.

He had five sisters two of whom were to take religious orders, and a younger brother, and Peter felt it was his filial duty to help the father settle his younger sister Rosie in marriage before he would answer his call to serve God; with his secondary schooling completed, he set off to Singapore, following in the footsteps of two of his maternal uncles, and worked there as a schoolteacher for some years until he realised his aim. Now a mature young man, he travelled to Rome at his own expense and joined a seminary for his theological studies to enter the priesthood.

After his ordination, he returned home to Jaffna, to serve in the local diocese. While in Rome, he had also mastered the Italian and French languages besides the mandatory Latin, all to a great degree of fluency. It was his Latin that drew me close to him, to learn under him the language that I had not learnt at school that was to help me get further with my studies.

Fr Peter's French, together with his piety, devotion and dedication, took him on regular trips to Colombo, to preach retreats to the French clerical fraternity in Lanka.

One of his early parishes was Anuradhapura , and that was where he acquired scholarly fluency in Sinhala that implied that the Sinhala mudalali, that premier businessman, to take off that golden chain to gift to the priest.

Quite a strange incident in Mannar that impressed my mind about Fr Peter's saintliness and virtue as perceived by any average person comes to mind. The hiring car that took Fr Peter to the Railway Station for his French rendezvous suddenly vanished from sight, to the great consternation of the houseboy and others at the presbytery. The time for the train was also fast approaching. They all started praying frantically, when the car reappeared. Fr Peter was safely transported to the station just in the nick of time.

The driver, back from the station, had to profusely apologise to the houseboy for his irresponsible behaviour. He had parked the car and walked away for a quick smoke. On his return he just glanced towards the back of the car and saw Fr Peter's sun hat on top of the back seat, and he drove off. Such was the reverence in which this priest was held, that many would not look him straight in the eye.

Missing

When the driver found Fr Peter was missing at the station, he concluded that the priest had really gone to heaven. He had driven back in haste to the presbytery to report the event, to find Fr Peter calmly waiting for the car. The houseboy had loaded the luggage and the hat into the car while the driver was enjoying his smoke; upon his return after the smoke, the driver had mistaken the hat for the priest!

Mannar wasn't a particularly affluent parish, and the old St Sebastian's Church was almost crumbling and a new church needed to be built. Fr Peter undertook that mission with barely a penny in the till, and miraculously completed the new Church that now stands glorious as the Mannar Cathedral; his rich ex-parishioners from Pesalai, a neighbouring fishing village which had experienced a reformation under his relentless care, and particularly one man to whom Peter was truly God's man on earth who could not be let down for want of finances , generously gifted the 'proceeds of a day's catch' several times over, to see to the grand church's completion.

Fr Peter accomplished similar feats with churches in some of his other parishes later.

Foreign and local priests whom he had trained and shaped are many. Favours he had granted to, or obtained for, the deserving, in his lifetime and after, are also many. May this holy and righteous man's exemplary life continue to serve as a shining beacon to those who seek a path to serve God and man in their life on earth.

Anton Jesuthasan (sajj)