Fr Mathew Lewis was certainly a stalwart missionary, consummate administrator, effective retreat director, ever available spiritual director and indefatigable worker of the Kingdom.
He was born in Kallianpur on 10 August 1918 of Mr Lawrence Lewis and Mrs. Louisa Natalia Picardo. He had his early education at the parish school. Thereafter he proceeded to St Aloysius College Mangalore, and completed his graduation in History and Economics. At that time already he must have felt a kind of attraction for the Jesuit way of life. This must have been accentuated during his one year of teaching experience at St Joseph’s Indian High School, Bangalore, and it pursued him even when he got a lucrative job at the Telephone Department in Bombay. The Hound of Heaven followed him up the hills and down the vales till he finally surrendered himself and joined the Jesuit novitiate at Calicut on 3 March 1943, to the great surprise of his relatives who thought he would find a fitting partner and settle down. Once he joined the Jesuits, it was a total surrender without reservations; only then he could find real peace. One of his brothers, Fr Peter Lewis (Shilananda), was also a Jesuit, a missionary of the Bombay Province.
Then on, it was a steady march for Mathew, through the Novitiate, Juniorate, Philosophy and Theology. Even before becoming a Jesuit, he had some experience of perfecting in St Louis Boarding House when he was teaching in the Indian High School (HIS), and that must have been taken as equivalent to regency. He had a determined will and the strength of Jesuit spirituality to take him forward. With Ordination at Pune and Tertianship at Kodaikanal, he emerged a mature and common sense man, ready to be sent anywhere as the needs of the Kingdom required. Nothing was too difficult for him. Such calls were plenty in his life, as many as 25, as he himself would relate. Seeing his endless zeal and the vast good he accomplished for the Kingdom, the Superiors recognized his worth and promoted him to the Profession of Solemn Vows.
Fr Mathew was not a brilliant scholar, but an earnest student and a hardworking Jesuit, and hence successful too, in whatever task he put his hand to. He was always a man of books over which he poured till practically the very end. When he wrote something, his head, heart and hand would vie with each other to give expression to what caught his eye right then: The Anekal Mission, The Mundgod Mission, Strange Men These! Karnataka Jesuit Evangelizers, Traditions of Spiritual Guidance. He translated the book, The Jesuit Martyrs of Uganda. No wonder the Superiors chose him to be the coordinator of Missions.
His first preference was to work among the poor and the marginalized in the mission field, but his first appointment was to St Joseph’s Seminary, Mangalore. We can imagine his inner feelings. He later recalls his first years’ experience in the Seminary, “the toughest and the most challenging. I went through it all the same, and at the end of it came the liberation, to use the modern terminology, when my Provincial told me I could go to the missions. With a sense of relief and freedom, I stepped out.”
As classroom teaching was not his cup of tea, he had already offered himself for the missions. He worked in different mission stations of the Province. The work was hard, and the challenges were many. There was need of money for improvements. That was the time when the Karnataka Province was going through a financial crisis, and was not able to help the missionaries. The Provincial sent them with a big blessing, and they had to fend for themselves. He worked in places like Channapatna, Nagavalli, Suntikoppa and so on.
On the Calicut Mission becoming a Vice-province, when Karnataka lost its Pulaya missions to Kerala and the new Vice-province was looking for fresh opportunities of evangelization, there came a call from Africa for laborers to work among the Indian settlers in S. Africa. While Fr Picardo was the first man chosen to be sent there, there was need of a companion for him. As Fr Mathew Lewis had opted for the missions and had already had some mission experience, the choice fell on him to accompany Fr Picardo.
“It was a fateful day when I was sent to a foreign mission to Africa with Fr William Picardo. I was totally unprepared. It was not to my liking to be uprooted from the local missions and to get used to new surroundings and people in the Dark Continent”, he wrote later on. As the scope for direct evangelization among the Gujaratis in Africa was woefully little, Fr Mathew opted back, incurring the displeasure of the Vice-provincial, and gave himself to work in his native land...
Once back, Mathew moved from place to place, from office to office, socius to the Provincial, warden at St Aloysius, director at Gonzaga House and then Rector of St Aloysius. It was a tale of success wherever he went. His immediate predecessor at St Aloysius, for instance, had left his office in financial straits. With his characteristic efficiency, at the end of his term he left the office with little for his successor to worry about. It was his signal success that must have prompted those concerned to ask for a second term for him as Rector at the time of the Centenary celebration of the College. Its success too, to a large extent was due to the unique touch he gave to the celebrations. His love for the poor was manifested when, at the close of the centenary celebrations, he set aside a substantial amount of money for the establishment of Aloysian Boys’ Home at Nehrunagar for the rehabilitation of the delinquent boys as a centenary memorial. His successors faithfully carried out this far-sighted project and ran it successfully with the stupendous collaboration of the Sisters of Charity until 2020, when it had to be closed down for want of new admissions, although it still continues in its new avatar as a hostel for poor students from North Karnataka. Mathew, whose heart always beat for the Missions, would be mighty pleased.
Offices came to Fr Mathew one after another: Even before being made rector of St Aloysius, St Joseph’s Indian High School had him as its first Superior when the community moved to Lavelle Road as a separate unit. After his second term at St Aloysius, he was made Superior of Ashirvad for a couple of years (1980-82). But left to himself, his first love was missions. That is how he landed at Mundgod when he was 65. With the able assistance of his companion Fr Pradeep Sequeira, and unstinted cooperation of the Sisters of Charity, he revived the faith, fervour and fellowship of the little flock both in Mundgod town and in the sub stations of Mainalli and Ugginakeri where mosthly the Siddis, descendants of African slaves, dwelt. Inevitably perhaps the proverbial Paul-Barnabas syndrome led to Father Mathew’s transfer to Hassan, where restless that he always was, the invitation of the Bishop of Karwar, the great, gracious and good Msgr William D’Mello came to him as a welcome boon and he left for Madangeri, a small catholic outpost close to the famous Gokarna Temple. It did not take the Superior s too long to realize that if the Mission has to go forward, an experienced person like Fr Mathew had to be there. So, back he was in Mundgod. Immediately he purchased a little plot of land to able to replace the small old church, with a bigger beautiful one there. With the help of the Sisters of Charity, he started a small school in the premises of LVK, which Fr Lawrence Pinto would take to greater heights. However, it was Fr Mathew’s far-sightedness that led him to identify the land for the present school campus and initiate negotiations for its purchase.
After coming from Mundgod he was seen as chaplain now at St Philomena’s, now at Arsikere. None of these appointments could contain his zeal nor exhaust it. Thus for six years (1993-98) he was director of Dhyanashrama, Bangalore, making it a vibrant retreat house. Only from 2000 did he gracefully let himself age at Ashirvad, even there doing his mite like retreat direction, confessions and counseling, reading and praying, doing gardening and walking around. His principle always was to ask himself, not why should I, but why shouldn’t I. Though for years he had been home to several ailments, he always kept them at bay; but now at Ashirvad, after a brief hospitalization, he passed away on 1.1.2008, at the ripe old age of 90, to receive the crown the Lord had prepared for him.
- by Fr Richard Sequeira, SJ
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