19 Jul 2020 | 05:29am IST

Basilio G. Monteiro

hanks to the internet and social media, there has been recently a flurry of heartwarming news snippets about the priests in Goa engaged in agricultural/farming work along with their parishioners. The Goan diaspora is enthralled by the sight of young folks making farming cool again.

Due to many historical accidents and particularly driven by pseudo-development models fuelled by neo-liberal economics, domestic farming and self-sustenance agriculture fell out of favour.

Farming came to be seen with less dignity and derided by those aspiring to move to the ranks of the middle-class and up. The fertile land, which, for generations, reliably fed all inhabitants, has been ransacked by greedy, unscrupulous and incompetent developers in collusion with some corrupt politicians.

This pandemic lockdown, despite its built-in pain, has awakened in us a renewed appreciation for food grown in ones backyard and by oneself.

Pope Francis, in the last chapter of his letter Laudato Si, speaks about ecological education and spirituality; the farming ministry of the priests in Goa invites us to consider the frayed relationship between the human roots and the ecological crisis.

The COVID-19 lockdown underscored Pope Francis letter on the CARE of OUR COMMON HOME, in which he encourages us to act:

Yet all is not lost. Human beings, while capable of the worst, are also capable of rising above themselves, choosing again what is good, and making a new start, despite their mental and social conditioning. We are able to take an honest look at ourselves, to acknowledge our deep dissatisfaction and to embark on new paths to authentic freedom. No system can completely suppress our openness to what is good, true and beautiful, or our God-given ability to respond to his grace at work deep in our hearts. I appeal to everyone throughout the world not to forget this dignity which is ours. No one has the right to take it from us (205).

A good number of priests in Goa are engaged in farming for quite some time, with the enthusiastic encouragement of Archbishop Filipe Neri Ferrao. The students at Saligao and Rachol seminaries and of the Pastoral Institute at Old Goa have been fruitfully living off the land for quite a few years.

On a recent quick survey among the priests in Goa, I discovered, with utmost delight, that a significant number of them across Goa are taking, without any fanfare, very good care of our Common Home, albeit in small patches of land in their respective backyards or in neighbouring fields.

A few examples arepaddy cultivation at Sao Jose De Areal, Quelossim, Curtorim and Benaulim (this one in an area of 6000 sq meters); farms are being fostered in Carambolim, Veluz, Old Goa and many other villages.

Rachol Seminary students have been engaged in cultivating their own paddy fields for their self-sustenance, with the collaboration of farmhands from nearby villages, who offer their services free of charge; after the paddy season is over, the fields are converted into vegetable gardens; the seminary has a productive collaboration with the Horticulture Department of the Government of Goa.

Saligao Seminary daily time-table includes work in the kitchen garden, where the students grow more than twenty kinds of vegetables, relishing them at the dining table. The efforts of the Calangute parish leadership turned to be highly influential in getting some folks from the village to cultivate their lands again, in one case after 15 years, and in another, after 25 years.

It is noteworthy that Fr Bolmax Pereira, armed with a PhD in Botany, is leading an eager generation of millennials in reclaiming the fallow lands of Chicalim; they even formed an enthusiastic Chicalim Youth Farmers Club, while the Pilar Fathers have been faithful guardians of our Common Home in Sanguem and Pilar, besides Birondem, where they run a farm belonging to the archdiocese.

The Don Bosco Agricultural Education Complex in Sulcorna, pioneered and managed by the Salesians, is where the relationship between ecology and spirituality is cultivated in the minds and the hearts of the students. Their work in the agricultural renaissance in Goa is prodigious.

The Redemptorists on the Porvorim hillock have an innovative initiative towards a sustainable planet: RED ROCK GREENS (RRG). Given the rocky 10000 sq metres at their disposal, they launched into terrace gardening, which led to a farmers market with 30 farmers participating in this collective.

Their venture in rain water harvesting, stands as a model for other villages to harvest the bountiful rainwater. Vagator parish kitchen garden serves as a small feeder to the neighbours in need and Borim parish garden generously distributes tenddli, bananas and papayas to its neighbours.

There are young fellows whom I came to know, looking for collaboration with other equally minded young Goans, such as Adv Gideon Noronha (Vasco), who is committed to a renaissance of the comunidade land, the young Lance Godinho (Verna), passionate about rainwater harvesting, and Hychinta Aguiar (Divar), who walks villages to map the biodiversity of Goa.

Farming is a collective enterprise, where human bonds are formed, nurtured, valued, and interdependency is experienced as asine qua non for healthy living. In this collective exercise we discover our common humanity and realize that well cultivated relationships in shared hardships of cultivating the land are indispensable for integral human development and integral living in the village community.

This COVID-19 pandemic woke us up to a profound spiritual reality that humans need to connect with the transcendent. Pope Francis eloquently reflects on this fundamental and noble dimension of our life intertwined between the care of the nature and care for each other:

Care for nature is part of a lifestyle which includes the capacity for living together and communion. Jesus reminded us that we have God as our common Father and that this makes us brothers and sisters. Fraternal love can only be gratuitous; it can never be a means of repaying others for what they have done or will do for us. That is why it is possible to love our enemies. This same gratuitousness inspires us to love and accept the wind, the sun and the clouds, even though we cannot control them. In this sense, we can speak of a universal fraternity (228).

The pain of the COVID-19 lockdown ought not to be in vain. The re-awakening to the fact that the soil of the earth sustains us compels us to discover our humanity, our spirituality and helps us to build and value human bonds as well as cultivate a harmonious community.

(The writer is a Diocesan priest from Goa teaching at St. Johns University, New York).

See the original post:

The Care of our COMMON HOME fires up Priests of Goa - Oherald