Our Associate, Fr Antony, who is from south India, is part of a religious order that does ministry in the north part of India. His superior, Fr. John Olickal, is visiting from India and will be speaking to us on the weekend of August 28/29. He is the Provincial Superior of the Little Flower Province of Little Flower Congregation from India.
He writes, “Little Flower Congregation (C.S.T.) was founded in Kerala, India in the year 1931 by Rev. Fr. Basilius CST (Fr. Thomas Panat). St. Therese, known as “The Little Flower”, is the patroness of the Congregation. Our Charism is: ‘Be little; Serve the little.’ This means imbibing the attitude of a child like simplicity, love, trust and absolute surrender to God in the context of Gospel teaching and Theresian spirituality. The Little Flower Congregation, out of its missionary zeal to proclaim the Good News sent its members to Gorakhpur Region in North India in 1970. Pleased with its missionary works, the Holy See created the new Diocese of Gorakhpur in 1984 and entrusted it to the care of Little Flower Congregation.
In the Little Flower Province we have at present 50 priests, 25 professed Major Seminarians and 35 Minor Seminarians. The newly recruited candidates after their High School are trained in Kerala for one year and are sent to the Novitiate in the Punjab before they make the Profession.
The priests of the Little Flower Province are involved in missionary activities especially in the fields of faith formation and evangelization, education of the poor, community organization, job oriented training and community health education. Adult illiteracy, children not able to attend schools, unemployment, children straying in the streets as orphans, truants from schools and homes, child labor, child trafficking etc. are some of the crucial problems of the place. So we run formal and informal Schools, Vocational Training Centers, Rehabilitation Centers, Orphanages, Dispensaries, Social Development Centers, etc. We also run a Residential School for the children of the Chepang, a hill-tribe of Nepal, who are greatly in need of development.