He arrived in India to meet the bishops, his fellow Salesian confreres, but also the civil authorities such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj, whom he thanked personally, “for their efforts to secure my liberation”.
The priest will celebrate a thanksgiving mass in the Cathedral of New Delhi, then he will reach Bangalore and meet with the Salesians of the province, and in the next few days, he will be busy in several meetings with civil and religious authorities of the Kerala state from which he is originally from. Sometime in the near future, he will eventually go back to his pastoral service.
Nothing will be like before for father Tom. The massacre of the nuns with whom he worked (the four Missionaries of Charity murdered on March 3,2016), the experience of imprisonment and long-running kidnapping have marked him forever. “Those days were like a long spiritual retreat,” the Salesian tells Vatican Insider. I have had the opportunity to enter deeply into myself, to think again about my life, my vocation and the mission the Lord entrusted to me” he says.
In his goodness and Providence - Tom Uzhunnalil continues - the Lord has allowed me to live this experience, to experience insecurity, suffering, privation, imprisonment, and then return to being a free man, still able to carry out my mission as a baptized, a priest, a son of Don Bosco. I thank God with all of myself for this new possibility,” he says deeply moved.
The Salesian priest tells us that during the seizure he lived and found strength through “spiritual communion”: “I celebrated Mass spiritually every day, remembering by heart all the readings and parts of the liturgy, as I had no liturgical texts nor bread and wine to celebrate the Eucharistic sacrifice”. But at that moment, hostage of persecutors who could have put an end to Father Tom’s earthly existence, he notes that “I was the Eucharistic sacrifice, my own body was a living sacrifice that pleased God”.
The priest is grateful to God for having lived this long ordeal that has drawn him closer to “the suffering man, the one who knows anguish, who has been mistreated and rejected, Christ on the cross”. Even if he says that he did not fear death, he would often go back to what happened on March 3,2016, the eve before the massacre: the director of the house of the Missionaries of Charity of Aden, noting the precarious situation in which they were as missionaries in a territory marked by conflict and violence, had said “It would be nice to be martyred all together for Christ”. And the youngest of the religious - who survived the attack - had replied, “I want to live for Christ.
This “new life” is today very real for Father Tom, who has the enthusiasm of a young religious, and claims that he is “ready to give all of himself to sow the Gospel and proclaim the Kingdom of heaven”.
Of the same mood is another priest who made the painful experience of a kidnapping: Teresito Soganub (called “p. Chito”), the Filipino priest kidnapped on 23 May and released after 117 days of imprisonment by the terrorists of the “Maute” group linked to the Islamic State, which occupied the city of Marawi, on the island of Mindanao (Southern Philippines).
My kidnapping was God’s will. A test that He wanted. I have confidence in Him. My future? I see myself only in Marawi: Christians and Muslims, we are brothers and we believe in the only, one God “: he said, after he was freed by the Filipino army, which is on the verge of defeating the jihadists.
Upon his arrival in Manila, the priest of Marawi recalled the kidnapping, noting that he never attempted to escape, because he wanted to “share the fate with the other hostages until the end”. Soganub thanked “all those who prayed for us and for our salvation” and said that he wanted to continue to engage in Islamic-Christian dialogue and peace-building.
A kidnapping as a “spiritual experience”: Luciano Benedetti - a missionary of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (Pime), who resisted 68 days in the hands of terrorists from the “Abu Sayyaf” group, forcibly wandering through the forests of Mindanao – speaks about it as well “I was kidnapped by men, but also by God”, he said after being rescued. It was an “extra experience” - he explained – something extra in my life. I’ve come face to face with death, I‘ll never forget that, as I’ll never forget the seed of humanity - the seed of God - that I found in my kidnappers. For me it was a calling to give more space to prayer and personal relationship with God “.
