By RICK SNIZEK, Executive Editor
PROVIDENCE — Father Vijay Kiran proudly sports two lapel pins on his clerical suit jacket: one for Saint John Paul II and one for Saint Teresa of Calcutta.
While most people would be blessed to have been in the presence of even a single future saint in their lifetime, Father Kiran has been doubly blessed to have interacted multiple times with both over the course of his formative and early years as a priest in his native India.
Those interactions with the two globally revered holy figures — as they were journeying on the living path to sainthood — have had a profound impact on his life. So much so that over the last decade, Father Kiran has been amassing a trove of cultural and religious artifacts that honor the likeness of each saint, gathered by various means from around the world.
Upon his retirement from active ministry in July, Father Kiran will return to his native Bangalore, the burgeoning capital and largest city of the southern Indian state of Karnataka — with an estimated population of about 14 million people. There, he plans to open a museum dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saints John Paul II and Mother Teresa.
Father Kiran was on the second of two breaks he had taken to serve in the U.S. when he came to Rhode Island from the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Maryland, to preach a mission. Here, he met Msgr. Ronald Simeone, who encouraged him to explore the possibility of serving in Providence, and in 2016, he went to St. Thomas More, narragansett to serve as an assistant pastor.
Given his background — Father Kiran worked hard to earn three Ph.D.’s related to Church architecture, conservation and management, he did extensive research and published a book on the history of the stained glass windows at St. Thomas More. He currently serves as a hospital chaplain.
Father Kiran led Rhode Island Catholic on a tour of a large room at Blessed Sacrament rectory, where he is in residence, during one of several interviews for this story as it has developed, to view hundreds of items of memorabilia commemorating both Saint John Paul II and Mother Teresa.
Financing the project entirely from his earnings as a priest, Father Kiran had to arrange for the very expensive shipments of even small boxes of items back to India for storage until he was ready only as he could afford to. “Everything I have earned as a priest is gone,” he said of his personal investment.
And he knows it’s been money well spent because the materials he’s brought together will propagate the faith back home more than the spoken word can.
“Those are all beautiful memories,” Father Kiran said, with a peaceful and loving smile, as he displays photos, beginning early in his priestly formation in the Archdiocese of Madras and Mylepore, of him accompanying both Saint John Paul II and Mother Teresa on official visits to Catholic dioceses in India.
In the first, as a deacon holding a 35mm camera, Father Kiran is walking side-by-side with the pontiff as one of two organizing secretaries for Saint John Paul II’s Feb. 5, 1986, visit to Madras. On that day, the pope preached about how religious freedom should be a right for all creeds, as well as the right to proselytize them — a momentous statement in an overwhelmingly Hindu nation (80 percent), where only about 2.5 percent of the population identifies as Christian.
Despite the low percentage, that still translated into 20 million Catholics in a country with a 1986 population of 790 million people. Today, the total population of India is estimated at 1.4 billion people, and the government still forbids open evangelization of faith.
The pope and his entourage later that day ascended a local hilltop where tradition holds that St. Thomas the Apostle became a martyr after bringing Christianity to India.
Father Kiran would be ordained a priest five months later, on July 23, 1986, for the Dioceses of Madras and Mylepore, established in 1606 — now the Archdiocese of Madras Mylepore.
In other photos he is seen greeting Mother Teresa and other religious of her Missionaries of Charity during several occasions in which Father Kiran encountered the “Saint of the Gutters” for the Albanian-Indian Catholic nun’s tireless ministry in serving the sick, poor and dying in the slums of Calcutta.
“She was a very simple person, always concerned about the poor and the needy,” he recalls of her.
He asked her more than once for a blessing, but she demurred, saying she would never offer a blessing upon a priest.
“You are a priest, you must bless me,” Saint Theresa would say as she bowed to him.
“You have consecrated hands; you will have to bless me,” she told him.
Meticulously catalogued and arranged on tables throughout the room tables are filled with collectible stamp and coin sets, books, photos and paintings, even a relic of St. Teresa encased in a monstrance, all which Father Kiran had collected during over the course of a decade.
All of the artifacts collected from around the world were already in the packing and shipping phase, which could cost $100 for a large box. It would take three months to arrive in India by container ship and placed into safe keeping for the museum, the blueprint for which has already been drafted.
During a visit home a year ago, not even a planned surgical procedure could slow his enthusiasm. Father Kiran oversaw the setting up tables of statues of Blessed Virgin Mary with different titles. There were also fact cards about each statue for the people to read.
The long lines of area schoolchildren and other people in Bangalore, who came out in droves to see a preview exhibit of some of the artifacts served as evidence of the strong appeal for the full museum.
In one of his photos, shared with Rhode Island Catholic, a schoolgirl is seen copying down on paper the information from at least one note card for her own edification.
“I started to collect Mother Mary statues about 20-25 years ago as one of my hobbies,” said Father Kiran, who began his ministry in the Church as an altar server and always remained a part of it.
“I was an altar server for many years in my parish. I was very close to the Church. We were very close to the priests,” said Father Kiran, who was born in Bangalore in 1955, the oldest of two brothers, and has one sister.
He was 31 when he was ordained to the priesthood.
While Hindi is the most widely spoken language in India, he learned Tamil for his ministry.
His first appointment was as assistant financial administrator in the diocese. He then was assigned to a parish for five years then appointed chancellor and later secretary to the bishop before returning to parish administration for seven years.
He took his first break in the U.S. in 2006, when he traveled to Miami to serve as a hospital chaplain.
He was inspired to delve into the history of the statues, many of which were given to him by others on their travels around the world, through his own travels, especially all over the U.S., or ones he acquired off websites such as eBay, Etsy, Amazon and so on.
He learned that Our Lady of La Leche is the oldest shrine devoted to Mary in the country, established in 1587 in St. Augustine, Florida.
He had collected about a dozen of them and then carried over that same devotion to honor Saint Mother Theresa after she was canonized in 2016.
“I felt I must do something on these two saints, Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa,” he said of the ones he’s acquired.
After doing months of research, he found that both saints’ lives were already well-documented. So, he decided to collect all the books about them that he could to start a library for the seminarians and nuns in Bangalore, which is home to two major Catholic seminaries and 56 religious formation houses for men and 124 congregations of nuns with more than 50 formation houses.
“So far I have collected 1,250 books on Saint John Paul II and more than 550 books on Mother Teresa,” he said.
“I’m looking forward to going back to do this project, which will be my retirement project, and it will be one of the most unique libraries in India. Nobody has such an extensive collection on these two saints,” he said.
The project will incorporate the library into the museum, so there will be something of great interest to all who visit.
His mother and brother are very supportive of Father Kiran’s ambitions.
His brother demonstrated this by taking a loan to purchase a small 2,000-square-foot building adjacent to his Bangalore home that will house the museum.
Father Kiran will live with his family next door so he will be able to constantly oversee the fruits of his love for the Blessed Virgin Mary and of the two saints. When the museum and library are completed, Father Kiran will have brought to life an everlasting tribute to honor them.
He will need to raise the remaining $56,000 USD equivalent required to outfit the museum for visitation. The ideal layout for a full museum and separate library would have cost 18 million rupees, about $189,000, but he knows this is not feasible.
In addition to investing most of his own resources in his labor of love for the Blessed Virgin Mary and for the saints, Father Kiran will graciously accept any donations from anyone in the Rhode Island diocese where he has served for the last 10 years. A plaque will be placed at the museum to enshrine the donor’s name.
Although 80 percent of the population is Hindu, followed by about 15 percent Muslims, with Buddhists, Christians, Jains and Sihks making up the remaining single-digit percentages, Christians have an outsized influence due to their individual numbers overall.
And as preliminary interest in the Blessed Virgin Mary and Catholic saints has shown, the museum will be a revered and cherished resource for the faithful of India, not just in Bangalore, but far beyond.
“Our influence in India is much more because India has 1.45 billion people across 172 dioceses, with more than 200 bishops. Sixty percent of the basic education in the country is provided by Catholics,” Father Kiran said.
With an anti-conversion bill passing in the legislatures of several Indian states, the museum will offer a needed bulwark, providing a forum that promotes even a silent witness to the faith.
“In India today we cannot directly evangelize. We cannot preach anymore, officially,” Father Kiran explained.
“If anybody wants to be a Christian, they must go before a magistrate and must declare that on their free will they are going to become a Christian. After that it can be done.”
“My museum, and this little library, will be a silent evangelization. People can come there to talk, visit and pray.”
To help support Father Vijay Kiran in his mission to open a museum and library dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saints John Paul II and Teresa of Calcutta, please contact him by phone at 401-594-7645, or by email at frvijaykiran@gmail.com.
