GODS PLUNDERED By Valmiki Faleiro
The hiatus has cracked, the lull’s shattered. The respite from a spate of church thefts last year, short-lived. The siege on Goa’s churches has begun anew. To loot the little that remains of a hoary heritage. About a fortnight ago, thieves struck twice for church artefacts in Bardez, in a single night. It is easy to blame only the police. Art and antiques attract predators anywhere in the world. As a Mexican would say, "Like flies around my horse’s arse." Over the past half century, the worldwide tribe of wealthy art collectors multiplied. Prices spiraled, stakes shot through the roof. Nature abhors vacuum. Local thieves, dealers and smugglers swelled into a legion. So did safeguards at art centres everywhere -- museums, churches, galleries. The Church in Goa, however, watched idly, as repeated rip-offs depleted priceless antiquities and religious art treasures in this "Rome of the East." The Church is the ultimate custodian of the faith and its temporal assets. While the world’s curators, in the face of soaring commerce in stolen artefacts, rushed to catalogue their prized possessions, the Church in Goa, the institution, did an ostrich. And from much before it came to be headed by a native bishop, Dom Francisco da Piedade Rebelo. Today, if police per chance recover some stolen church property, there is no basis even to establish identity. In fairness, plunder of the gods did not begin from the night of 19/Dec/1961. And not always by the ‘bhaile’ (migrants), patronized by art smugglers from beyond Goa. Our own ‘bhitorle’ had already ravaged religious repositories long before the ‘bhailes’ arrived. The difference today is, thanks to far freer and wider local media coverage, a church heist grabs headlines. Times were not the same. Let’s peek at how they were. Human avarice kneweth no wrath of God. Even among those who spread the word of God, men in cassocks. And lay descendants of illustrious ancestries of men of God. Scandal by the religious was not reported in newspapers those days. It travelled by word of mouth, in hushed tones. For the general laity, sacraments in Latin spiced the awe of padres, regarded as incapable of sin. Sensational was the ‘vanishing trick’ of the sparkling jewels on ‘Goencho Saib’ St. Francis Xavier’s reliquary, a late-17th century gift from an Italian duke. The diamonds were reputed to be of such rare quality that they shone bright in the otherwise ill-lit, high-vaulted chapel housing the Spaniard’s mausoleum at Bom Jesus basilica. Nobody must have noticed the light bouncing off the jewels gradually diminish. The jewels were intact -- to the naked eye -- as originally embedded by Florentine artisans. At the time, a Goan priest born not afar from Old Goa, worked at the Basilica. He sure must have worked long and hard nights, with local jewellers, carefully replacing the diamonds with fakes. Consider recent unconfirmed reports of a huge amount of money found in the personal effects of a deceased Goan priest. A sum he had no legitimate means of coming to. A friend in the know says the priest had polished off church artifacts from Carambolim and some part of the Agacaim parish. There was this priest in Goa’s port town. One night in the mid-1970s, a police patrol picked him carrying a gunny bag. The jute sack was full of church antiques. An inspired story went round that the priest was insane, that no man in his senses would go out in cassock with a sack of antiques in the dead of the night... Grey deeds came even by day. An anguished, public cry for justice (in the form of a Dec-25 newspaper Ad) by a Gulf-Goan alluded to a famous priest, who later met a tragic end. The man said the priest stole his wife and, through her, several lakhs of his hard earned money. The man got a divorce after conclusively proving he had not fathered his wife’s youngest child. Even if the High Court dismissed the man’s plea that the priest be put to a paternity test. Saints, in comparison, are the blissful padres who allowed damaged but serviceable old Belgian crystal chandeliers to be replaced with ‘new,’ by Bombay ‘Chor Bazaar’ crooks. Or who marred historic church facades with RCC weather shades. And assorted travesty. In resolute action, the Goa Church, down ages, was found wanting. Not all is lost. One hears of enlightenment at the helm now. That must cheer us, all Goans. At stake is our residual, collective heritage. It would be totally misleading and unfair to suggest that only priests were privy to ripping off churches. Lay Goans had their fair share. Next week, let’s pan to a marvellous specimen... a stellar player who masterminded many a god theft in Goa. No names, because there’s no proof. Bolting horses never leave their hides behind! The Valmiki Faleiro weekly column at: http://www.goanet.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=330 ============================================================================== The above article appeared in the October 15, 2006 edition of the HERALD, Goa _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list Goanet@lists.goanet.org http://lists.goanet.org/listinfo.cgi/goanet-goanet.org