Father Jack Kenealy left his West Side home to join the Jesuits as a youth of 17. Four years later, he said goodbye to the United States as he embarked on a missionary career in India. Back on a home visit at the age of 75, the tall, stoop-shouldered man, retains something of the elf about him. Wearing a pale aqua polo shirt, greenish trousers and blue Converse sneakers, with a green canvas bag slung over one shoulder, he looks more like an overgrown paperboy than a priest. His hands and face are spotted with age, but he laughs often and as easily as a child. The accent of his Irish upbringing in Austin sometimes scrapes through the more lilting Indian speech pattern he has picked up. Indians are patient people, he says, and it comes through in his deliberate answers, his willingness to wait for the right words to come to him.

The Catholic New World: How did you end up going to India and staying so long?

Jesuit Father Jack Kenealy: I joined the Jesuits in 1945, after graduating from St. Ignatius High School. In those days, the next thing was the draft, or college, but I wasn’t going to college, so if you wanted to join, you had to do it by your 18th birthday.

I knew about India because we used to have mission collections in high school, for the Patna mission. After I joined, you could volunteer, or you didn’t have to volunteer. If you didn’t volunteer, then they probably wouldn’t send you. If you volunteered, then they might send you, or they might not. I said let them make the decision, so I volunteered.

They decided to send me in 1949.



TCNW: Tell me about the trip.

JFJK: We went by ship in those days. It took a month. But the war was over, so we went by luxury liner. It was a very pleasant journey, a very interesting journey. There were eight of us, eight Jesuits, and six nuns also, from Cleveland. Notre Dame sisters. We went and landed in Bombay. This is before jet planes, before jet lag was invented.

Then in India, they sent me to language school.



TCNW: What language did you learn?

JFJK: Hindi.



TCNW: For how long?

JFJK: That was about seven months, in Patna, before I went to South India for three years to study philosophy.

Then I came back to Patna for two years and taught in one of the schools, and then I went for theology, to Darjeeling, which is up in the foothills of the Himalayas. I spent four years there. I grew up over there.

I was ordained in 1958, at Patna.



TCNW: Where in India is Patna?

JFJK: Patna’s in the northeast of India, just south of Nepal. Patna is the capital of the state of Bihar. Before jet lag, mountaineers going up to climb Everest used to come through Patna. Now not many people have to go through Patna. It’s not on the tourist route.



TCNW: What have you done there?

JFJK: I spent 20 years in village mission work. I made a mistake during that time. I used to send my accounts in on time and in fairly good order, so when they divided the diocese (in two, along the Ganges River) and they needed a new treasurer for the new diocese, they made me a treasurer.

So I’ve been in finance for 22 years, and trying to get out of it, but nobody wants the job. I’m also in charge of a marriage tribunal for annulment cases for both the dioceses.



TCNW: After spending most of your life in India, has it been what you expected? You were such a young man when you signed up.

JFJK: Well, we didn’t expect to come back. In those days, before world travel became easy and not so expensive, when we said goodbye, we didn’t expect to come back. It wasn’t the custom. We went over there to live, to spend the rest of our lives there.



TCNW: Was that a hard decision for you to make?

JFJK: No, no, it wasn’t. It was very hard for my mother—I’m an only son, so for her it was a sacrifice. For me it was a great adventure. It’s never been a hard decision. … I was 22, and if you really want to know, I was an Andy Frain usher in high school, so I saw everything in Chicago. I was paid to see whatever events took place in Chicago—sports events, entertainments of various kinds—and I enjoyed it, so I saw everything. It wasn’t enough to give your life to. So I said, if it doesn’t exist in Chicago, then it doesn’t exist over here, that’s all. I love Chicago. This is the greatest place on Earth. But if it’s not here, then I can go. I’m not going to miss it.



TCNW: What were you looking for?

JFJK: Something to dedicate my life to, no? Something worthwhile to do with my life.



TCNW: Did you find it?

JFJK: Yes, I found it. I’m in love with India. I really found a great love there. I love the country, I love the people.



TCNW: What about India attracts you so?

JFJK: It’s very hard to describe. It gets into your system. Once you’ve been there a while, there’s a lifestyle … India’s slower. Life moves slower. The people are gracious. People always have time. People are not in a rush in India. They’re not rushing because you’re going to be delayed in any case. They’re busy, but not in the same way. They’re patient people, actually, and they enjoy meeting people. They like being together.

Indians don’t mind crowds. They like being in crowds, actually, rubbing shoulders and living together. There’s a warmth there that is attractive. It’s very hard to describe. Those who have been there for a number of years, they want to go back.



TCNW: When you were doing village mission work, what did that entail?

JFJK: It’s everything. It’s pastoral work. There are new Christians, so there’s instruction. It’s also educational. They are very poor—the Patna mission is mainly the formerly untouchable caste, very poor people, so educating them, helping with social uplift, various forms of economic help as well.



TCNW: What’s the religious make-up?

JFJK: I don’t have exact numbers. In the area of the original Patna mission, which is now four dioceses, there are about 300 million people. Catholic Christians might be about 100,000, a very small minority. It’s a new church. The first baptism that took place there was around 1914. The church—except for a few isolated pockets—it’s only 60 or 65 years old. But we’re getting vocations from their children, boys and girls.



TCNW: How close contact do you keep with people in the United States? I know you’ve been back for a couple of months this summer.

JFJK: Three months, and I’m still busy meeting people. From the beginning, I kept in contact through correspondence. … The family is a big one, even though we only had three in my family. My father was one of 12, so there were a lot of cousins. There are a lot of people, and I’ve met most of them now.

This is the normal visit, three months every five years.

The first time I came back was after 18 and a half years.



TCNW: What was that like?

JFJK: That was culture shock. I used to visit some of the department stores, and they were so beautiful, I would feel intimidated. Going in, I’d say, gee, maybe they’ll throw me out. It took me a while to adjust the first time. …

It was 1967 I came back, and there were a lot of big changes taking place in the church at that time. People were leaving the priesthood and the convents in droves. We didn’t experience that in India, although we got the benefit of it.



TCNW: How do you mean?

JFJK: It used to be considered a great disgrace. Somebody leaves and gets married—that used to be a big issue, and people didn’t even want to talk about it. It was like the end of the world. And now they know it happens. Nobody takes it so badly.



TCNW: How did Vatican II change the church in India?

JFJK: It gave us more freedom to adapt to Indian customs, in liturgy especially. Of course, the Vatican Council showed more tolerance of both non-Christian and non-Catholic Christian religions. You realize what good people they are. Instead of looking down and sort of judging from a height, you get to know the people and realize these are very sincere people and they’re doing their best, no? So there’s a lot more tolerance. That’s one thing about India—Indian culture is very tolerant. They very religious people, but they don’t care what religion you belong to. Religion is respected, and a religious person is always respected no matter what religious group he belongs to. That’s their way, that’s why you like it.



TCNW: What kind of misconceptions have you run into in the U.S. about India?

JFJK: Nowadays people are interested in India because of the international situation. You’ll see a lot of news reports about India, mostly from a political point of view. Before, when people thought of India, they thought of tigers and snakes and poverty, starvation. They had an image of the starving millions of India. They had an archaic view of the country, and nobody was really interested in India. India wasn’t a superpower, and it didn’t count on the world stage much. Nobody paid too much attention to it. Whatever opinions the Indians might have, they didn’t acknowledge them.

Now, of course, everyone’s interested in India. It’s the world’s largest democratic country. We have really free elections over there. They’re messy; democracy is always messy. But it’s free, and things are changing because of that. A lot of big changes have taken place.

Then they begin to realize how clever the Indians are, because they’re hiring them. Either coming here, or over there. Telemarketing and all that—the Indians are all picking up the phones or making the calls. I know a boy like that in Delhi, I’ve known him since he was a small baby, and now he must be 21 or 22, and he’s got a telemarketing job from some company here in the States. They give him the number, he makes the phone call, and if somebody wants to buy a product then he lets them know. Of course, they’re saving money. If they pay him $200 a month, he’s getting a very good salary there. That’s close to 10,000 rupees a month, which is a very good salary. A high school principal might 8,000 or 9,000 rupees a month. And there’s an endless source of people over there. They speak English well, they are computer-minded—they take to that like a duck to water—they take education very seriously, and they have a tradition of learning. This country is coming up, and the perception of India is much better now, much more accurate now, than the last time I was here five years ago.



TCNW: What would you like to tell people about India and the Patna mission?

JFJK: We have to thank a lot of people. The mission has been helped by so many people and organizations here in Chicago, and the people of the archdiocese continue to help. They give us so much financial help. The Patna diocese—there are about 45 mission stations and parishes, and I would say only three of them are self-supporting. The people are still very poor. It’s mostly rural villages. I’m the treasurer, so I know we still rely heavily on halp from abroad. Most of our expenses are for education.



TCNW: Religious education or general education?

JFJK: General education. All our parishes have small schools, and since the children live in the villages—they don’t live around the mission, they live maybe 10 miles away—they spend the school months with us. They come to the mission and we have little hostels for them. They have to be fed. We charge small fees, as much as they can bear, but nobody’s kept out of school because they can’t pay.



TCNW: Do the girls go as well as the boys?

JFJK: That was a big change since I’ve been there—one of the biggest changes—that they realized the value and importance of educating daughters.



TCNW: Everything I have read says that the best way to improve the situation of a family is to educate the women, who are the ones running the household.

JFJK: Oh, definitely. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. Women are the ones who raise the children. You can’t improve any group of people without educating the women. It’s a lot of the work that’s going on now in Patna, by the church—going out to the villages, to the women. Of course, it’s the sisters who are doing most of it. Women are still neglected, and village women are still illiterate and looked down upon and not treated really with equality. Our sisters go out and do social work: illiteracy, basic health education, social awareness and some skills that can earn money, like sewing. If you live in a village and have a sewing machine, everyone needs a tailor every now and again.

Even to be able to write a letter—a woman whose husband goes away for a job, out of town, and he writes a letter to his wife, and she can’t read it. She has to go to somebody else to have her letter from her husband read to her, and she can’t write. I mean, you have to just imagine what it means not to be able to communicate like that. It’s a very simple thing, no? But if you begin to think about it, you think about how deep it is, how much it means to a young woman who wants to write to her husband and doesn’t want to tell the whole world what she’s writing.

The women are coming up. You give them a chance, and then you realize what strength they have when the band together. They’re growing aware of their dignity and importance.



TCNW: Have you had a happy life there?

JFJK: Very happy.



TCNW: What else do you want Chicago Catholics to understand about India?

JFJK: We have no real shortage of vocations.



TCNW: Why do you think that is?

JFJK: I can’t explain that. It may be the challenge to work among the poor. We get vocations from all over the country. In the south of India, the church is very old, from the time of Christ and the time of the apostles, and of course the time of St. Francis Xavier. Those churches are old down there, and the boys and girls are being recruited and they come up north as missionaries. They learn a new language, a whole new world—it’s the same country, but the difference between north and south is enormous. When foreign missionaries were restricted by the government in the 1960s, all the congregations in the north, they began to recruit in the south, and they came up in the thousands. When history is written, they will see what happened. In the beginning, they came from Kerala, and now they’re coming from Tamil. They’ve not only replaced the foreigners, but they’ve taken it so far beyond that. They’re real missionaries in the best sense of the word. Marvelous. Then the local people from Bihar in the north—some families when they are economically well enough to allow their boys and girls to join. It requires some economic background just to get them educated in the first place, at least to high school level or one or two years of college. Rather than insist that they begin to support the family, if they allow them to become a priest or brother or sister, it means they’ve grown in the faith. We’re getting vocations from our own people, vocations from earlier communities. They join the congregations, the diocesan priesthood. The Jesuits have had a great interest in India from the beginning, from the time of St. Francis Xavier, and now there are more Jesuits in India than in any other country. They’ve surpassed the number in the Unites States. We’re talking about the Indians, not foreigners. We’re a dying breed—we’re the last of generation. And they’re a younger group. The age groups in India, the older ones are on the top (drawing a pyramid) and the younger ones are on the bottom, which means they have a youthful foundation. In the United States, it’s like this (drawing an inverted pyramid) with the older ones on top.

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