RAIA: At the 8.30 am mass at Rachol Church, a little away from Zuari river, it was the first Sunday mass in the Lenten season and people had come to focus on their time of solemnity and prayer. But the mass was not as usual. The church which is usually packed with crowds on the first Friday of the month as people come to make vows to St Joseph Vaz, saw a bizarre incident, when two tourists walked into church in the midst of mass and decided to attend the celebration.
The boys clearly appeared to be misguided tourists of a different faith and genuinely were unaware of the customs and traditions of the Church.
They were dressed for sightseeing and in their Bermuda’s and jackets with backpacks, the boys were not dressed as per the recent norms issued by the Archdiocese of Goa and hence they caught the suspicion of the villagers. The villagers were even more horrified when the boys namely Sunny Agarwal and Bhojraj Singh Sikarwar joined the queue for Holy Communion and that’s when two villagers namely Wilfred Rodrigues and Savio D’Souza video filmed these boys who consumed the Holy Communion and immediately walked out of Church and spat it out. One if them Bhojraj immediately tried to cover it with mud.
That’s when despite mass still in progress large crowds of the Our Lady of Snows Church, Rachol came out and apprehended the boys and charged the desecration was a pre-planned to create communal discord while this, as later developments proved didn’t appear to be the case.
Tension grew further since the Maina-Curtorim police reached late as they were believed to be on election duty.
But the person who kept calm through the tension, was the Parish Priest, Fr Eremito Rebello. Fr Eremito completed the mass proceedings and forgave them after they wrote letters of apology. But he was wary of the crowd tension and wanted to shift the boys away from the mob. That’s when Maina Curtorim PSI Alvito Rodrigues stepped in and gave the boys a patient hearing before the crowds.
“Sunny Agarwal showed us his personal books in the bag and how he has a diary highlighting great places across India that he wants to visit. The boys here hired a two-wheeler from Mormugao and came to see Rachol as a 17th century site and entered the mass ignorant of their attire. They received the Communion thinking it as ‘Prasad’ and because of it different taste, they spat it outside the church and were covering it with mud not to leave it open for someone else to see as disrespectful unrealising the damage they were doing hurting the religious sentiments of people around them,” explained PSI Alvito.
