As a teenager, he was an active member of the parish youth. Always having this mission in his mind he decided to become a priest and joined the Blessed Sacrament Fathers in Mumbai.
Once ordained, he came back to Goa and, always a man with a mission, went to different parishes, with a guitar and a big smile, giving talks to youth members. Not satisfied with this he embraced wholeheartedly his real mission. What was it? The same as that of the Prophet of Nazareth who, in the Synagogue of Nazareth on a Sabbath Day, using the words of Prophet Isaiah said: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has anointed me to preach the Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captive, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, to announce the year when the Lord will save his people” (Lk.4,16-19).
Bismarque might have stopped exercising his priestly ‘liturgical’ functions but he carried with greater force his social and evangelical mission. He was not at ease in the ecclesiastical framework of the Church but he did not stop functioning in the broader mission of the Church, that is, proclaiming the Good News to the poor and the oppressed.
He did what Pope Francis expects from the Church, that she should go to the roads and the market places and get dirty; that the Church should be a hospital where the infirm and the marginalized find refuge.
Those who pursue their mission with zeal and sincerity even die for the mission. The Prophet of Nazareth was crucified when he was just about 32years old, in our own days, Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador died in 1980 whilst celebrating Mass, victim to the bullets of the powerful. But the death of the Man with a Mission cannot stop his work, it goes on with more force.
Fr. Bismarque could be a ‘Martyr’, an unconventional Saint with a Guitar who fought for the causes of the oppressed all over Goa, from Vasco to Tiracol, from St Estevam to Vanxim. His work and his vision should not die and will not die. He will be more powerful in death than in life.
