(May 7, 2012) The Society of Jesus or the Jesuits in Nepal on Sunday celebrated 60
year’s of its presence and service in the Himalayan nation with Nepal’s first president
Ram Baran Yadav gracing the anniversary ceremony in St Xavier’s School in Jawalakhel,
Kathmandu. Sixty years after US Jesuit priests, Frs Marshall Moran, Francis Murphy
and Ed Saxton first arrived in Kathmandu and set up St Xavier’s School with 65 students
in Godavari, 15km north of Kathmandu, there has been no looking back for the Nepal
Jesuit Society (NJS). Owing to the steady growth in the number of students, the primary
section of the Godavari school was shifted to Jawalakhel in 1954. “The NJS sapling
planted by the three Fathers in 1951 has today grown into a beautiful tree with branches
spread all over Nepal,” said Fr Amrit Rai SJ, the principal of St Xavier’s School.
The past 60 years have not always been kind to the society, Fr Rai noted. “If the
country is soaked in the sweat of the [Jesuit] Fathers and Brothers, the land is also
soaked in Fr Gafney’s blood,” he said, referring to Fr Thomas E Gafney, an American-born
Jesuit priest who was found murdered at his residence in Kathmandu in December 1997.
President Yadav of Nepal lauded the work of the Jesuits and said the NJS brought about
a revolution in the education system of the country. “Nepal has always been a land
of tolerance and religious harmony … with people allowed to practice the faith of
their choice without fear,” he said. The Maoists in Nepal waged a 10-year-long
insurgency that ended with the government and the former rebels signing a peace accord
in 2006. Subsequently, a freshly elected assembly in 2008 abolished the 239-year-old
monarchy in Nepal and declared the then Hindu kingdom a republic. Apart from the
two schools in Godavari and Jawalakhel and two more in Jhapa district in Eastern Nepal,
the Jesuits run a social service centre, a drug rehabilitation centre, a centre for
the sick and elderly, and the Human Resource Development Centre in Kathmandu. They
also run a child care centre in Pokhara in western Nepal, while around 3,500 students
pursue higher education at the St Xavier’s College in Kathmandu.