“Should we really be calling this twenty-five years?”
The question came quietly, almost apologetically, at a community meeting. It was honest. The missionary story of this land did not begin in 2002. It began in 1963 as a Poona Region and then in 1978, when the former India South Province (INS) of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) first took root. So when news spread that the India-Mumbai Province (INM) was preparing a Silver Jubilee, a few confreres paused. The dates did not seem to line up.
It was a fair question. It deserved more than a quick reassurance. So the Provincial Council did what any careful family does when a question about its own history arises: they went back to the letters.
In 2002, the India South Province came to an end in its old form. Two new provinces took their place – India Mumbai (INM), and India Hyderabad (INH). This was not a matter of splitting one name into two labels. The Superior General’s letter was specific. Each confrere became a member of the new province that corresponded to where he was serving. Fresh elections were held for each. Two distinct provinces stood up, each with its own leadership, its own path, its own beginning. Legally and spiritually, the India Mumbai Province came into being in 2002. Twenty-five years have truly passed. The Jubilee is not a stretch. It is simply true.
But truth has more than one layer here, and that is the point worth sitting with. Becoming a new province never meant starting empty-handed. Decades before 2002, missionaries had already built schools in dusty towns, sat with families in hospital wards, taught catechism to children who would grow up to teach it to their own, and kept parish doors open through years nobody wrote down. None of that vanished when new paperwork was signed. The India Mumbai Province (INM) picked all of it up and kept walking.
That is why the province’s own records have always listed 1963 and 2002 together, not one instead of the other. One is the root. One is the point at which this branch stood on its own two feet. Read side by side, they do not argue with each other. They tell the whole story, start to finish.
This way of holding both dates is not a compromise. It is a confession of how mission actually works. The work of God is rarely a series of clean breaks. It is more like a river that changes course without ceasing to be itself. The India South Province (INS) gave birth to the India Mumbai Province (INM) the way a parent gives birth to a child: the child is distinct, with a new name and a new path, yet carries within it the blood, the habits, the wounds, and the hopes of the family that came before.
The timing feels right, too. Only last year, the whole Society of the Divine Word gave thanks for one hundred and fifty years of mission around the world, and the India Mumbai Province took part in that with a full heart. Now, barely a year later, there is a second reason to pause — smaller in scale, but no less personal, because this one belongs specifically to the parishes, schools, and mission stations that people here call home.
The Jubilee Year opens formally on 8 September 2026 — the Society’s Foundation Day and the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It closes on 2 February 2027, at the end of the Second Provincial Assembly in Atma Darshan, Andheri, on the Consecrated Day. The theme running through it all is short: “Illumined by the Word, Radiating Hope to the World.” Before hope can be carried out to anyone else, it first has to take hold somewhere inside.
Given how far this province stretches — parishes and mission posts scattered across several states (Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, and Goa) — there will not be one grand central event trying to gather everyone under one roof. Instead, each local community will mark the year in its own way, at its own pace. Parishioners, benefactors, old students, former staff, and friends who have stayed close to the mission over the years are all invited in, wherever they happen to be standing. A Jubilee Prayer will be said in every community from September through February, a small daily thread tying the whole province together even when its people are hundreds of kilometres apart. The Feast of Saint Arnold Janssen (the Founder, Father, and Leader), on 15 January 2027, will give every SVD parish, mission, and institution another natural moment to lift the theme into its own liturgy.
There are plans for a short documentary too – tracing the years from the old India-South Province (INS) through the division up to what the India-Mumbai Province (INM) has become since. Not a highlight reel. More like something a grandchild might want to watch one day, to understand where the mission they inherited actually came from.
Any such story would be incomplete without the work of the province’s Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation (JPIC) ministry. A confrere is assigned full-time as provincial JPIC coordinator, establishing contacts, fostering dialogue, and supporting social development projects across communities. JPIC’s vision – to witness to the Reign of God by building communities of love, peace, justice, and reconciliation – finds concrete expression in ministries among the poor, people of other religions and cultures, and faith-seekers.
One of the most visible fruits of this commitment is Janseva Society in Tala, Raigad. Born out of an agreement between the Archdiocese of Bombay and the India Mumbai Province in 2012, Janseva was established as a mission station among some of the region’s most marginalised communities, including the Katkari, a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG). What began as a focused outreach has grown into a sustained presence: door-to-door awareness campaigns against child marriage, efforts to improve access to education, livelihood and vocational training, women’s empowerment initiatives, and, most recently, the inauguration of a Community and Human Resources Development Center on the Janseva campus.
Janseva is not a side project. It is a living sign of what the province means when it speaks of “prophetic dialogue with the poor”. In its classrooms, health awareness sessions, and community meetings, the Jubilee theme — “Illumined by the Word, Radiating Hope to the World” — is already being lived out, long before any banner is raised.
In a sense, the Jubilee is an invitation to tell that story again, not only for those who have been here from the beginning but also for those who have joined more recently. For many younger confreres, lay collaborators, and parishioners, 1963 may feel like distant history. For others, 2002 may be the only beginning they can remember. The Jubilee asks both groups to listen to each other. It asks those who remember the early days to speak gently of the struggles and graces they witnessed. It asks those who came later to receive that memory not as a burden, but as a gift that makes their own work possible.
This is not just about dates on a timeline. It is about identity. A province that forgets its roots risks becoming a collection of projects without a soul. A province that clings only to its past risks becoming a museum. The India Mumbai Province, by holding 1963 and 2002 together, chooses a third way: to be rooted and free, grateful and daring, and faithful and new.
And maybe that is the real heart of it. Picture an old catechist somewhere in Karjat (a New Mission of INM) teaching the same prayers his own teacher once taught him in a room that did not exist twenty-five years ago but stands on ground the mission has walked for over sixty years. Picture, too, a young trainer at Janseva in Tala, walking with tribal youth through a workshop on rights and livelihoods in a centre that was only a dream in 2002 but now stands as a springboard for self-reliance. Nobody there is arguing about which year to count from. They are just showing up, the way missionaries always have — before the paperwork, after it, and long after anyone remembers whose idea the jubilee was in the first place.
In that quiet room in Karjat, and in that bustling centre in Tala, the question about 1963 finds its answer. Not in a document, not in a debate, but in the living chain of faith that stretches from one generation to the next. The Silver Jubilee is not a claim to a number. It is a thanksgiving for that chain and a promise to keep it unbroken for those who will come after it.