Fr. Vincent Banon SJ
1927 - 2007

A Personal Memory - Myron J. Pereira SJ

Vincent Banon was the first Jesuit I ever met and fell in love with. It was 1957. We were teenage boys in the seventh standard at St Stanislaus, Bandra, and he was the young handsome Jesuit regent sent to teach us Marathi, but who told us enthralling stories instead. (We only did two lessons in the whole year!) Who would not go crazy over such a man? Indeed, of such improbable encounters are vocations made.

Later on as a Jesuit scholastic, I followed his life from afar. Like many others, like his friend Barranco and his namesake Vincent Ferrer, Banon had come to India to be a missionary. And most of his life was indeed spent as an active missionary in the Nashik area, though he was also at Talasari in those turbulent times of Peter D'Mello and the Kashtakari Sanghatana. I was elsewhere, and so our paths seldom crossed. The mission was his life, his inspiration. Years later I published a first person piece of his in Jesuit Parivar, "My Life's Dream", where he stated..

I was 23 when I came to India with a heart abounding in youthfulness and its strengths: idealism, generosity, the desire for self-surrender and to do good with no thought of human recompense. From the moment I arrived, my mental horizon and the capacity to love began to broaden. I was facing a new world greater in size, population and culture than the world I was leaving behind. So began an adventure motivated and guided by love.

In India I opted to work among those even poorer - it was my personal decision taken before my vows' crucifix. This choice of mine took me first to the dalits and next to the adivasis. And I let my heart go, opening it up to them. I gave them my love. We broke barriers. I stayed with them, giving myself to them, doing what I could for them and beginning to love a people who had been denied their human dignity. By my being with them I gained much, experienced a joy beyond compare.

But even missionaries sometimes have a change of office. For Banon it came abruptly in the early 70s when he was asked at short notice to become novice-master. Banon had had no formal training for this, but he fitted in, and carried on in this post for 11 long years, respected and beloved by scores of young Jesuits whom he introduced to religious life. That was vintage Banon: always available, always gracious, always ready to step in.

In fact my last conversation with him was a few years ago in the garden of the Jesuit novitiate in Nashik. We were comparing the Jesuit style of training novices with that of the Salesians, and in an organization getting rapidly 'destructured,' we wondered what the future would be. Let me add however that Banon was never anxious about the future, for as a man of deep faith, he knew in whom he had placed his trust. So I can do no better than conclude in his own words:

Life for me has been very happy. Of course I've suffered, as those suffer who wish to grow in love. I take full responsibility for what I've done or undone, for what I've still not done. The adventure is mine - it has my odour, my colour, my flavour. I make it all mine - Jesus knows.

And at the end of such a joyful adventure, I can't help remarking, Vincenti dabitur - truly, "the winner takes it all".

Vincent Banon's first person article, "My Life's Dream" appeared in Jesuit Parivar, New Year 2003, p. 5-6.