In a show of community spirit and generosity, 10,000 Sydneysiders flocked to the annual Jesuit Mission Bazaar on Saturday at St Ignatius’ College Riverview.
For more than 70 years, the Jesuit Mission Bazaar has been a community staple when parents, students, alumni, parishioners and neighbouring schools come together to fundraise for marginalised communities around the world.
This year, Fr Tony Herbert SJ, a Saint Ignatius old boy and Hazaribag Missionary for over 50 years, joined the bazaar to thank the community.
Fr Herbert, who has served and advocated for the rights of Indigenous Dalit communities in rural India for most of his life, concelebrated the closing Mass and addressed the hundreds of students in attendance.
“The deeper meaning of your work on the bazaar, is the fact that you have touched the lives of people far away, people you’ve never seen before, people whose results of your efforts you will not know,” Fr Herbert said.
The bazaar began in 1952 to support the works of the early Australian Jesuit missionaries, like Fr Herbert, who were sent to Hazaribag, in western India, to uplift the outcast through education and social activism, with the expectation that they would never return home to Australia.
“We had a sense that we were on mission with them (as co-missionaries in Australia), by doing things like the bazaar, by praying for them, by walking with them,” said Fr Tom Renshaw SJ, Rector of St Ignatius’ College Riverview.
“I’ve had the privilege of visiting Fr Tony in Hazaribag five times and it deeply enriched and changed my life for the better. It enriched my answer to that question of ‘Who is Jesus?’
“I got to see how Jesus became present in local cultures there in north-east India.”
Now, Jesuit Mission has expanded its reach to empower marginalised communities in more than 10 countries.
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Faith shines in action at the Jesuit Mission Bazaar (Jesuit Mission)
