Our History
PIME in India
Among the many places where PIME (Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions) worked in Asia, the mission in India is the one that best of all, represents the continuity of work. For 170 years, about 150 missionaries have worked for the plantation of the Church in the Telugu region and Bengal region, now Indian missionaries are going abroad to witness the Gospel of Jesus in other countries.
In 1855, six young missionaries left for India to take up two huge missions there: one in Hyderabad, South India and another in Krisnagar, West Bengal, later on the mission was handed over to the Salesians and PIME moved to Dinajpur across the Ganges. In 1928, the new diocese of Dinajpur (now part of Bangladesh) was established.
On the 8th of May 1855 two PIME missionaries, Fr. Francesco Pozzi and Fr. Giovanni Domenico Barbero, reached the harbour of Bombay (Mumbai). They had started their journey in Genoa (Italy) on the 20th of February with three others destined to Bengal. When these two missionaries reached India how was the social, political and ecclesiastical situation in this vast subcontinent? We have four letters written by Fr Barbero at every stage of his journey: one from Napoli (23rd of March), one from Bombay (11th 0f May), one from Secunderabad (19th of June) and one from Machilipatnam (8th of August). A few passages of these letters can give us the ideas of what they found.
The two missionaries for Hyderabad, while in Bombay, they received hospitality at the parish of the Capuchin fathers. So, we understand that there was a fairly well organised vicariate under the leadership of the Capuchin Bishop Anastasius Hartmann. It took for them one month to reach Secunderabad by bullock cart. At Pune they met a Jesuit father chaplain in the military cantonment. At Solapur they met another missionary who had not seen any priest since one year. When they reached Secunderabad, they had been welcomed, always in the cantonment, by the Irish Bishop Daniel Murphy. The Vicariate of Hyderabad had been created only ten years earlier by detaching its territories from Madras. At that time, outside the big centers, the Catholic Church was represented by the priests, attached to the British Army, as chaplains to the Irish soldiers. For many decades that had been the duty also of the newly arrived Italian missionaries. Politically India was administered partly directly by the East Indian Company and partly by various local Rajas and Maharajas in agreement with the British. That was the case of the Nizam of Hyderabad.
After the first missionaries witness many missionaries were inspired and folles tier paths and preached in Andhra Pradesh. They established couple of Dioceses in Andhra Pradesh i.e. Hyderbad, Vijayawada, Warangal, Eluru, Nalgonda, Khammam,
