Thomas d'Esterre Roberts (7 March 1893 – 28 February 1976) was an English Jesuit prelate. He was rector of St Francis Xavier Church, Liverpool, from 1935 to 1937. He served as Archbishop of Bombay from 1937 to 1950, but in practice did not exercise this role after 1946 when he absented himself from the post and left his Indian auxiliary bishop effectively in charge. In 1950 he was appointed titular Archbishop of Sugdaea.
After leaving Bombay, not having a regular diocesan job, he dedicated himself to lecturing, writing, and the promotion of debate on controversial issues. He held that to be effective, authority had to be accepted, not imposed. This required that it be subject to open criticism, scrutiny and review, procedures which he felt were somewhat lacking in the governance of the Church. His refusal to sweep any question under the carpet at times unnerved some church authorities"Obituary: Archbishop Thomas Roberts", Kay, Hugh, Letters and Notices, Volume 81, No 371, Society of Jesus, November 1976 and gained him a reputation in some Catholic circles as a "rogue bishop" or a "maverick". Although others applauded his challenging insights, the controversy surrounding him obscured the significance of his work in Bombay.
Early life Thomas was born on 7 March 1893 in Le Havre, France, to Clara Louise Roberts and William d'Esterre Roberts, who were cousins. Thomas was the second son and seventh child of eventually nine children. His father was from an Irish Protestant family of French Huguenot extraction. Before Thomas was born, the family had lived in Liverpool, England, then in the West Indies, where William did consular assistance before retiring in ill-health. The family then settled in Le Havre where William became an export merchant. The family moved to Arcachon and Thomas went to the College of St Elme, a Dominican boarding school. The school had a nautical bias which had a lasting influence on Thomas's thought processes. In 1900 his father became a Catholic.Hurn p 9
In 1901 his father died and the family moved back to Liverpool, where Thomas went to Parkfield School, a non-Catholic private school. However, by 1908 he was considering the Catholic priesthood and asked to be transferred to St Francis Xavier's College a Jesuit school. On 7 September 1909, he entered the Jesuit noviciate at Manresa House, Roehampton. He studied philosophy at Stonyhurst St Mary's Hall. In 1916 he was sent to Preston Catholic College for teaching practice. In 1922 he went to St Beuno's College, St Asaph, N Wales where he studied theology. He was ordained there on 20 September 1925, aged 32.Hurn pp 10-11
After ordination, Roberts had spells teaching back at Preston College, then at Beaumont College, Old Windsor, Berkshire, where he set up a branch of the Catholic Evidence Guild, with 33 speakers at pitches in four dioceses. His tertianship was at Paray-le-Monial in the Saône-et-Loire department, followed by another six years, 1929-1935, teaching at Preston College. In early 1935 he became the youngest Jesuit rector in the country when he was appointed rector of St Francis Xavier's, Liverpool. St Francis Xavier's was one of the largest parishes in England, in an inner-city area, with high unemployment and clashes between Catholics from Southern Ireland and Protestants from Northern Ireland.Hurn pp 11-12
On 3 August 1937 he learned he had been named Archbishop of Bombay when a journalist from the Liverpool Post asked him for a comment on his appointment. Years later, in retirement, he insisted his appointment had resulted from a bureaucratic blunder on the part of a Vatican official.
Archbishop of Bombay Bombay was ceded by the Portuguese to England in 1661 as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza on her marriage to King Charles II. Ever since then there had been difficulties between the Portuguese on the one side and the English and the Vatican on the other side over the administration of the Catholic Church in India in general and the appointment of the Archbishop of Bombay in particular. The Vatican had set up the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (known for short by the Latin word Propaganda) to be responsible for missionary areas such as India. However, the Portuguese claimed that the Padroado (by which the Vatican had, beginning in the 15th century, delegated to the kings of Portugal the administration of local churches in the Portuguese sphere of influence) gave them that right in those territories in perpetuity even where Portugal had ceded control. In 1928 it was agreed under a concordat between the Vatican and the English and Portuguese Catholic hierarchies that the post of Archbishop of Bombay would be held alternately by a Portuguese and an English Jesuit. There was no provision for an Indian. The first ordinary appointed under the concordat was a Portuguese, Archbishop Joachim Lima, S.J. He died on 21 July 1936 and Pope Pius XI appointed Roberts on 12 August 1937.Hurn pp 29-33Black Popes, p viii
Roberts received his episcopal consecration on 21 September 1937 from the Archbishop of Liverpool, Richard Downey. Co-consecrators were the Archbishop of Cardiff, Francis Mostyn, who had ordained Roberts, and the Vicar General of Liverpool archdiocese, Robert Dobson. Over 100 priests attended and the congregation of over 1000 spilled out into the street for a service which lasted over three hours, a tribute to someone who 2½ years previously was an obscure lower form master at Preston College.
As his episcopal motto Roberts chose Carior libertas, "Freedom is more precious", from the motto of the Irish branch of his family, the d'Esterres, Patria cara, carior libertas: "My country is precious, but freedom is more precious".
Shortly afterwards, Roberts left Liverpool for Bombay. On the way, he spent two weeks in Lisbon in an attempt to lessen the tensions that still existed between the two hierarchies. He saw the Prime Minister, Dr Salazar, and Cardinal Cerejeira, the first time a non-Portuguese archbishop had made contact with the Portuguese authorities. He arrived in Bombay on 1 December 1937.From the Bridge, pp1,7
The Catholic archdiocese of Bombay was the largest in India, and stretched from Baroda (modern name Vadodara), Gujarat state, about 300 miles north of Bombay, to the village of Korlai, in Maharashtra state, about 50 miles south. There were 68 parishes with 140,000 members predominantly among the poorer sector. There were 121 secular clergy, 66 Jesuits, and three Salesians. It had a college of higher education, Xavier’s, the largest in Bombay and later to become a constituent of Bombay University, 25 high schools and 88 middle and primary schools.Aguiar, p 69
Overlapping and cutting across the Padroado/Propaganda division was a further division based on place of origin: indigenous Bombay Indians, immigrants from Catholic centres such as Goa, Mangalore, Madras, and Malabar, as well as Europeans and Anglo-Indians. All were deeply suspicious and jealous of each other.Aguiar, p 68 Roberts exploited his relationship-building with the Portuguese by rationalising the parish structures with the help of the Portuguese Consul General.
Particularly controversial was his decision to abolish the parish of Our Lady of Esperance at Bhuleshwar. This had been the cathedral parish since 1887 but the church was a vast, expensive to maintain building in an area by then devoid of Catholics.Aguiar, p 78 He sold the land and used the proceeds to build churches in the suburbs where the Catholics then lived. He adopted the Church of the Holy Name, the parish church on the harbour, as his pro-cathedral, later to become the Cathedral of the Holy Name, Mumbai. He broke with tradition by appointing not a Jesuit but a Goan, Fr Valerian Gracias, as its first secular rector.Hurn p 36 This was part of a policy of steady Indianisation of the clergy, which Roberts adopted with the blessing of his Jesuit superiors, and which was virtually complete in the archdiocese by 1945.Hurn p 42
Roberts worked on improving the unity of the archdiocese by a series of letters to the children of his diocese, published in The Examiner, his diocesan newspaper. He put in place a wide range of social services particularly for the poor, orphans, and prostitutes much of it paid for by fund-raising carried out by the children in response to his appeals to them through The Examiner, many catalogued in From the Bridge. He set up centres where seamen could stay while in port. In 1941 he overcame stiff opposition orchestrated by Bombay University's Professor of Economics and member of the Senate K. T. Shah and established the university's Sophia College for women.University of Mumbai, list of colleges, http://mu.ac.in/portal/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Updated-All-College-List-with-Course-Detailss.pdf This was for Christians and non-Christians alike. He later had to overcome attempts by Shah in 1942 and again in 1943 to have the college disaffiliated from the university. The senate rejected the 1942 proposal but passed the 1943 proposal. After mass protests in Bombay the decision was overturned by the Government of Bombay which had the final say on Senate decisions.Aguiar, pp 78-79
In 1939 Gandhi's Congress Party proposed to introduce prohibition. Roberts, in an address to the Rotary Club, subsequently broadcast on All India Radio, argued that it would not succeed unless the Indian people were solidly behind it, which he was unconvinced was the case. Although his view received wide approval, it brought him into conflict with Gandhi, who drew a parallel between the state provision of drinking facilities and the state provision of women for prostitution.Aguiar, p 75, quoting from Gandhi's publication Harijan
During World War II Roberts was appointed Bishop Delegate to H.M. Armed Forces in the Indian and South East Asia Commands. As his American counterpart was unable to fly he also ministered to American service personnel. This involved flights of over 2000 miles (each way) in service planes to where the troops were, in Assam, Burma and as far as the Chinese border, and meant he could be away for months at a time.Aguiar, p 80 This was not without risk, and he was involved in two crash-landings, one when the undercarriage jammed, the other when an engine failed in mid-flight. For this work he received the Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal in the 1946 Birthday Honours, probably its last recipient. There was a particular problem with the presence in India of religious communities from the Axis powers, particularly German and Italian Catholic nuns. The British colonial rulers invited Roberts, as the only British prelate in India, to sit on the commission set up to deal with them.Hurn pp 42-44
With India moving towards independence, Roberts saw that it would be untenable to keep the system whereby Indian Catholics were governed alternately by a British and a Portuguese archbishop. In May 1945 he visited Pope Pius XII in Rome and proposed that the 1928 concordat be terminated, followed by his demitting his post as archbishop. If he simply resigned he would be succeeded by a Portuguese, not an Indian. To get round this, Roberts planned to appoint an Indian auxiliary bishop, ostensively with a view to proving that Indians were perfectly capable of running their own affairs. An auxiliary bishop had no right of succession (so the Portuguese could not object) but might in practice succeed, especially once India was independent. While accepting Roberts's plan in principle, the Pope asked for an explicit undertaking from Roberts that he would not drop the title of Archbishop of Bombay. Roberts returned to India to manage the transfer of his responsibilities to the auxiliary bishop. On 16 May 1946 Gracias was appointed and Roberts consecrated him on 29 June 1946.Hurn pp 44-47 Roberts then left for England on an oil tanker, the British Aviator.Aguiar, p 81