Vocations

Hasitha: seminarian of Buddhist father and Catholic mother

Hasitha Menaka is one of the first two Sri Lankan seminarians sent by his bishop to study in the Ecclesiastical Faculties of the University of Navarra, thanks to a CARF scholarship. A student of the last year of the Bachelor of Theology, he resides at the Bidasoa International Seminary.

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Hasitha Menaka

Hasitha Menaka

Born in Sri Lanka 28 years ago to a Catholic mother and Buddhist father, he and his sister were baptized at birth and were raised Catholic from an early age. Hasitha is grateful for the formation he received from his parents, and remembers the effort his mother put into transmitting the Catholic faith to him. She attended a Catholic school and later a Buddhist one. "Thanks to the fact that, in my country, the difference between cultures is not a conflict, I was able to continue to grow in my faith," she says.

On one occasion, in the sanctuary where she was helping to care for pilgrims, a Catholic mother told her that her daughters were not baptized so that they could choose. "When God gives you faith and you cherish it as the best thing you can give a child, it's wrong to say let him choose when he grows up," she says.

He thanked God for his priestly vocation: "The Lord planned my vocation from the beginning, as St. John Paul II said, it is a gift and a mystery. Now I look back and realize how everything was related.

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