From Danville to Delhi

“When you’re on top of a hill enjoying the view, the effort of getting there is forgotten,” says Fr. Paul Faulstich, SJ. “But how can you forget the people who walked up the hill with you?”

He certainly hasn’t. Growing up in Danville, Ill., 100 miles from the nearest Jesuit house, he attended Schlarman Catholic High School, staffed by “the remarkable Sisters of Holy Cross.” Through retreats led by Jesuit Frs. Charles “Dismas” Clark and Richard Jones, he found himself inspired by the life of St. Ignatius of Loyola, as well as by the example of his father, a lifelong Ignatian retreatant at White House Jesuit Retreat center in St Louis. Upon graduation in 1955, the future Fr. Faulstich entered the Society of Jesus at the novitiate in Milford, Ohio.

Eventually, he attended Loyola University Chicago, graduated with a master’s degree in education and volunteered as a missionary in the Jesuits’ Patna Province in northern India. Along the way, he met one of the “heroes” of his Jesuit journey: Fr. Paul Dent, SJ, who originally went to India in 1926 but had to return to the United States around 1935 for surgery.

“Doctors advised that Fr. Dent remain in Chicago for observation, which went on for 30 years while he petitioned four different provincials to return to India!” Fr. Faulstich says. “He succeeded finally, in part, when he was sent to Nepal, where he died in 1980, his dream fulfilled.”

While Fr. Dent was in the U.S., he wrote a history of the Patna Jesuit Mission and gave Hindi tutorials. Fr. Faulstich was one of his students. “I joined a class of five philosophers at West Baden College who came under his spell on Thursday evenings,” he says. “We soon got familiar with the Devanagari script and the basics of Hindi.”

In 1964, Fr. Faulstich set sail for India, where he discovered a whole new world. He began four years of theology at De Nobili College Pune and went on to teach at high schools in Patna, at nearby Bettiah and faraway Delhi, all in northern India. He also served four years as secretary to the provincial of the Delhi Region.

“I thank God for the years he gave me as a missionary,” Fr. Faulstich says. “I’m especially grateful for the gift of ordination in 1968 in Patna, with the privilege of having my mother and father, a brother and sister, an aunt and a high-school classmate present, and for the many salt-of-the-earth friends I made in all my years there.”

Fr. Tom Kunnunkal, SJ, former superior of the Delhi Region, called Fr. Faulstich a man of great commitment, eager for sacramental ministry and a lover of the poor and the less privileged. “He found his way into the hearts of many,” Fr. Kunnunkal wrote in a 1995 letter after Fr. Faulstich was missioned back to the Chicago area.

“I value the welcome I received at Loyola Academy [in Wilmette, Ill.] and the chance to be of service in a great school, and then my time working with archives at the province level,” Fr. Faulstich says. “Most recently, I appreciated living in community with Jesuits in first studies on the Loyola University Chicago campus and offering Sunday Mass with the amazing folks at The Breakers on Sheridan Road.

“So many people have been with me all the way up the hill I climbed. They need to know in their hearts—God never forgets the kind word and the cup of life-giving water given in his name.”