The Southern Cross | May 2025

The Adelaide Archdiocese has four new international priests, all from southern India and all big cricket fans. In their first weeks here they spoke about their vocation and the move Down Under.

With three of Adelaide’s new Indian priests aged in their thirties, Fr Francis Showrie Bulipe SMM is the ‘elder statesman’ of the quartet.

Fifty-year-old Fr Francis is also the only one who has travelled outside India before. He spent time studying and training in the Philippines, Indonesia and Europe before he accepted an offer to serve as a missionary priest in Australia.

Fr Francis is from the Society of Montfort Missionaries, a French order, and was ordained on January 22 2006.

He was born and raised in a small town in the southern province of Andhra Pradesh where his father was a carpenter.

One of three children, he attended the local Catholic school, was an altar server and developed an early interest in the priesthood.

“From childhood I had a strong desire (to be a priest) so after I finished my schooling someone came to me and asked me if I would like to be a priest, so I opted for it,” he said.

After 14 years in the seminary he went to the novitiate in the Philippines for a year. Returning to India he was appointed as the vocations director at the seminary in Bangalore while also serving in a parish.

He later worked in a co-educational school where he was also caretaker of a boys’ home.

“In south India there are so many tribal villages, about 500 villages, it’s a huge mission for the Montfort fathers,” he explained.

“So we collect the tribal children…we educate them, we take care of them.

“I was principal and director of the boarding school…it was fully busy.”

Fr Francis ministered in the school for 12 years and from 2019 to 2025 he was training seminarians.

He said it was a “free choice” to come to Adelaide and he was happy to do so because he wanted a change from education to pastoral ministry. His interests include table tennis and playing the guitar which he hopes to put to good use in Adelaide.

Fr Rajashekar Gundiga CSC, 36, was ordained a priest of the Holy Cross Fathers five years ago.

He is from the southern Indian state of Telangana, which is the youngest state in the country, having been established eight years ago.

His parents are farmers and he has two siblings but his extended families are much larger and like everyone else in their village, they are Catholic.

“In my village we are 100 per cent Catholic except one family out of 250,” he said. “It is a diocesan parish, I am the first Holy Cross Father from that village.

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