JESUS YOUTH | KAIROS GLOBAL | AUGUST 2026

Author: Dr Edward Edezhath

7:45

An Apostle of Reconciliation Among Warring Communities

In 2023, the news from Manipur arrived like a wound. Ethnic violence erupted between two prominent tribal communities – the Meiteis and the Kukis – with a ferocity that shocked India and much of the watching world. When the accounting was finally done, nearly 300 lives had been lost. More than 60,000 people had been uprooted from their homes, some 5,000 houses reduced to ash, and hundreds of churches and other religious structures desecrated or destroyed.

While political leaders organised protest marches across continents and public figures composed their statements for the morning papers, one quiet figure was doing something altogether different. Travelling alone, without fanfare or a press escort, Archbishop Thomas Menamparambil made his way into those troubled territories. He sat with the Kukis' elders. He sat with the elders of the Meiteis. He took his time. He listened. And, patiently, he began drawing both communities to the same table.

Archbishop Thomas is nearly 89 years old.

His repeated solo visits to some of the most volatile corners of the region have brought, if not resolution, at least a measure of calm – a reminder that someone cares enough to keep showing up. The situation has not been fully resolved; it rarely is so quickly. Violence rooted in long-standing ethnic and territorial grievances, layered over generations of socio-cultural and economic fault lines, does not yield to easy solutions. But here is a senior churchman who has devoted the better part of a long life to sitting with conflicting communities and their leaders, hearing them out, and building – brick by quiet brick – the fragile architecture of understanding.

The Man Behind the Mission

Archbishop Thomas was born in 1936 in Kerala, India, and entered the Salesians of Don Bosco, that congregation so passionately devoted to the young. He served for eleven years as Bishop of Dibrugarh in Assam, followed by two decades as Archbishop of Guwahati. Now officially retired, he has not allowed retirement to become rest  – not while there is still work to be done.

A chance meeting during a Charismatic convention in Mumbai in 1986 set in motion what would become a long and cherished friendship between Bishop Thomas and the Jesus Youth movement. From the very beginning, he was more than a sympathetic observer, he was a collaborator, shaped by the same spirit that animated his great patron, St Don Bosco, in all things related to youth. He visited Jesus Youth communities across Kerala in 1987 and, in a gesture of characteristic generosity, sent me to Taizé so that our movement might connect with that community and, through it, with the wider world of youth ministry. That connection has never been broken. Since those early days, Archbishop Thomas has been a living presence at most of the significant gatherings of Jesus Youth internationally and a steadfast supporter of the movement's many initiatives.

His peacemaking efforts have not gone unnoticed by the wider world. In 2011, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize – a recognition of his sustained commitment to reconciliation, stability, and the long, unglamorous work of building trust among the ethnic and tribal communities of northeast India. That region is home to extraordinary diversity, and to conflicts of extraordinary depth and duration. Archbishop Thomas, who lived among these communities for decades as their pastor, made it his mission to walk with them, not above them, not at a safe remove, but alongside. Awards and honours have followed over the years, each one a small testimony to a life quietly and consistently given in service.

Peace and Evangelisation: Two Faces of the Same Call

For Archbishop Thomas, evangelisation and peacemaking are not separate ministries – they are two expressions of the same Gospel impulse. I have heard him speak from the heart many times, and he always returns to a simple conviction: peace comes when we recognise that we need one another. He traces his entry into peacebuilding to a specific moment in 1996, when nearly a quarter of a million people fled into relief camps around Kokrajhar in Bodoland, having lost their loved ones and their homes overnight. ‘Fortunately,’ he recalls, ‘like-minded people came together to help, from different churches and communities. It was a people's effort of joint action.’ That experience of collaborative response – people of different backgrounds, different faiths, setting aside division for the sake of those who were suffering – became the template he has carried into every subsequent situation of conflict.

Listen, Connect, Collaborate

The opposite of peace, in his understanding, is not simply violence – it is mistrust, which breeds arrogance, and arrogance that provokes more arrogance in return. Exaggeration invites exaggeration. The antidote, accordingly, is gentleness: a practised, intentional humility in how we approach those with whom we disagree.

I have heard Archbishop Thomas speak warmly and with great appreciation about Jesus Youth's manner of evangelisation — the way the movement shares Good News without threat, with a joy and peace that disarms rather than alienates. He sees in this something genuinely suited to the contemporary generation, who are quick to sense when they are being managed rather than respected.

His approach to peacemaking has the same quality. He spends time – unhurried, attentive time – with groups who may seem irreconcilable, listening for the needs and fears beneath the stated positions. The first step, he says, is to find some common ground: not to resolve everything at once, but to identify a small area of shared concern, and begin there. From that modest beginning, an awareness can slowly grow – an awareness of what the other side actually needs, of why peace itself is a greater good than any grievance. These quiet paths, walked patiently, often lead at last to reconciliation.

He is equally insistent on not going public prematurely. During the Manipur crisis, his visits were many and sustained but were not announced to the media. He went to the people who mattered: the real decision-makers, not always the most visible ones. Behind many conflicts, he observes, there are thinkers and leaders who remain hidden from public view, quietly shaping events from the background. It is with those people – the ones truly controlling the narrative – that lasting resolution must ultimately be built.

We Are Called to This

In his 2025 autobiography, Pope Francis noted that at the time, 59 wars were being waged simultaneously in different parts of the world. It is possible, of course, to go on living and praying as if none of this is happening – as if the only conflicts that matter are the ones touching our own immediate lives. But the Lord calls us to lift our gaze, to see the suffering of those caught in the wreckage of conflict, and to desire with our whole hearts that His kingdom come – a kingdom where enmity yields to reconciliation, and hostility to peace.

In Archbishop Thomas Menamparambil, we have one of the most remarkable living witnesses to that kingdom: a man who has spent decades bringing the Good News to people and, with equal devotion, bringing people to one another. He is, in the truest sense, an apostle of peace.

May his tribe increase.