St. Joseph’s College
Source:Dailymirror
In 1960 the Sirimavo – Badurdeen pact attempted to grab all Catholic schools and appropriate them as state property. Our great college St. Joseph’s was placed as top priority in their list of schools to be targeted and to be nationalised.The state fought both tooth and nail to take over our college. They tried every trick and devised strategies hook or by crook in their attempt to take over the school. However they failed neck and crop and ended up demoralised in every aspect of the word so as to never rise again. The main punch which the Prime Minister Bandaranaike and her Education Minister Badurdeen received was from a group of young Josephian mothers. They set foot in our college with their chutti mutti (pots and pans) and cooked and ate their own food and drank their own tea and coffee while occupying the class rooms of the college; making the political grab an absolutely impossible task.
I intend writing something in these lines on this massive endeavuor which these mothers undertook and successfully saved our great College; which stands to this day as a prime academic institute and a valuable heritage of the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka. It was all possible because of this bold young Josephian mothers in the year1960 that we Joes are today able to live to learn and proudly have our formation in knowledge and virtue which we as Christian children need when we leave the security of our homes to launch into a challenging world to pray and to work– Ora et Labora –as good citizens of Sri Lanka.
St. Joseph’s College owes its existence today’ to these mothers and to the tough dedicated stance they took in order to defend this institute from which we get our ‘ Virtue & Knowledge
(This article is written on the 100th Birth Anniversary of one of the mothers Mrs Daisy F. Pereira which fell on June 28, 2021)