Missionary Society of St Thomas

The Missionary Society of St Thomas the Apostle is a Catholic missionary organization founded in 1968 in Kerala by the Syro Malabar Church, for missionary work in "less Christian areas" in and outside India. It was founded by bishop Sebastian Vayalil as a Society of Apostolic Life.

The Society is organised as three officially declared regions, Ujjain in M.P., Mandya in Karnataka, and Sangli in Maharashtra. There are 300 priests working as full-time members of the Society, all of them members of the Syro Malabar Church. There are also a few priests working in other continents as pastors. MST in United States is an extension of the MST in Kerala.

The Missionary Society of St Thomas the Apostle (MST) was formally inaugurated on 22 February 1968.

Who is the real founder of MST has always been a point of debate. One of the founding members was the Bishop of Pala Sebastian Vayalil.

Joseph Maliparampil writes, "St Thomas Missionary Society is the fruition of a long cherished vision of the ‘missionary Bishop’, Mar Sebastian Vayalil that the SyroMalabar Church should have an association of missionaries”. It was Bishop Vayalil who visualized it as an institute of the Church and gave concrete form to it with the help of his priests. In the words of Cardinal Lourdusamy, it was in 1962 “that the Missionary Society of St Thomas the Apostle began to take shape in the vision of late Mar Sebastian Vayalil, then Bishop of Palai”. The initiatives taken by him and the cooperation and support extended by other prelates of the Church really paved the way for the foundation of the Society. In the report of the Director General presented at the General Assembly of 19Th we read, “... it is the Bishop of Palai who took initiatives on his own accord and on behalf of the Hierarchy to give shape to this missionary project,’ encouraged as he was by the Pope himself and the Cardinal Prefects of the Sacred Congregations of the Oriental Churches and Propaganda Fide".

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