New priest from India begins ministry in diocese

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Father Jaya Kumar Penugonda

SALT LAKE CITY— On May 13, the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, the Diocese of Salt Lake City welcomed the newest member of the diocesan presbyterate, Father Jaya Kumar Penugonda.

Fr. Jay, as he prefers to be called, was born in India. His family raised him and his brother as Hindus.

“We were not practicing Catholics, not even Christians,” he said about his religious upbringing.

 However, a trip his father took to Mumbai, India’s largest city, changed his family’s life.

During the trip, his father “lost everything, even his passport, so he was faced with a big trial,” Fr. Jay said.

Empty-handed and worried about how he was going to provide for his family, his father met a Catholic pastor who helped him. The pastor told him not to worry, that his wife and children were all right, and that God would provide, Fr. Jay said.

And God did provide, so the family decided to become Catholic.

“We as a family were welcomed in to the Catholic faith,” said Fr. Jay, who at age 12 received the Sacrament of Baptism and his First Communion.

One day the Missionary Sisters of Mary Immaculate visited his village. At the time, Fr. Jay’s mother was the only person in the village who knew how to write and read in different languages, so she helped the sisters communicate.

“They kindly gave us two dollars – 150 rupees – every week,” Fr. Jay recalled.

With that money, his mother helped to buy hygiene supplies for the people.

“That money also helped to fix the water system. People used to call [the sisters] angels from heaven,” Fr. Jay said, adding that people used to say, “the angels are coming. … I told them they are not angels, they are humans like us, but they are in the service of the Lord.”

The sisters helped open him to his vocation to the priesthood, he said.

“I was somehow attracted to their life, so when I got offered to join the seminary, I was 18 years old, and I accepted,” said Fr. Jay, who was ordained to the priesthood on May 5, 2012, by Bishop Mallavarapu Prakash.

“At my ordination I was only thinking my Lord is calling me for something more. God called me to this higher service,” he said.

He served as parochial vicar in two different parishes from 2012 to 2015, then spent a year as vice-rector at St. John’s Minor Seminary. From 2016 to 2018, he was pastor of two different parishes. The following year he attended a language course at Hydera-bad Institute, and then was assigned as pastor of St. John the Baptist Church at Ponnamanda in his hometown, where 40 to 50 families attended.

“They really have enjoyed the presence of Christ through the Eucharist,” he said. “Families that belonged to other faiths are coming there, too.”

Before he received the letter of acceptance from the Diocese of Salt Lake City, Fr. Jay’s grandmother offered him a blessing before she died.

“She told me that I was going to receive many nations as my people,” he recalled, and he thinks he did, because since arriving in Utah he has been welcomed by different cultural communities at the Cathedral of the Madeleine, where he is a priest in residence.  

On Aug. 1, he will be assigned to a diocesan parish as a parochial vicar.

“I feel this is the nations of God. … Salt Lake City is a great blessing for me,” he said.

“Fr. Jay will be the first to mention that he didn’t arrive in Utah on his own; he made it to this great state through the Providence of God and the powerful prayers of his mother and of his late father, Joseph, who passed away last year on May 3, 2021,” said Fr. Ken Vialpando, vicar for clergy for the Diocese of Salt Lake City.

This is Fr. Jay’s first trip out of his home country, and “everything in Utah and the United States is a whole new world for him,” Fr. Vialpando continued. “He is like a kid in a candy store or at Disneyland, and because of his smile and the joy in his heart, it shows. You will immediately pick up on his joy-filled personality.”

Fr. Jay said one of the joys of his priesthood is celebrating the Mass, “since the Glory of God revels itself at the Mass.”

Fr. Jay speaks Telugu, English and Hindi. He is also working on Spanish and Italian. On June 4 he will celebrate his first Mass in Spanish at the cathedral.