Priest’s 50-year mission: Saving girls from child marriage in Bangladesh

For more than 50 years, Father Luigi Paggi has lived and worked among some of Bangladesh’s most marginalized people, building schools, teaching girls, and waging a quiet war against a practice that has claimed countless young lives: child marriage.

The 77-year-old Italian Xaverian missionary has made it his life’s work to empower the Munda Indigenous community in coastal Bangladesh, teaching girls a simple but revolutionary principle: “Disobedience is life.”

“Among the various superstitions the tribal Munda are affected by, a major one was the tendency to force their daughters into premature marriage,” Paggi told EWTN News from his mission in Ishwaripur, Satkhira district, about 217 miles south of Dhaka near the Sundarbans mangrove forests.

“The tribals used to think that the sooner a girl is married off, the better it is for the girl and the family. Girls were married off between the ages of 8 and 12,” he said.

Paggi, a member of the Society of St. Francis Xavier for Foreign Missions, arrived in Bangladesh in 1975, three years after his priestly ordination. After serving as an assistant pastor in Satkhira from 1975 to 1980, he spent the next two decades working among the lower-caste Rishi Hindu community, helping them discover their dignity and rights.

“I helped them to discover and to study the Moses of the Dalits, Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar, and to become his disciples and start some kind of a peaceful protest in order to get their place in civil society,” Paggi recalled.

In 2002, he turned his attention to the Munda people, a small Indigenous community living at the edge of the Sundarbans forest. What he discovered alarmed him: Unlike other communities, the Munda had significantly fewer women than men — a demographic imbalance caused by girls dying from complications of early motherhood.

Paggi declared what he calls a “kind of war” against child marriage. He traveled from village to village on motorcycle along narrow, brick-paved coastal roads, raising awareness among girls about the dangers of early marriage.

He built a hostel where he teaches about 20 to 30 boys and girls, and established pre-primary schools in Munda villages. But his most powerful tool has been his message of resistance.

“When we started this campaign against this culture of child marriage, we had a special teaching: ‘Disobedience is life,’” Paggi said.

The strategy has worked. Several girls have been saved from child marriage and have gone on to receive education. Some are now teachers, others work in private institutions or nongovernmental development organizations.

One of them is Minati Munda, 30, an Indigenous woman who now works as a teacher at a Caritas Bangladesh Trust technical institution after completing her bachelor’s degree in civil technology.

“Father Luigi gave me a second life,” said Munda, who fled her family’s plans to marry her off as a young girl and came to the hostel run by Paggi. “When I was young, my family wanted to get me married off, so I left home and came to the father in the hostel and studied there.”

Munda, who follows traditional Indigenous religion, worked for years from the hostel with other girls to prevent child marriage in villages, saving many young lives. She eventually became the first Christian from that area to accept Christianity through baptism given by Paggi.

“Father Luigi has brought light to my life. Father Luigi has done the responsibility that my parents could not do for me. I am grateful to Father Luigi,” Munda said.

A childhood in Italy

Born July 26, 1948, in Sorico, a small village in northwestern Italy near the Italy-Switzerland border, Luigi Paggi joined the diocesan seminary of Como after primary school, spending six years there before joining the Xaverian Missionaries and continuing his studies.

He was ordained a priest in 1972.

After coming to Bangladesh, Paggi initially did pastoral work. From 1980 to the early 2000s, he worked among the lower-caste Rishi community — cobblers and sweepers — educating them and making them aware of their rights. Some educated members of that community later converted to Christianity, forming what has become a subcenter of Khulna Diocese.

Paggi began working among the Munda people in 2002 and has been serving that community for more than two decades. He has traveled to various Munda villages on a motorcycle along narrow and brick-paved coastal roads, falling several times. Now he can no longer walk as he once did.

The priest admitted that not much has changed among the Munda, but more time is needed.

Despite spending more than half a century in Bangladesh, Paggi said he wants to return to his home country at the end of his life.

“My wish is to return to my country and die in my paternal house and be buried in my native village,” he said.

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