A Syro-Malabar archbishop, who heads a diocese in northern India, wants his Oriental Church to become global by breaking free the barriers of Kerala, its base in southern India.

“What we need is globalization and not colonization of the Church,” Archbishop Kuriakose Bharanikulangara of Faridabad said on July 1 in an apparent response to fears expressed in certain circles over the Oriental rite gaining pan India jurisdiction.

The Syro-Malabar Church’s recent all India expansion, the archbishop said, should be seen more as an opportunity for greater evangelization than colonial conquest or territorial expansion.

The Universal Church today needs more “mission power” than “muscle power,” explained the first prelate of Faridabad diocese erected on March 6, 2012, primarily for the Syro-Malabar Catholics settled in the national capital and surrounding regions.

The archbishop, a former Vatican diplomat, expressed these views in a pastoral letter that was read on July 1 in all 36 parishes and 15 mission stations under the diocese that covers the National Capital Region and the states of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab and Rajasthan.

The prelate repeated them at the opening of the new academic year of catechism and faith formation program in the diocese held on the same day. More than 500 catechism teachers of the diocese attended the program at St Francis Assisi Forane Church in Dilshad Garden, a suburb in eastern India.