The registration of Christian marriages in Mumbai has come to a halt after the retirement of the marriage officer in July.
Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, newlywed couples are forced to travel to Pune to get their marri-age certificates stamped by state government authorities. Activists Godfrey Pimenta and Nicholas Almeida of the Watchdog Foundation have urged the state government to appoint a new officer in Mumbai at the earliest. Advocate Vivian D’Souza, Rita D’Souza as well as Tulip Miranda, president of the Bombay East Indian Association, have signed the request.
Pimenta said, “Mumbai has a Catholic popu-lation of 10 lakhs (1 million), and every year, thousands of couples get married in the 100-plus Catholic Churches that are located in Mumbai alone. The post of marriage officer remains vacant ever since the previous incumbent Ashish Lopez retired a few months ago.”
Pimenta explained the procedure saying, “Couples are required to procure their marriage certificate from the local church where the nuptials were solemnized. The certificate is then attested by the chancellor attached to Archbishop House in Colaba, and subsequently by a notary public. Later, it is to be stamped by the state home department and finally by the marriage officer whose office is in Mantralaya.”
In the absence of the Mumbai appointee, couples are required to travel to Pune to get attestation done through the Commissioner of Social Welfare. Almeida said, “This is a matter of concern since Pune has a high number of Covid-19 cases. More-over, the journey is tedious. The state government should immediately fill the vacancy in Mumbai.” The archdiocese of Bombay expressed concern as well. Spokesman Fr Nigel Barrett said, “The situa-tion of having no registrar of Christian marriages is indeed true. It has been communicated to the government about the urgency to appoint a registrar and we are hopeful it will be addressed soon.”
Daily Archives: December 16, 2020
India escapes US watch list, Pak sanctions on religious freedom issues
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s intervention led to Pakistan escaping sanctions for lack of religious freedom and India stopped from being listed on a Special Watch List, said US Ambassador-at-Large for Inter-national Religious Freedom, Samuel Brownback.
“There were several reco-mmendations that the Secretary [Pomoeo] did not follow, and this was one of them,” he said about keeping India away from the Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) list. The US Commission for International Religious Free-dom (USCIRF) had recommend-ed that India be put in the CPC list because of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
Brownback said the US had privately discussed these issues with the Indian government at a high level, and will continue to get raised. Pompeo is “well aware” of the statute (CAA) and the issues associated with the Modi government. And as I said, he’s raised it at the highest levels, but just decided at this point in time not to place them on a CPC or a Special Watch List,” he said during a briefing on rollout of US action against religious freedom violators. Though Brownback was critical of India, he did not get baited by a question posed by a Pakistani-origin journalist who wanted to know why Pakistan was on CPC and India was not.
BJP leads reconversion of Christian families in India
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the southern Indian State of Karnataka has reconverted 23 people from five Christian families to Hindu-ism. A reconversion ceremony on Nov. 29 was organized by Anant Kumar Hegde, a BJP leader and MP for Uttara Kannada district. “Hegde was handpicked by the Hindutva hierarchy to create communal divisions and tension in the coastal belt of Karnataka,” Sajan K. George, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians, told UCA News.
“After BJP victories in the 2014 and 2019 general elections, the Sangh Parivar [fanatic group] moved with the speed and cunning of a barracuda to attack and weaken the constitutional institutions needed to transform Indian society into a more equal and just one.”
George said the BJP has used the twin weapons of a brute majority and communal polarization to implement laws and policies that have impacted most adversely those who are denied all rights and can make no claims to equality: women, Dalits, backward castes and tribal people.
“This advance towards a Hindu Rashtra [Hindu nation] is viewed with concern and alarm by many, but as far as the majority are concerned, they feel that only members of minority communities will be threatened while they themselves will be guaranteed some kind of a privileged status,” he added.
Assam wants couples to disclose religion
Assam is planning a law that will require the bride and groom to declare their religion and income in official documents a month before the wedding. Against the backdrop of many other BJP-ruled states bringing in laws to check “love jihad,” the Assam government says its aim is to “empower our sisters.”
The ruling BJP’s move comes ahead of polls in Assam next year, which the party is confident of winning. State Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said his govern-ment’s law was not entirely like the ones in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, but would be similar.
BJP fields 500 Christian, 112 Muslim candidates in Kerala
The Bharatiya Janata Party has fielded 500 Christian and 112 Muslim candidates for the local body elections in Kerala.
If the BJP manages to win at least municipal corporations in these elections, it would brighten the party’s chances in the Kerala assembly elections scheduled to be held in 2021.
Kerala will elect its local bodies on December 8, 10 and 14 and the results are expected on December 16.
The state has total 27,656,579 voters: 13,172,629 male, 14, 483,668 female and 282 trans-gender. More than 75,000 candidates are in the fray for the polls after November 24, the last day for withdrawing nominations.
The voters will choose from 54,494 candidates for 941 grama panchayats. The candidates contesting in 152 block panchayats number 6,877 while 1,317 will fight it out for 14 district panchayats.
The 87 municipalities in the state will see 10,339 candidates and the six corporations have 1,986 candidates
At 8,497, Malappuram tops the list candidates in the fray, followed by Ernakulam 7,256, Thrissur 7,020 and Palakkad 6,532.
Pope to visit Iraq in March 2021
Pope Francis will travel to Iraq next year. The Holy See Press Office director Matteo Bruni made the announcement on Dec. 7.
Following the invitation of the Republic of Iraq and of the local Catholic Church, Pope Francis will make an Apostolic Journey to Iraq on 5-8 March 2021. The pontiff will visit Baghdad, the plain of Ur, linked to the memory of Abraham, the city of Erbil, as well as Mosul and Qaraqosh in the plain of Nineveh.
For the Church in Iraq, for Iraqi Christians and for the whole country, including Muslims, this “represents a source of great and immense joy, which we have been waiting for many years, since the time of St Pope John Paul II, in 2000, with the first reports of a journey that was not possible then,” said Mgr Basel Yaldo, Auxiliary Bishop Baghdad, a close aide to the Chaldean Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako. Francis will undertake the journey that St John Paul II was unable to make in 1999. Ur of the Chaldees was supposed to be the first of three stages – the other two were the Sinai and Jerusalem – in a journey along the path of history before the 2000 Jubilee, said in 2014 Card Giovanni Battista Re, who at the time was sostituto (substitute) for general affairs of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State.
St Pope John Paul II was able to visit the Sinai and Jerusalem (pictured) in February and March 2000, but not Ur of the Chaldees. The site, located in southern Iraq, is the place where, according to the Bible story, Abraham heard the voice of God and left. Today, ancient Ur is now nothing more than a collection of archaeological remains.
This first stage, which St Pope John Paul II “dreamed and desired,” was however very difficult to do at that time, coming as it did a few years after the First Gulf War, which ended with the liberation of Kuwait. In those years, Iraq was under a UN embargo for the refusal of Saddam Hussein’s government to allow inspectors to see his alleged nuclear and chemical weapons programmes. No plane could travel to the country.
Elderly Catholic priest suspended over exorcism in Vietnam
A Catholic diocese in Vietnam has suspended an elderly priest after he joined a banned group of exorcists, disobeying his bishop.
Da Lat Diocese annou-nced on Dec. 6 that 72-year-old Father Dominic Nguyen Chu Truyen had been sus-pended from administering sacraments and pastoral care. The diocese’s vicar general, Father John Bosco Hoang Van Chinh, announced the suspension of Father Truyen, who claims to be an exorcist.
Father Turyen lived in a house owned by Teresa Nguyen Thi Thuong, who leads a group of exorcists based in Bao Loc parish in Lam Dong province.
Thuong and her group members regularly perform exorcism inside the house, attracting several people. The diocese banned Catholics from attending such practice, in June after some priests and nuns also attended the rituals.
The vicar general said Father Truyen sent two letters in October to Bishop Dominic Nguyen Van Manh and the diocesan advisory board stating that he “has to absolutely obey the will of God” even if it means disobeying the bishop.
Father Truyen, a former pastor of Thanh Mau parish, said that Thuong received “a mandate from God for him.”
He claimed that he could “put hands on patients and heal them and perform an exorcism without seeking the bishop’s permission.”
The priest said he considers this service as “a special grace from God, more than his priesthood.”
Rawalpindi, Christian girl murdered for refusing to marry a young Muslim
Sonia, a 24-year-old Christian girl was killed by a young Muslim Shahzad because she refused to marry him. The killing took place last November 30 and the killer is still at large.
Sonia was the daughter of Allah Rakha Masih, who moved 13 years earlier with her family from Faisalabad to Rawalpindi to work as a janitor in a government school.
Sonia’s mother, Teresa, says her two daughters, Sonia and Nazish, 18, work as housekeepers and are a great financial help for the family. Usually they always left together to go to work. On the morning of November 30, Sonia left her sister at the entrance of the Air Force Colony, the neighborhood where they live in a rented house, and headed to Behria Town, where she worked. As she was crossing the G.T. highway, Shahzad shot her in the head and killed her.
The family, warned of the accident, took Sonia to the hospital, where the doctors could only declare her death. Allah Rakha tells that the family of Shahzad, a Muslim, had met their poor Christian family and asked that Sonia marry Shahzad. But they refused, saying that being Christians, their faith does not allow them to marry people of other faiths. In addition, Allah Rakha explains, Sonia was a “true Christian” and would never agree to change her religion.
Hong Kong: Anti-Communist Media Mogul Jimmy Lai Facing Decade in Prison
The owner of Hong Kong anti-communist news-paper Apple Daily, Jimmy Lai, is facing a minimum of a decade in prison after being charged on December 11 with violating the city’s new, and illegal, law against “national security” trespasses.
Prosecutors charged Lai, 73, under the law’s “foreign intervention” provision for allegedly having conversations with foreigners about the steep decline of respect for human rights in Hong Kong in the past year.
The “national security” law mandates no less than ten years in prison for those convicted of four times of national security crimes: foreign interference, “secession,” “terrorism,” and “subversion of state power.” The law was implemented through Beijing’s National People’s Assembly, which violates Hong Kong’s longstanding policy of “One Country, Two Systems.” Under the policy, Hong Kong cannot exercise sovereignty and the Chinese Communist Party cannot impose its laws on the city. Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, a Beijing loyalist, has nonetheless ordered Hong Kong police to enforce the illegal legislation.
Apple Daily has developed a reputation for being one of Hong Kong’s most vocal publications criticizing the current government’s friendliness towards Beijing. The newspaper regularly covers Hong Kong police’s use of violence against peaceful dissidents and Lai himself became a regular during the anti-communist protests that erupted in the city in 2019.
Pakistani PM orders probe into forced conversions
Church leaders have thanked Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan for ordering an investigation into forced conversions of females from religious minorities.
“The PM has ordered an investigation on a case-by-case basis of incidents of forced con-versions of minor girls belonging to minority communities, particularly Christian and Hindu, to find reasons for this issue. Law and rights are equal for all. Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and daughters of minorities are our daughters as well,” said Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, the PM’s special representative on religious harmony.
“Forced marriages, forced conversion of religion and abdu-ction of underage girls of other religions in the name of marriages will not be tolerated. The human rights ministry, in consultation with other stakeholders, is working out a mechanism to eliminate the fear of forced marriage among non-Muslims.”
Ashrafi was speaking at a joint press conference on November 30 with Catholic and Protestant bishops on Nov. 30 at St Peter’s School of Lahore.
Church of Pakistan Bishop Azad Marshall, president of the National Council of Church-es, welcomed the Prime Minister’s decision.
“We urge Islamic scholars and government officials to sit with us and develop a mechanism for judging instances of religious conversion of children. Many cases go unreported due to societal pressure and fear of reprisal from the accused” he said.