A Catholic priest has vowed to quit priesthood and face any punishment if an allegation is proved that a Church-led protest against seaport project has received foreign fund to destabilize the country. “Our hands are clean and ready to face any probe,” says Father Theodacious D’Cruz, one of the conveners of the fishermen’s protest against Adani international seaport at Vizhinjam coast in Thiruvananthapuram district in the southern Indian state of Kerala .
Hundreds of thousand fishermen and their family members have been protesting against the construction of the private seaport since July 20 after Kerala’s Communist-led government refused to accept their demands for resettlement and rehabilitation.
“Our protest has now entered the 105th-day and we are getting good public support, but we are being accused of accepting foreign funds to destabilize the country and its developments,” Father D’Cruz told on November 1.
The priest was responding to the allegation that Aleyamma Vijayan, the secretary of Sakhi Women’s Resource Centre, received funds for the ongoing coastal protest. She is the wife of A J Vijayan, a trade union leader and a petitioner in the National Green Tribunal against the port project.
Aleyamma has filed a defamation suit against the news channel “News 18” that carried the controversial news. In the petition, she said the organization has been working in human rights since 1996 in Thiruvananthapuram. It is registered as a Public Charitable Trust with a Foreign Contribution Regulation Act registration to receive funds.
Daily Archives: November 11, 2022
Collection of writings in honor of Jesuit Islamic scholar released
Jesuit superior general Father General Arturo Sosa has released a collection of writings in honour of a pioneer in Christian-Muslim relations who had worked in India for decades.
While releasing the book “Witness to a Common Hope: Festschrift in honour of Jesuit Father Christian W. Troll on October 28 at the Jesuit head-quarters in Rome, the general stressed the importance of the Jesuit works’ scholarly dimension.
The Festschrift (a collection of writings published in honour of a scholar) contains 26 essays that honor Father Troll. The volume was edited by Herman Roborgh, head of the School of Religion and Philosophy, Minhaj Univer-sity Lahore, Pakistan, and Jesuit Father Joseph Victor Edwin, lect-urer of Theology and Christian-Muslim Relations in Delhi’s Vidyajyoti Institute of Religious Studies. It was published by the Gujarati Sahitya Praksash in Gujarat.
The editors while introducing Father Troll as a scholar and ser-vant of reconciliation expressed joy in offering a bouquet of essays in honor of him through the edited volume.
Formed in the school of Igna-tian discernment, Father Troll was inspired by the Second Vati-can Council and its documents such as Lumen Gentium, Nostra Aetate and Dignitatis Humanae in his engagements with Muslims around the world.
CBCI: Nuncio urges Indian bishops to become exemplary prelates
The Indian Catholic bishops’ 35th general body meeting on November 7 took off to a colorful start with the Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Leopold Girelli celebrating the opening with more than 200 prelates as concelebrants.
Present at the opening program at St John’s National Academy of Health Science in Bengaluru were Cardinals Mario Grech, the secretary general of the Synod of Bishops, and Oswald Gracias, Archbishop of Bombay and president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India.
Also present were Bishop Joshua Mar Ignathios, CBCI vice president and secretary general Archbishop Felix Machado along with a number of archbishops, bishops and priests.
Speaking in his homily, Archbishop Girelli highlighted the readings of the day. He urged the bishops to be good shepherds who will be an example to priests and the faithful.
The papal ambassadors also shed light upon the Pope’s Intentions for November: Prayers for the Suffering Children, especially those who are homeless and helpless.
“There are those who dare to say, as if to justify themselves, that it was a mistake to bring these children into the world. …” Children are never a mistake. Their hunger is not a mistake, nor is their poverty, their vulnerability, their abandonment – so many children abandoned on the streets – and neither is their ignorance or their helplessness…
Cardinal Alencherry asked to appear in person in court
The Kerala High Court has asked Cardinal George Alencherry, head of the Catholic Church in the southern Indian state, to appear before a court in connection with cases related to a land sale.
The top court in Kerala November 9 dismissed the cardinal’s plea seeking exemption from personal appearance before the Judicial First Class Magistrate Court, Kakkanad, a suburb of Kochi. The prelate is facing seven criminal cases in connection with the sale of land belonging to the Archdiocese of Ernakulam-Angamaly Archdiocese a few years ago.
The cardinal is accused of selling prime land belonged to the archdiocese fraudulently without consulting canonical bodies and other concerned authorities and incurring a loss to the tune of close I billion rupees.
The cardinal had denied the allegations and reportedly admitted having certain failures in overseeing the land deals and made no gains from them.
Cardinal Alencherry in his plea said that he “is a senior citizen aged 77 years and head of the Syro Malabar Church spread over whole world, having a membership of 55 lakhs (5.5 millon).”
The prelate further said, he is “bestowed with the duty of performing religious ceremonies, rituals, including ordination of bishops, priests, consecration of churches.”
“Union Govt. Cites ‘Foreign Contributions’ For Keeping Out Dalit Christians, Muslims Out of SC List”
An affidavit filed by the Union govern-ment with the Supreme Court claims Islam and Christianity’s allegedly “foreign” contri-butions as justification for keeping Dalit Muslims and Dalit Christians out of the Scheduled Castes list, The Hindu has report-ed. The report notes that the affidavit “contra-dicts itself at several junctures,” and that there is “a lack of clarity on its arguments defending the current criteria” for determi-ning which communities can be included in the Scheduled Castes list.
The Ministry of Social Justice and Empo-werment filed the affidavit in October, in a case arising from a petition filed by the Centre for Public Interest Litigation, alleging that the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order 1950 is violative of Articles 14 and 15 of the constitution as it discriminates against members of Scheduled Caste communities who have converted to religions other than Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism.
“It is submitted that the present is a case of classification between Indian citizens and foreigners which cannot be doubted on any count. It is well established that Article 14 forbids class legislation but does not forbid classification,” the government has claimed.
“It is submitted that there exists a clear intelligible differentia between local contri-butions to the sector and foreign contribu-tions,” it added.
The Hindu report notes that, of course, the case does not concern foreigners but Indian citizens.
The Union government thus makes a case to distinguish between Scheduled Caste communities practising Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism and Scheduled Caste commu-nities practising other religions.
The Union government further submitted that a “twin test of classification” – purported-ly laid down by a “bench of higher combina-tions than Shayara Bano Supra – states that Article 14 forbids class legislation but does not forbid classification.
“It is submitted that it postulates that permissible classification must be founded on an intelligible differentia which distingui-shes persons or things that are grouped to-gether from others left out of the group, and the differentia must have a rational relation to the object sought to be achieved by the statute in question,” the Union govt. says.
Caste culture’s rooted in amongst Bangladeshi Catholics too
Two years ago, Kanika Das was in a relationship with a boy from a rich Catholic family and they planned to get married. However, their dreams were left in tatters when the boy’s family opposed the plan saying Das belonged to a Dalit Catholic family.
“When they [the boy’s family] found out my father is a cobbler and we belonged to the Dalit caste, they called off the marriage. That is not my fault, I think this is my misfortune,” Kanika, 19, told.
Dalits are considered socially lower and economically weak in the Hindu caste system on the Indian subcontinent, which continues to be practiced within Catholic Churches in the region, including Bangladesh.
The two families, both living in Khulna district in southern Bangladesh, did not know each other earlier. They met through a mutual friend and they maintained a close relationship for nearly two years.
The boy was ready to accept her Dalit background but “problems started when his family became aware of it,” she said.
Chaplains stay put in Myanmarese camps on the Thai side
Some 90,000 Myanmarese refugees live in nine camps on the Thai side of the border. At the height of displacement in the early 1990s, the camps held more than 130,000 refugees.
People already in the camps have watched humanitarian groups come and go over the years, though in recent times aid workers have mostly moved on to newer crises, leaving a chronic shortage of assistance for the refugees. What hasn’t declined is the commitment of the Catholic Church to accompany people in the camps. Father Nyareh said when Pope Francis mentioned refugees from Myanmar in his speech for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees Sept. 25, his words echoed among Burmese of all faiths.
Blasphemy ‘wrath’ behind attack on Pakistan’s ex-PM
The never-ending nightmare of the blasphemy law in Pakistan has a new victim — former Prime Minister Imran Khan.
The chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party was shot in the right leg on Nov. 3 in the eastern city of Wazirabad in Punjab province, where he was leading a protest march against the government.
Khan is the fourth high-pro-file figure to have been attacked in Pakistan by vigilantes who swear by the blasphemy law and hold the view that everyone who disgraces Islam’s holy figures must die.
Government officials termed the attack as the work of a lone gunman and “a very clear case of religious extremism.”
“He pretends to be giving a message like the Prophet Muha-mmad”
Naveed Mohammad Basheer, the arrested assailant, has report-edly confessed to the crime and accused Khan of committing “blasphemy” and cited this as a reason for the attempt to kill him.
“He was making noise during Azan [call to prayer] time. He claims to be the prophet of this century. He pretends to be giving a message like the Prophet Mu-hammad.
From a few Catholics to a multitude in Bahrain
Before Bahrain established the Gulf’s first church in the 1930s, priests would visit from Iraq to perform services for a small Catholic community.
Now, its ranks swollen by foreign workers, mostly from India and the Philippines, the community is preparing to wel-come the pope, the leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics.
Pope Francis’s visit this week, his second to the Arabian peninsula, will be especially emotional for Najla Uchi, whose father Salman built the Sacred Heart church that opened on Christmas Eve, 1939.
After lighting candles at her home in Manama, capital of the tiny Gulf nation, Uchi pulls out folders of old photos of her father and a medal he was awarded for building the church.
“My father left his hometo-wn, the Iraqi capital Baghdad, a long time ago,” she told AFP. “He came to Bahrain and settled here.”
More than 80 years after its consecration, the Sacred Heart is on the pontiff’s itinerary in the Muslim-majority monarchy who-se Catholics now number about 80,000.
Sri Lankans rally to demand release of 2 protest leaders
Sri Lankan police blocked more than a thousand protesters who were attempting to march to the capital’s main railroad station on Wednesday to demand the release of two detained protest leaders and an end to a government crackdown on demonstrations against an economic crisis that has engulfed the island nation for months.
The protesters, including opposition lawmakers and trade union and civil rights activists, also urged the government to abolish a harsh anti-terror law under which the two student protest leaders have been held for more than two months.
Father Jeewantha Peiris, a Catholic priest and prominent protest organizer, said Wasantha Mudalige and Galwewa Siridhamma have been detained for 74 days under the Prevention of Terrorism Act without any legal basis.
Mudalige and Siridhamma were involved in anti-government protests earlier this year, and their arrests drew wide condemnation.
The protesters marched Wednesday along a main road in Colombo toward the railroad station where they planned to hold a rally. But hundreds of police blocked the road, forcing them to abandon the demonstration.