Last week more than 5,000 people signed a petition against the construction of a luxury eco-resort in Old Goa (Velha Goa), a city in the State of Goa, western India. Among the signatories there are also several political and religious leaders.
The project encroaches on areas around the Chapel of Our Lady of the Mount, one of the oldest Catholic churches in the region and an important religious site, which should be protected by the state.

In the face of wars, violence, death and destruction prevailing in the region and across the world, a college in north Bengal dedicated its two-day inter college mega music and cultural fest for global peace and harmony.
Salesian College Siliguri hosted the inter college cultural and music fest ‘Innovision’, for the first time as autonomous college, on November 8 – 9, 2023.

A 19th century nun, considered the “mother of consecrated women in Kerala,” has reached the second stage of the four-phase canonization process in the Catholic Church.
Pope Francis on November 8 approved the heroic virtues of Eliswa of the Blessed Virgin Mary, founder of the first indigenous congregation for women in India.

Hundreds of thousands of Afghans living in Pakistan faced detention and deportation on November 2 , as a government deadline for them to leave sparked a mass exodus.
Thousands joined a snaking queue that stretched seven kilometers (four miles) at the busiest border point, with officials reporting at least 29,000 people crossed into Afghanistan the day before.

Official recognition as essential workers, registra-tion, identity cards, and sett-ing up a helpline app to address workplace harass-ment were some demands from the garbage collectors of Hyderabad.
More than 500 garbage collectors met November 5 to highlight their pressing demands and the lack of their basic rights and entitlements as they keep the southern Indian city clean and healthy.
The meeting decided to present their de-mands as a memorandum to the Telangana chief mini-ster. The memorandum also demanded the garbage pi-ckers enumeration by the municipal and state labor department authorities.
The meeting was organi-zed by the Montfort Social Institute, India Network for Basic Income Foundation, and Work FREE, a research project based at the University of Bath, United Kingdom.
Brother Varghese Theckanath, director of the Montfort institute that hosted the convention.

Laughter and singing re-verberated through a girls or-phanage in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur, as violence raged on the streets outside.
“Not that we are not affe-cted by the violence, but we feel safe and secure here,” Anjali Khouchung, a 12-year-old resident of Snehabhavan (“Home of Love”), told Global Sisters Report.
The ethnic violence in Manipur, which began May 3, is a conflict between the Meitei community, who are Hindus and the majority community of the state, and the Kuki, a minority tribe who are mostly Christians. Nearly 200 civili-ans, mostly Kukis, were killed in the violence. Many churches and villages were also burned.
The violence was still ra-ging when GSR visited the Manipur capital of Imphal the last week of September.
The state government had cut off the internet but, pre-suming the situation had im-proved, restored it after four months – only for it to be disconnected again as fresh violence hit Imphal following social media rumors about the murder of two students of the Meitei. The state government also reimposed indefinite cur-few in Imphal, the capital city.
“Our sisters take good care of us here,” said Khouchung, a member of the Naga, a mino-rity tribe in Manipur that is not involved in the conflict.
The sisters had to send the Kuki students back from their Imphal center for security rea-sons, as the majority commu-nity of Meiteis were targeting Kukis, but sisters continued to take care of the orphaned Kuki children in refugee camps thro-ugh their outreach programs.

Jaipur’s Jantar Mantar, an iconic scientific marvel, was created in 1734 with ideas from astronomy scholars of various reli-gions, including Jesuit pri-ests from Goa, says a sci-ence historian in India.
The site is “truly an innovation far ahead of its time” and intrinsically secular in nature, said Dhruv Raina Nove-mber 5 while delivering a lecture at the MOG Sundays, an initiative of the Museum of Goa, Pilerne.
The Jantar Mantar is a collection of 19 astronomical instruments built by Sawai Jai Singh, the founder of Jaipur in the present day Rajasthan state.
“Many Jesuits who came to India from France were astronomers. They interacted with local traditions and ways of doing astronomy. Jai Singh II wrote to the Governor of Goa to tell him that he needed some astronomers and the governor sent some Jesuit priests,” Raina said.
Hence, Jai Singh II’s endea-vour facilitated interactions between Muslim, Brahmin and Christian astronomers, making it a secular space, he added.
The site that features the world’s largest stone sundial now holds UNESCO World Heritage status. The Rajput king built the Jantar Mantar in pursuit of accurate scientific knowledge and its production. The sun dial is colloquially known as the ‘Samrat Yantra’ or ‘King of Instruments,” Raina explained.

An Indian court has allow-ed a Catholic activist to inter-vene in an ongoing legal battle to reclaim, restore and declare a 16th century Portuguese-era church as a historical monu-ment.
Melwyn Fernandes was appointed an intervener to ex-pedite the case filed by Mumbai archdiocesan clergy to reclaim Our Lady of Mercy Church (Nossa Senhora Des Merces) built by Portuguese Jesuits in 1562 at Thane in the western state of Maharashtra.The next hearing of the case is on Nov. 21.
The church is located in a neighbourhood called Pokhran and is around 45 kilometres away from Mumbai, the fina-ncial capital of the country. It is currently in ruins, a part of which is being claimed by a Hindu temple trust, Fernandes said.
Judge A.S. Nalge of the Thane Civil and Sessions Court last month asked the St John Baptist Church, the complain-ant in the dispute, to include Fernandes after he sought to intervene in the dispute as he felt the case was proceeding at a slow pace.
Fernandes, who is general secretary of the Mumbai-based Association of Concerned Ca-tholics, told on Nov. 7 that the dispute dates back to 1970 when the church was being renovated and a stone with Hindu carvings was found at the entrance arch.
Hindus residing nearby started a campaign that the church existed on what was originally a temple of the Hindu god Shiva.

Cut off from the world, surrounded by the outbreak of war in Gaza by the firepower of the Israeli army intent on repelling the infiltrations of Hezbollah and the Palestinian commandos of the al-Qassam brigades, part of Hamas: these are the conditions of the inhabitants remaining in the town of Rmeich (around 10 thousand people) and in the two nearby villages of Aïn Ebel and Debl, located on the edge of the Lebanese-Israeli border. For this reason, the visit in recent days of the apostolic nuncio Msgr. Paolo Borgia came as a great surprise.
The Vatican diplomat arrived in Rmeich with a convoy of the Lebanese NGO Solidarity, chaired by businessman Charles Hajje, who is also president of the Maronites in the World Foundation, an institution of the Maronite Patriarchate. Welcomed in the town hall, the nuncio conveyed to his guests the blessing and concern of Pope Francis and the Secretary of State, Card. Pietro Parolin, who exceptionally authorized him to visit this war zone.
The town is in fact located in a war zone. “As far as we are concerned, the conflict that Prime Minister Nagib Mikati is trying to avoid by visiting Arab capitals is actually already there and present,” says Milad Alam, president of the Rmeich municipality. The official then thanked the nuncio for his visit. Of course, it is a contained war, but “it has already claimed many victims, including a photographer from the Reuters agency”, he recalls.
However, although limited, this war, which the vast majority of Lebanese do not want, is starting to take its toll on the border population. Faced with Hezbollah, the Lebanese state has revealed the extent of its impotence. Municipalities are deprived of their resources and the population feels forgotten by the central government. The Lebanese army has no say in the south of the country of cedars and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) is reduced to appealing to reason towards all parties involved.