A national conference on synod has called for restoring the space denied to Dalit Christians in the Church and society.
The February 16-17 conference on “Synodal Church: Voice of the Marginalized in India,” studied the Dalit Empowerment Policy of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, 2016, that mandates an end to caste practices and promotes inclusive communities. The policy also focuses on the denied space of Dalit Christians in the Church and society.
“The very focus of the Synodal Church is mission, communion, and participation,” asserted Cardinal Anthony Poola, arch-bishop of Hyderabad, who presided over the conference held at the Indian Social Institute in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru.
The first cardinal from the Dalit community said everyone should be included in the mission of the Catholic Church so that no one feels left behind. “The marginalized should participate in the Church where their voice should be heard,” he asserted.
The program was organized by the Tamil Nadu Bishops’ Council, Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in collaboration with the Office for Scheduled Castes and Backward Classes under the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI).
The participants were Dalit Catholics from Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana.
The conference prepared a memorandum that reiterated the need to give to the Dalit Christians in India their denied space and taking steps to empower them.
The conference has decided to submit the memorandum to the Vatican, the CBCI and the Conference of Catholic Bishops in India. Among those present were Bishop Sarat Chandra Nayak of Berhampur, the chairperson of the CBCI Office, and his predecessor Bishop Neethinathan Anthonisamy of Chingelpet.

An octogenarian Catholic priest says an award he received from the Tamil Nadu government is the recognition of what Christians have contributed to the growth of Tamil language in the past five centuries.
“I am glad the Christian contribution to Tamil language is being recognized. The larger society has not recognized pro-perly the contribution of Christians in various fields in Tamil Nadu,” Father D Amudhan, the recipient of the 2022 George Uglow Pope (G.U. Pope) Award, told Matters India Feb. 24.
The Tamil Nadu’s Department of Tamil Development awarded Father Amudhan, a well-known academic from Tanjore diocese, at a function on February 22 at the Raja Rathnam Auditorium in Adayar, Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu.
Father Amudhan is the first Catholic priest and the second Christian to receive this award, named after a 19th century British Anglican missionary who had served in Tamil Nadu for 40 years.
The priest, who would turn 81 on April 18, was among 25 people who received the award for their contributions to Tamil language and literature from M P Swaminathan, minister for Tamil Development and Tourism.

Cardinal Filipe Neri Ferro, archbishop of Goa-Daman, has been elected the president of the Federation of Asian Ca-tholic Bishops’ Conferences (FABC).
He will succeed Salesian Cardinal Charles Muang Bo, the head of the Catholic Church in Myanmar, in January 2025, when he completes his three-year term as the head of the Asian Church.
The election took place February 22, the last day of FABC Central Committee’s three-day meeting at Bangkok, capital of Thailand.
The meeting also elected Bishop Pablo Virgilio Siongco David of Kalookan, Philippines, as the vice president. He will succeed Cardinal Malcolm Ranjit, archbishop of Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Salesian Archbishop Tarci-sio Isao Kilkuchi of Tokyo, Japan, has been reelected for a second term as the federation secretary general.
Cardinal Ferrao is currently the president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India (CCBI), the national body of the Latin rite prelates in the country.
After completing minor seminary at Our Lady, Saligao-Pilerne, Goa, he studied philo-sophy and theology at the Papal Seminary, Pune, Maharashtra. He was ordained a priest on October 28, 1979.

In the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh a large crowd took part this morning in the Eucharistic liturgy for the centenary of the Mary Matha shrine in Gunadala, in the diocese of Vijiawada. The liturgy – the heart of three days of celebrations – was presided by the Apostolic Nuncio in India.
“The work begun by those missionaries is now carried on by the new generations of Christians that they baptised,” explained the bishop of Vijayawada.

The Catholic Church in India on February 17 witnessed another round of mass appointments of bishops.
On the same day, Pope Francis accepted the resignations of one arch-bishop and five bishops.
The appointments and resignations were announced at noon in Rome and its corresponding time in India.
The latest appointments are for the dioceses of Purnea in Bihar, Khandwa and Indore in Madhya Pradesh, Aurangabad in Maharashtra and Khammam and Nalgonda in Telangana, according the Holy See Press Office.

Thousands of people were present when the Vatican raised an 18th century shrine in Mahe as a basilica, marking a historic milestone in Kerala’s northern region.
During a Mass on February 24, Bishop Varghese Chakkalakal of Calicut on February 24 announced that the Vatican has given the new status to St. Teresa’s Church in Mahe that comes under his Latin rite diocese.

Pope Francis on February 27 appointed Father Johannes Gorantla as the sixth bishop of Kurnool diocese in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.
This appointment was made public at noon in Rome and its corresponding time in India on the bishop-elect’s 50th birthday.

Ho Ca Dau is taking catechism classes to be baptized into the Catholic Church after having helped persecute Christians for nearly a decade, treating them as enemies of communism.
The 27-year-old from the Bru-Van Kieu ethnic group believes his conversion is akin to that of St. Paul, who “persecuted Christians but fell to the ground on the way to Damascus and chose to follow Jesus.”
Dau was born into an atheist family in a village in the central province of Quang Tri. In the village, he treated Christians as a “reactionary force,” fighting against the communist government, he said.
His father, a soldier and Communist Party member, told him that religious forces such as Christianity abuse ethnic villagers and damage the government’s revolutionary causes.
“There is no God in the world and humans can do all things,” Dau recalls his father telling him.
Dau studied at a state-run boarding school where he joined the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union, a socio-political organization that educates young people to be loyal communists.
After completing high school in 2015, he volunteered to serve as a militiaman to maintain social order and se-curity in the village.
He tried his best to get rewarded by his superiors by “following, snooping, and eavesdropping on people” who came to the village from other places. People came to trade in dried fish, sugar, milk, cooking oil, and clothes, besides supplying notebooks to the local people.
“I suspected them of illegally spreading Catholicism and Protestantism. I accused them of endangering social security,” he recalled.
In 2016, Dau got five of them arrested for “keeping crosses and copies of the Bibles in their bags.”
Dau believed the cross was an “evil” force and actively prevented local Catholics from gathering for prayers.
“One day I fainted because of hunger and was lying on the side of the road. A Catholic passer-by took me to the hospital and covered all my medical treatment costs,” he said.
“As he began mixing with the other Catholics, he became deeply interested in Catholi-cism,” Vinh said.

Christian Churches in Assam, northeastern India, have criticized the state government’s “misguided and misleading” statement equating healing with proselytization.
The Assam Christian Forum (ACF), an umbrella body of all Churches, has also rejected a radical Hindu group’s demand for the removal of Christian symbols from missionary schools in the state. The group, Kutumba Surakshya Parishad (Family Protection Council), alleged that missionaries use such symbols subtly to convert students from other faiths.
“The Assam Cabinet’s assertion that Christians engage in magical healing is misguided and misleading. Our numerous dispensaries and hospitals operate within the recognized medical frameworks, providing essential services to the sick,” ACF stated