Church leaders and activists have welcomed the appointment of a tribal Catholic as India’s new minister of state for minority affairs.
John Barla, an MP who represents Alipurduar in West Bengal state for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s latest cabinet reshuffle on July 7.
“We are quite delighted after John was given the chance to look after minority affairs and will be directly responsible for day-to-day activities of minorities’ groups. We hope he does justice to his responsibilities,” Father Nicholas Barla, secretary of the Indian bishops’ commission for tribal affairs, told.
“It feels good when someone from the same community is chosen as a federal minister, and we pray and wish him good luck. “Since John himself belong to an Oran tribe, he is the right person who can understand the sufferings, difficulties and socioeconomic condition of the tribal people. It will be easy for him to work for the downtrodden people.
“We have a big list of demands concerning tribal rights and we hope the new minister will be able to address all these issues.”

The Catholic bishops in north-eastern India on July 13 condemned the demolition of a church in the national capital the previous day.
“It is shocking and sad news,” said Archbishop John Moolachira of Guwahati, who is president of North East India Regional Bishops’ Council (NEIRBC). The Little Flower Church in Lado Sarai was demolished by the South Delhi Municipal Corporation citing encroachment of government’s agricultural land “by some people by instalment of reli-gious structures.”
Speaking on behalf of NEIRBC, Archbishop Moolachira said, “Demolition of the Church in Delhi has hurt the religious sentiment of the peace loving Christian community not only in Delhi but across the country. The number of such incident has been on the rise in the recent past, including many parts of North East India.”

Every third Jesuit who succumbed to Covid-19 in the world since June 2020 was Indian, according to a list circulated by Father Arturo Sosa, superior general of the Society of Jesus. The list, sent with a letter to all heads of 83 provinces, six independent regions and ten dependent regions, shows that as many as 158 Jesuits died of Covid-19 within a year starting June 2020. Among them 50 were Indians and two Sri Lankans.
Father Sosa recalled the death of another 44 Jesuits due to Covid in the previous year. “This list is long, and it would be even longer if we added the names of all our relatives who have left us,” he says.
The Covid toll adds to the already dwindling numbers among the Jesuits. As of 2018, the Society of Jesus had 15,842 members: 11,389 priests and 4,453 men in formation. This was 56 percent less than 36,038 in 1965, when the congregation’s membership peaked.

Father John Fernandes, founder president of the Catholic Priests’ Conference of India (CPCI), died in Mangaluru on July 3, the feast of Saint Thomas. He was 85.
The funeral is scheduled at 9:30 am on July 4 at St.Joseph the worker Church, Vamanjor, Mangaluru.
Father Fernandes, a priest of Mangalore diocese, had made a mark as a renowned human rights activist and a promoter of interreligious dialogue. He had led a number of movements for justice for Dalits, farmers and villagers while serving as pastor of rural parishes under the diocese of Mangalore.
He also fought for the rights of the Catholic diocesan priests in India the leader of CPCI, which was once the national forum of priests influenced by liberation theology.
As a dialogue activist he had addressed several meetings of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (RSS), the umbrella organiza-tions of the Hindu nationalist groups, as an invitee on topics related to interreligious har-mony. He was the recipient of the Herbert Haag Award for Freedom in the Church from Lucerne, Switzerland in 2007.
Fr Onil D’Souza, the dire-ctor of the St Anthony’s poor homes where Father Fernandes spent his last days, said he was “deeply touched by his passion for the poor, his secular app-roaches and sense of justice all through his priestly life.”

In a rare diplomatic gesture, India has returned the relics of a Christian saint and Georgian queen killed in Iran for refusing to give up her faith 400 years ago and buried in Goa.
Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar handed over the relics of St Queen Ketevan to his Georgian counterpart David Zalkaliani on July 10 during a two-day visit to Georgia.
Ketevan was the queen of Kakheti, a kingdom in eastern Georgia in the 17th century. Iranian King Shah Abbas I took her hostage after he conquered her kingdom in 1613-14.
She refused to convert to Islam or join the Iranian ruler’s harem and is believed to have been tortured to death on Sept. 22, 1624.
Some Augustinian friars in 1627 brought her body to Goa, then a Portuguese colony. It was buried and remained hidden inside the Augustinian convent in Goa.

The Rainbow Home of the Seven Sisters (RHoSS) aims to provide a home for homeless transgender women and help them build a better future. The new facility – located in Guwahati, Assam’s commercial capital– is the brainchild of Sister Prema Chowallur, a member of the Sisters of the Cross of Chavanod, who has been working with marginalized people since 2016.

Fr Stan Swamy, who died on Monday at the age of 84, was laid to rest today. His fellow Jesuits described the service as “The funeral of a saint of our time”, held in St Peter’s Church in Bandra (Mumbai). Only 20 people were able to take part in the ceremony due to COVID-19 restrictions, but the Mass was streamed live.

On June 15, a new version of the local anti-conversion law came into force in the Indian state of Gujarat: it mainly targets “love jihad”. And just four days later, in the city of Vadovara, the police filed a complaint arresting six people, including five members of the same family.
A 24-year-old woman raised this case, which shows how divisive the issue is in the Indian states where the Hindu nationalists of the BJP rule.

The Indian Women Theologians’ Forum says it will campaign for the repeal of draconian laws that unjustly incarcerate those working for justice and human rights. Mourning the death of Father Stan Swami, the association of women theologians from various Christian denominations, expressed shock and anguish that the government labelled the Jesuit activist’s work as seditious whereas the State should have been doing what the priest had done – “upholding the Constitutional rights of all Indians.”