Catholics in a southern Indian diocese have pardoned vandals who desecrated a Christian cross, but some suspect the divisive move aimed to create religious discord ahead of state elections in Kerala next year.
The incident, the second of its type in a month, took place on Oct. 24 in Thamarassery Diocese, where five young men climbed over a 12-feet-high concrete cross on a hilltop, took pictures and circulated them on social media.
The cross was erected on the Catholic parish property in 1979. Parishioners overpower-ed the young men, took them to a police station and filed a desecration complaint.
But the diocese intervened and withdrew the complaint to help the release of the young men from police custody, said Father Benny Mundanattu, diocesan chancellor.
India’s BJP begins targeting minority schools
In India’s Assam State hundreds of Muslim cleric-run schools, popularly called Madrasas, now face an existential crisis.
Assam’s Minister for Education Himanta Biswa Sarma has announced from November onward, the government in the north-eastern state will stop financing the Madrasas.
“Teaching Quran cannot happen at the cost of government money. If we have to do so, then we should also teach both the Bible (of Christians) and Bhagavad Gita (of Hin-dus). We want to bring uniformity and stop this practice,” he said.
India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which runs the federal government as well as the Assam State government, has never been shy of taking up pro-Hindu causes. Its new move against Muslim schools shows it has taken the next step – a crackdown on education – in its effort to make India a Hindus-only nation.
Christian shot dead inside Indian church as persecution intensifies
A Christian man was shot dead and three people were injured when assailants entered a Pentecostal Church and opened fire indiscriminately in India’s Punjab State. Police arrested three persons connected with the attack and are searching for four others who escaped, Christian leaders told. The attack happened as Christians were leaving the church after a special prayer meeting on Oct. 23.
Lack of political will keeps India hungry
India, a land of abundance and enduring democracy, has slipped below neighbour Bangladesh in the poverty index and will have to work hard to play the big brother role in South Asia. More than seven decades after their country escaped its British colonial legacy, Indians are relatively worse off than their counterparts in Bangladesh, Myanmar and Pakistan in the Global Hunger Index.
Priests release book on Church financial administrative culture
Ten diocesan priests from Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry have released a book on the Church financial administrative culture. “It was a soul searching process while we prepared the book Akkarai (concern) 2020,” Father Devasagayaraj M Zackarias, one of the authors and a former national secretary of the Indian bishops’ office for Scheduled Castes and Backward Classes.
Indian appointed to Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue
Pope Francis has appointed Divine Word Father Sebastian Maria Michael, a noted sociologist and writer, as a consulter of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue. Father Michael is the director of the Commission for Interreligious Dialogue of the Arch-diocese of Bombay. He is a professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Mumbai, and honorary director, Institute of Indian Culture, Mumbai.
Indian court quashes state acquisition of Church land
A court has set aside India’s only communist government’s order to acquire more than 2,000 acres of land belonging to a Christian denomination for a proposed airport in Kerala State.
The Kerala high court, the top court in the southern Indian state, on Oct. 16 quashed a notification issued by the state government to initiate the process for acquiring 2,253 acres of rubber plantation in possession of the Believers’ Church.
Rome appoints apostolic visitor for Kerala congregation
The Vatican Congregation for the Oriental Churches has appointed an apostolic visitor for the Kerala-based Missionary Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament (MCBS).
An October 13 letter from the Apostolic Nunciature in Delhi to MCBS superior general Father Joseph Maleparampil said Rome has appointed Carmelites of Mary Immaculate Father Paul Achandy as the apostolic visiror to the 87-year-old congregation.
The appointment, done with Pope Francis’ knowledge, is “Ad Nutum Sanctae Sedis,” a Latin term meaning “at the disposition of the Holy See.” It refers to any circumstance involving a conflict of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, where Rome decides to take the matter under its own jurisdiction and reserves to itself the right to make a final judgment on the matter.
Father Achandy is currently the chancellor of the Bengaluru-Based Christ University. He is also the rector of the Dharmaram College, a major seminary managed by his congregation adjacent to the university.
The 57-year-old priest took over as the vice chancellor on September 21.
He is an alumnus of Dharmaram College and former staff of the university when it was a college. The congregation was raised to the pontifical status on December 2, 1989. The congregation has two provinces– Kottayam and Kozhikode – in Kerala and region, Satara in the western Indian State of Maharashtra.
The two places the congregation works outside the Kerala are Shimoga district in Karnataka and Satara and Solapur districts in Maharashtra. It has missions also in Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu, a residences in Italy and Germany. Its priests work in Australia, North America and the Philippines.
This is the second time this year that Rome intervenes in the administration of religious congregations in India. On May 16, the Claretian congregation replaced its Bangalore provincial with a Vatican official as the delegate of the superior general.
UN rights chief urges India to safeguard human rights
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet on October 20 appealed to the Indian government to safeguard the rights of human rights defenders and NGOs, and their ability to carry out their crucial work on behalf of the many groups they represent.
Bachelet expressed regret at the tightening of space for human rights NGOs in particular, including by the application of vaguely worded laws that constrain NGOs’ activities and restrict foreign funding.
“India has long had a strong civil society, which has been at the forefront of groundbreaking human rights advocacy within the country and globally,” the High Commissioner said. “But I am concerned that vaguely defined laws are increasingly being used to stifle these voices.”
Bachelet, a former president of Chile, cited as worrying the use of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), which a number of UN human rights bodies have also expressed concern is vaguely worded and overbroad in its objective. The Act prohibits the receipt of foreign funds “for any activities prejudicial to the public interest.”
The Act, which was adopted in 2010 and was amended in September this year, has had a detrimental impact on the right to freedom of association and expression of human rights NGOs, and as a result on their ability to serve as effective advocates to protect and promote human rights in India.
It is expected that the new amendments will create even more administrative and practical hurdles for such advocacy-based NGOs. Most recently, Amnesty International was compelled to close its offices in India after its bank accounts were frozen over alleged violation of the FCRA.
Christians angry over blocking of church construction in India
A Christian group in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh is mulling a protest after the state government prevented construct-ion of a church because it says it was illegal.
Arunachal Christian Forum (ACF) has asked the state govern-ment run by the pro-Hindu Bha-ratiya Janata Party (BJP) to qui-ckly resolve the issue in Buddhist-majority Tawang town.
“The present government says that the church is illegal as it is on public land, referring to the Supreme Court order that bars construction of religious structures in public places, but that is not the case here,” Father Felix Anthony, spokesman for the Catholic Church in north-eastern India, told.
“People here who are for or against the construction of the church are not for disturbing the peace of the community that has been prevailing for years. People want the issues sorted out ami-cably. There is no question of disobeying the law written in the constitution.”