Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has app-lauded a Catholic parish for allowing the cremation of Hindu Covid victim in its cemetery.
“The action of Edathua church to allow the pyre of a Covid -19 patient, who was not a member of the parish, is laudable,” Vijayan told a press conference on May 27 while briefing the coronavirus situation in the southern Indian state.
Srinivasan Puthenpurayil, an 86-year-old Hindu migrant from Tamil Nadu, was cremated on May 25 in the cemetery of St George Church at Edathua in Kerala’s Alappuzha district.
The man’s five family members were in quarantine after they were tested Covid positive.
“Due to heavy rain their residence and premises were waterlogged and there was no public crematorium in our place,” said Father Mathew Chooravady, the vicar of Edathua Church.
The man’s relatives and a panchayat member approached the church for help.
“After consulting the parish council team, we have decided to give our space for the cremation,” the 66-year-old priest told Matters India over phone on May 28.
The parish has launched various ways to help those affected by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Food distribution, medical help and awareness programs are some of them,” Father Chooravady explained.
The priest said the cremation of the Hindu man was “the need of the hour,” and “our facilities should not be limited only to our community during crisis like this.”
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Cardinal Bo under fire for meeting Myanmar coup leader
Cardinal Charles Maung Bo’s meeting with Myanmar coup leader Min Aung Hlaing has sparked outrage among the Catholic community in the predominantly Buddhist nation.
Senior General Min Aung Hlaing visited the archbishop’s house in Yangon on Dec. 23 for a Christmas event hosted by Cardinal Bo and two auxiliary bishops.
The archbishop of Yangon and the general cut a Christmas cake together and the military chief also donated US$11,000 to the cardinal for church funds.
Cardinal Bo said in his short message that peace and peacemaking represent the core message of Christmas.
“I encourage and request all people from all walks of life to make extraordinary efforts to bring peace, unity and development to the country through forgiveness, mutual respect, creating opportunities for the younger generation, sincere dialogue and reconciliation with all our people,” he said.
The cardinal also conveyed the message of Pope Francis, who visited Myanmar in 2017, that he is deeply saddened by the current situation in the country and repeated his appeal to work hard for peace, development and joy.
The meeting between the Catholic leader, who advocates for peace and human rights, and Min Aung Hlaing came amid the military’s relentless assault on civilians including air strikes and shelling in Karen, Chin, Kayah and Kachin states where Christians form the majority.
The Independent Catholics for Justice in Myanmar condemned the meeting, saying it ignored the suffering of the people who have been oppressed and killed and the bombing of churches.
“The meeting is not representing the whole Catholic community in the country as it is against the will of all Catholics,” the group said in a statement.
Catholics including clergy have taken to social media to express their anger, shock and dismay at the meeting.
South Korea pardons disgraced ex-president Park Geun-hye
South Korea’s ex-president Park Geun-hye received a pardon today, cutting short a jail term of more than 20 years for corruption with her successor saying he granted it in the interest of national unity.
Park became South Korea’s first female president in 2013, but less than four years later she was impeached and ousted after a graft scandal sparked huge street protests.
The 69-year-old was serving a 20-year prison sentence for bribery and abuse of power, with another two years after that for election law violations.
“Considering the many challenges we face, national unity and humble inclusiveness are more urgent than anything else.”
Moon said Park’s deteriora-ting health after serving almost five years in jail was also a factor in the decision to pardon her. Park has been hospitalized several times this year. She is currently receiving treatment at a facility in the capital Seoul.
The amnesty will take effect on Dec. 31, the Justice Ministry said.
Uproar over Pakistani bakeries’ boycott of Christmas cakes
Two popular bakeries in the Pakistani city of Karachi have caused uproar on social media after refusing to decorate cakes with Christmas greetings.
The controversy began after Celestia Naseem Khan, a Kara-chi-based student, reported on social media that Delizia Bakery refused to write “Merry Christ-mas” on a cake she bought.
“So I recently went to Delizia to buy a cake and when I asked them to write “Merry Christmas” on it and they clearly declined me, the guy said he’s not allowed to write it and they have given an order from the kitchen about this,” Khan said.
Following her post, thousands sent Merry Christmas greetings to the bakery while some Christians projected the bakery’s refusal as an expression of increasing intolerance in the port city known for its inter-religious community.
The bakery management, however, said in a social media post the refusal was an individual action and not part of management policy.
“This is clearly the act of an individual and we do not discriminate on the basis of religion or creed. At the moment we are taking action against him. It was done in an individual capacity and is not company policy,” it said. “It may have been done due to lack of education and awareness that ‘Merry Christ-mas’ means wishing someone a happy Christmas, nothing else.”
India-Bangladesh ties are no more refugees of the past
The agony and ecstasy associated with the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 still hold the message that religion cannot bind a nation together for long. Sheikh Mujibar Rahman and his Mukti Bahini firmly believed that the Bengalis in the east were different from West Pakistanis and thus Pakistan was splintered and Bangladesh came into being. This development had a more significant and wide-ranging impact than any other comparable event in the recent history of the subcontinent, especially for India, which played a big role in the liberation of Bangladesh.
Celebrating Christmas in Muslim-majority Pakistan
The international community fed by biased news tends to presume that all Muslim-majority nations ban any kind of celebrations, which is false.
Only a few among the 50 or so Muslim majority countries in the world, among them the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Tajikistan, Brunei, Morocco and Afghanistan, disallow celebrations like Christmas.
Speaking for and from Pakistan, non-Muslim citizens are permitted to take a couple of days off for their festivals.
There are over 5 million Christians in Pakistan, though they make up a small proportion of its 162 million people.
We are lucky because Dec. 25 is a public holiday as it is the birthday of the nation’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, also referred to as Quaid-e-Azam or the Great Leader.
The student community gets a longer winter break with schools and colleges closing on Dec. 23-24 until Jan. 2-3.
Catholics caution Philippine govt against Chinese aid
Catholics in Bacolod Diocese in the Visayas region have cautioned the Philippine government against accepting China’s aid to help victims of Super Typhoon Rai.
Chinese ambassador Huang Xilian on December 22 offered US$1 million as cash aid and 4,725 tons of rice to the typhoon-hit Southeast Asian country.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte accepted the aid and thanked the Chinese government.
The San Lorenzo Ruiz group, comprising representatives from various parishes in the region, said the Philippine government must scrutinize if there were any “strings attached” before accepting Chinese aid.
“The country is in need of money because we are still recovering from the pandemic. Now a natural calamity has hit us. But this does not mean we should put our defenses down while accepting these big donations,” the group said in a Facebook post on Dec. 23.
They further said the Duterte government must exercise caution to avoid falling into a debt trap like fellow developing nation Bangladesh, whose 6.81 percent external debt is now Chinese money.
“Let us be careful because all this could lead us towards a debt trap. These donations may lead to debts later on. Everyone must look at this deal because the million dollars may be a donation but the succeeding millions, if any, would be in the form of debt,” the group added.
The Chinese ambassador said the cash was allocated by the Chinese government for relief and recovery efforts by the Philippine government in badly hit provinces such as the Surigao, Siargao and Dinagat islands in the Visayas region.
Indian authorities to block foreign funding for Mother Teresa’s charity
For decades, the Christian congregation founded by Mother Teresa in an Indian slum was seen by supporters as a symbol of selfless giving and a magnet for donations from around the world. But to India’s Hindu right wing, it was a target of their ire — and a hotbed, some alleged, for the conversion of desperate Hindus into Christians.
Now, the Missionaries of Charity — an organization that grew from a humble order of 12 sisters led by Mother Teresa into one of the world’s most recognizable Christian non-profits with branches from Venezuela to Washington, D.C. — is facing potentially crippling sanctions from the Indian government. The organization’s international donations will be effectively frozen on Saturday after India’s Home Ministry said Monday it will not renew the group’s license to receive funds from abroad because it found “adverse inputs.”
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Although the ministry did not provide details about its reasoning or the case, the decision comes at a moment of rising Hindu nationalism in India — and mounting scrutiny of foreign non-profits and human rights organizations — under the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party.
The funding ban threatens an operation of thousands of nuns who have depended for decades on the enduring legacy of Mother Teresa to raise money from around the world and use it to provide shelter, food and education for orphans, the homeless and the sick. Mother Teresa died in 1997 and was made a saint in 2016.
Leaders at the Missionaries of Charity declined to comment but issued a brief statement saying they have asked members to stop accessing accounts with foreign funds until the matter is “resolved.” A senior official from the Archdiocese of Calcutta, where the non-profit is based, condemned the government move as an attack on both the Christian community and on “the poorest of India’s poor” who depend on its services.
Vatican agency reveals number of missionaries murdered around the world during 2021
22 Catholic missionaries were killed around the world in 2021, half of them in Africa, according to a report released by the Fides News Agency and distributed Thursday by the Vatican press office.
Fides, the news agency of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, reported that of the 22 missionaries killed in 2021, 13 were priests, two were women religious, one was a male religious, and six were lay people. Half of the total were killed in Africa: seven priests, two religious sisters, and two lay people.
In its report, Fides explains that their annual list “has not only included missionaries ad gentes in the strict sense, but has tried to register all Catholic Christians engaged in some way in a pastoral activity who died violently, not expressly ‘in hatred of the faith’.” According to the report, seven missionaries were murdered in Latin America, three in Asia, and one in Europe.
“In recent years, Africa and Latin America have alternated in the first place of this tragic ranking. From 2000 to 2020, according to our data, 536 missionaries were killed world-wide,” says the report.
In speech to Curia, pope warns against worldly attachments, including in the liturgy
To close a year in which he put limits on the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass, Pope Francis warned against the temptations of pride, spiritual worldliness, and attachment to superficial reassurances, including liturgical preferences.
In his Dec. 23 speech to members of the Roman Curia, the Pope centred on the biblical figure of Naaman the Syrian, who while being a powerful general in the Syrian army known for his courage and bravery, also had leprosy, which he hid beneath his armour.
In his search for a cure, Naaman, taking the advice of a slave girl, set out to find the Prophet Elisha for help.
Although he initially believed Elisha’s command to shed his armor and bathe in the Jordan River seven times to be too simple, he eventually obeyed and was healed, but only after humbling himself and letting go of his notions of power.
“The story of Naaman re-minds us that Christmas is the time when each of us needs to find the courage to take off our armor, discard the trappings of our roles, our social recognition and the glitter of this world,” and adopt an attitude of humility, the Pope said.