Category: From The States

Ratna Devi, who lives in a shanty home alongside the Yamuna River in New Delhi, remembers vividly how she and her husband were brutally assaulted by her family because she had married a socially poor Dalit man.

The 33-year-old woman fell in love with the Dalit man in her home state of Haryana and married him discreetly because she knew her family would prevent her from doing so.

“For high-caste families, it is not only a crime but also a sin to marry someone of lower caste in India. I committed that sin and faced my family’s wrath,” Devi told ucanews.com.

The family attacked Devi and her husband with wooden sticks to save their honor. Only the timely intervention of police saved the couple from death. They later moved to New Delhi. “Life is good here. We have children and my husband has a decent job with a private firm,” Devi said.

The head of the Catholic Church and general secretary of Muslim theologians in India on May 4 proposed to send a high level interfaith delegation to Sri Lanka to explore ways to help the island nation struggling to recover from terrorist attacks.

“The most ghastly serial bomb blasts in Sri Lanka’s churches and hotels on Easter Sunday have shocked the entire civilized society all over the world. We …condemn unequivocally these dastardly acts,” Cardinal Oswald Gracias and Maulana Mahmood A. Madani said in a joint press statement issued in Mumbai expressing solidarity with the terror victims.

Cardinal Gracias is the president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India and Maulana Madani is the general secretary of Jamiat Ulama-I-Hind or the Council of Indian Muslim theologians.

On April 21, Easter Sunday, seven suicide bombers targeted three churches and three luxury hotels in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka. At least 253 people were killed and more than 500 wounded. As many as 42 foreign nationals, including more than a dozen Indians, also died.

“Sri Lanka being our closest neighbour, we are ready with an offer of help to enable the victims to get over the unprecedented crisis in their lives. We propose to depute a high level delegation of various faiths to Sri Lanka to explore the possibilities of cooperation and also to offer our sincere condolence to the bereaved families,” says the statement from the cardinal and the maulana.

The Islamic State, a terrorist group, has claimed responsibility for the attacks.

The Supreme Court of India on May 9 granted bail to Gornath Chalanseth, one of the seven innocent Christians languishing in jail for a decade due to the alleged Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a hard-line Hindu group, fraud on Kandhamal, on bail application led by ADF (Alliance Defending Freedom) legal team.

The New Delhi-based ADF, a Christian rights’ group and an advocacy organization, protects fundamental freedoms and promotes the inherent dignity of all people.

Gornath along with six others including mentally challenged Munda Badamajhi had been convicted to life imprisonment by a third judge in 2013 abruptly after two judges had been transferred.

While their bail pleas had been twice rejected by the Odisha High Court, Cuttack, last in December 2018, their appeals against the conviction by subversion of the judicial system has been dragging on for over five years in the Odisha High Court, said Anto Akkara, a senior journalist and author, who has been advocating help for releasing those seven innocents, among others, including ADF.

A group of South Asian Jesuits has expressed the joy of rediscovering the richness of an Ignatian spiritual tradition.

President of the Jesuit Conference of South Asia, Father George Pattery, called the ‘spiritual conversation’ as “a rare fruit.”

Some 200 Jesuits from 19 provinces and regions of South Asia attended the April 25-28 assembly on ‘Interculturality for Reconciled Life and Mission,’ held at the Jesuit philosophy-theology center, Jnana Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune, the cultural capital of the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

Father Pattery said that the Jesuits continue to rediscover the Ignatian treasure that is always present.

He said that the technique of ‘spiritual conversation’ conserved energy. There was no arguments, no fighting, and everyone was listened to, with deep respect for one another’s culture, he added.

He invited the Jesuits to sharpen and nuance the tool of ‘spiritual conversation’ and use it in their communities.

Father Pattery, a member of the Calcutta Jesuit province, said the Ignatian tool for discernment introduced ‘respectful listening’ providing a true democratic space for those engaged in it.

The ten-year-old gender policy of the Indian Catholic Church has proved to be a failed promise, women theologians say.

A great majority of women’s servitude betrays male privilege that is normalized in the families and in the Church. “This situation makes us interrogate whether the ‘Gender Policy of the Catholic Church in India’ acclaimed as the first of its kind, has remained a failed promise even after 10 years of its existence,” the Indian Women Theologians Forum said in a statement.

The forum’s April 28-May 1 annual meet at Good Shepherd Convent Bengaluru deliberated the theme, “Towards a Gender Just Church.”

The participants said they are pained at the indifference and silence of the Church leaders to sexual abuse survivors, including religious women.

“We are deeply disturbed by the double standards with which the survivors and their supporters are further victimized while the alleged offenders are sympathized and defended in various ways,” said a statement issued by the forum after the meeting.

The statement also noted that the notion of gender justice still remains an ambivalent concept or, a mismatch within the framework of the institutional Church.

“While the Christian doctrine affirms equality between women and men on the biblical foundation of the creation of humans ‘in God’s image’ (Gen.1: 26-28), women’s experience of discrimination, silencing and exclusion within the ecclesiastical structures point to the contrary,” the statement said.

A Catholic nun died on the spot and another suffered serious injuries on May 12 when their scooter collided with a truck near Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh.

According to Jabalpur Church sources, Sisters Manju Sisodia and Agnes Surin were traveling from Sagar to Rimjha, some 135 km southeast, when a truck hit their Activa scooter from behind. While Sister Surin died on the spot, Sister Sisodia was admitted to a hospital in Jabalpur.

A Catholic priest has been conferred with the “Best Citizens of India Award” in recognition of his work among the marginalized in northern India.

The International Publishing House, the world’s leading biographical specialists, chose Father Vineeth George for the award. He is a member of the Bangalore province of the Claretians and a doctoral research scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology in Hyderabad.

Salesian Fr Jacob Anil D’Sa has been appoint-ed the Asian Inter-national Young Catholic Students (IYCS) chaplain.

The 40-year-old Indian priest will be based at Manila, the capital of the Philippines.

The IYCS is a Catholic action movement of the apostolate of Laity. As an International Catholic organization, it functions under the Pontifical Council for the laity, Vatican.

Pope Francis on May 1 transferred Bishop Derek Fernandes of Karwar to Belgaum as its new prelate, according to a press note from the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India headquarters in New Delhi.

The diocese was without a head after Bishop Peter Machado was transferred to Bangalore as its arch-bishop in May 2018. He was chancellor and procurator of Belgaum diocese during 1991-2002 and the diocesan administrator for two years from 2004. He was appointed Karwar bishop on February 24, 2007.