The Serra Club of Bangalore comprising of a group of lay Catholics promote, foster and encourage vocations to the Priesthood and Consecrated life. They held their 14th Annual Scripture Quiz on Saturday, August 4, 2018 at the Catholic Club, Bangalore, who also co-sponsored the event.
This year’s theme for the quiz was ‘Evangelization’ and focused on the Gospel according to St Mark and on St Paul’s letters 1 and 2 to the Corinthians.
Goa, a former Portuguese colony that now ranks as having one of the most famous beaches in India, is continuing to promote Christianity in Asia as part of its colonial legacy, according to former Archbishop Raul Gonsalves.
The 91-year-old retiree believes Jesuit missionaries, who have been based in his homeland on the subcontinent’s southwest coast since the 16th century, are still having a ripple effect across the entire continent, despite alleged attempts to “ethnically cleanse” the area of Catholics in the past. Archbishop Gonsalves said Goa has produced bishops for a number of countries due to the strong sense of faith instilled in so many families in the region.
This tiny Indian state, covered by the dioceses of Goa and Daman, has churned out some 60 bishops and cardinals for India, Pakistan and Africa, according to Father Joaquim Loiola Pereira, secretary to the current Archbishop of Goa Filipe Neri Ferrao.
Goa Diocese was created in 1533, 23 years after the Portuguese conquered the state by defeating its then Muslim ruler Ismail Adil Shah.
About 500,000 of Goa’s 1.8-million population identify as Catholic while in nearby Kerala about 5 million of its 36 million people are Catholics, and another 1 million are from other Christian denominations.
India’s secular ethos is being eroded by the politicization of religion ahead of a general election due in May next year.
Opposition parties during the latest session of parliament accused the federal government led by the pro-Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of trying to manipulate religious sensitivities. The Congress Party said Prime Minister Narendra Modi is copying divide-and-rule tactics used by British colonial rulers to foment antagonism between Hindus and Muslims. This included BJP leaders branding Congress as a “Muslim party.”
The head of the Catholic Church in India on July 27 expressed shock at the National Commission for Women’s demand for a ban on the Christian practice of confession. “This demand by the commission betrays a total lack of understanding of the nature, meaning, sanctity and importance of this Sacrament for our people; and also an ignorance of the strict laws of the Church to prevent any abuse,” Cardinal Oswald Gracias, president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, said in a press release.
The 73-year-old prelate, one of the eight cardinal advisers of Pope Francis, said such a ban will directly infringe on “our freedom of religion guaranteed by the Indian Constitution.”
According to him, millions of people from all over the world, over the centuries, have testified to the spiritual benefit of this Sacrament and to the grace, pardon and peace they have experienced as a result of receiving this Sacrament. “I am confident the government will totally ignore this absurd demand from the commission,” he added.
The cardinal was reacting to commission chairperson Rekha Sharma’s recommendation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and some of his cabinet colleagues to take steps to abolish the practice of confession in Christian Churches. The commission, a statutory body concerned with advising the Indian government on policy matters affecting women, reportedly recommended confession’s abolition alleging that the practice could lead to blackmailing of women.
Sharma on July 26 said priests pressured women into telling their secrets. “We have one such case in front of us, there must be many more such cases and what we have right now is just a tip of the iceberg,” she said.
The recommendations come in the backdrop of a rape case against four priests of Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church accused of sexually exploiting a married woman belonging to their church.
The issue came to the fore after the victim’s husband wrote to the Church, alleging that the priests blackmailed and abused his wife, a school teacher.
Leaders of various national women’s organizations and human rights activists in India have requested the Vatican to advise Pope Francis to remove Bishop Franco Mulakkal of Jalandhar from his post at least until an investigation was on his alleged sexual harassment of a nun. The women leaders on July 25 submitted a memorandum to Apostolic Nuncio to India Archbishop Giambattista Diquattro.
A member of the Missionaries of Jesus congregation in June filed a police complaint against the bishop alleging that he had sexually abused her several times during 2014-2016.
One of the women leaders, Annie Raja, general secretary of the National Federation of Indian Women, said an impartial inquiry could be conducted only if the bishop stepped down. The activists have already taken up the matter with the National Women Commission, which has assured all help to the aggrieved nun.
During a recent visit to the headquarters of Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), Father Ajay Kumar Singh of the Odisha Forum for Social Action advocated for the suppressed Christians of his eastern Indian state. “After 10 years there is hardly any justice for these communities,” said Father Singh.
The Catholic priest declared that the attacks of 2008 were the worst the country has seen in 300 years. “The violence claimed 101 lives, more than 350 churches were destroyed, 7500 houses were reduced to ashes, scores of convents, presbyteries, dispensaries and 13 humanitarian organisations were also attacked and vandalised. The riots spread to 450 villages in Kandhamal district alone.”
As time moves on buildings are rebuilt; the news headlines change, memories fade. But what is the state of the Christian community in Odisha and around India 10 years on?
In 2014, six years after the Kandhamal attacks, the “secularist” Indian National Congress party was voted out of power, in favour of the nationalist party the Bharatiya Janata Party.
As many as 2.52 crore minority students, half of them girls, availed three scholarship schemes being offered by the government, Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said today. Naqvi said in Lok Sabha that scholarships are being given for the education empowerment of minority students, including girl students all over the country.
All the three scholarship schemes are implemented through the National Scholarship Portal and the disbursement of scholarship is made under the Direct Benefit Transfer mode, which eliminates duplication and leakage, he said during the Question Hour.
Naqvi said so far 2.52 crore students belonging to minority communities have availed the scholarships, 50% of whom were girls.
Jayant Sinha is a Celtics fan. He graduated from Harvard. He worked for McKinsey. Born and raised in India but minted in the United States, he found wealth and success in the Boston area. His American friends say his politics were moderate, maybe even progressive.
Then he returned to India.
He ditched the suits he had worn as a partner at McKinsey & Company, an elite management consulting firm, in favour of traditional Indian kurtas. He joined the governing Hindu right political party and became a member of Parliament and then a minister, leading Hindu parades and showering worshipers with flower petals from a helicopter.
This month, he also feted and garlanded eight murderers who were part of a Hindu lynch mob that the authorities said beat an unarmed and terrified Muslim man to death. His embrace of the convicted killers has become the political stunt that Indians can’t stop talking about.
Across the country, the images of Mr. Sinha draping wreaths of marigolds around the men’s necks have started a conversation about whether the state of Indian politics has become so poisoned by sectarian hatred and extremism that even an ostensibly worldly and successful politician can’t resist its pull.
Abp Thomas D’Souza of Calcutta on Sunday reacted strongly to author Taslima Nasreen’s controversial tweet criticising Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity founded by her. Missionaries of Charity spokesperson Sunita Kumar told PTI that such comments “hurt her.” “I will not speak anything on this but it hurts me to hear such things,” Ms Kumar told PTI. The controversial Bangladeshi author had tweeted, saying “Mother Teresa charity home sells babies, it is nothing new.
The All India Catholic Union (AICU), a 99-year-association of Catholic lay people in the country, has called on the Jharkhand and federal government stop harassing the Missionaries of Charity Sisters, a religious order founded by Mother Teresa. “There seems but little doubt that the government of India, egged on by the religious nationalism of the RSS has decided to teach a lesson to the Christian community in India by singling out for posthumous criminalization the global icon Saint Teresa, a Nobel laureate but perhaps more important, an Indian citizen given its highest national honour of Bharat Ratna,” Dr. John Dayal, former national president and official spokesman of the AICU, which will be a 100 year old in 2019, told Matters India.
