Seven people were sent to judicial custody by a court in India’s eastern Odisha state for attacking Christian families in villages and forcing them to flee their homes after they refused to give up their faith in Jesus. The incident was reported from Narayanpatna and Bondhugaon in Koraput district on June 10. At least 60 indigenous Christians, including women and children, were forced to spend the night in a nearby forest, after which they trekked to their relatives and friends’ houses in the area the next day, Church leaders said. “We are happy that police arrested seven persons on June 12 and a local court remanded them in judicial custody the same day,” said Bishop Pallab Lima, head of the United Believers Council Network India.

Christian leaders in eastern India claim that the increasing incidents of robbery and assaults on priests in the region are systematic and part of a larger agenda to weaken the Church’s mission. In the latest incident, five masked men broke into the vicarage of a Catholic parish in Simdega diocese, in Jharkhand, during the early hours of June 9. The robbers “brutally assaulted” Samsera parish’s priest, Father Ignatius Toppo, and his assistant, Father Roshan Soreng, before stealing an undisclosed amount of money from a safe, according to Father Agustin Dungdung, the principal of the Church-run school in the parish. Father Dungdung, who resi-des in the parish house, was also attacked. In the past two years, “churches in eastern Indian states have increa-singly faced such attacks,” Bishop Theodore Mascarenhas of Daltonganj told on June 12.

As Don Bosco HRD Mission Dhobasole, West Midnapore completes one year of service to the Leprosy patients and their families, the team reflects on its humanitarian efforts to bring relief to patients in a leprosy hospital and rehabilitation villages. Nestled in Anchuri village, near Anchuri railway station, the government-run Bankura Leprosy Hospital serves patients from across West Bengal and neighbouring states. Despite leprosy being declared eradicated, thousands still suffer, particularly in underserved regions of India. Bankura hospital, with its 500-bed capacity spread across ten blocks, provides free medical care, food, and treatment. However, patients face extreme social stigma—ostracized by their families and communities, they often seek refuge in government and non-government facilities. A visit by Don Bosco HRD Mission Dhobasole last year revealed the lack of basic necessities. There are 350 men and 150 women patients, many live in discomfort, without proper storage for belongings, mobility aids, or essential medical equipment.

The Conference of Catholic Bishops of India (CCBI), the national episcopal conference for the Latin Catholic Church in India, celebrated a landmark event today with the solemn blessing and inauguration of its newly renovated General Secretariat at 9-10, Bhai Vir Singh Marg, New Delhi. His Eminence Cardinal Filipe Neri Ferrão, President of the CCBI, presided over the inauguration ceremony. His Excellency Leopoldo Girelli, Apostolic Nuncio to India and Nepal inaugurated the building. Archbishop Peter Machado, Vice President of the CCBI, blessed the office block, while Archbishop Anil Couto of Delhi blessed the residential section of the building. The event signifies a significant chapter in the history of the Episcopal Conference for the Latin Catholic Church in India.

The Vatican has appointed a new bishop for India’s Jalandhar dioce-se in Punjab, four years after Bishop Franco Mulakkal stepped down des-pite a court clearing him of charges of raping a nun. The Vatican named Father Jose Sebastian Thekkum-cherikunnel as the new bishop on June 7. The 63-year-old priest serves as the financial administrator of the diocese. The diocese, which has been without a bishop for nearly seven years, has not announced the date of Episcopal ordination. Retired Auxi-liary Bishop Agnelo Rufino Gracias of Mumbai has been serving as its Apostolic Administrator since Sept. 20, 2018, a day before police arrested Mulackkal based on the complaint made to law enforcement. The bishop elect also comes from Kerala but was ordained a priest in 1991 for the Jalandhar diocese based in Punjab, the Sikh-dominated northwestern Indian state. In 2004, Thekkumcheri-kunnel obtained a Licentiate in Canon Law from the Pontifical Urban University in Rome. He served the diocese in various roles across parishes and at the diocesan seminary. Additionally, he held the positions of chancellor and judicial vicar of the diocese. In 2022, he was appoin-ted as the financial administrator.

Jesuit Father Joseph Cardo-zo has been chosen to assist the Office of Discernment and Apostolic Planning for a Synodal Church. “It is in response to the call of the late Pope Francis, who after the completion of the Synod in Rome, had requested the Society of Jesus to help the Catholic Church in actualizing Synodality,” Father Cardozo told. The member of the Goa province will reside at the Jesuit headquarters in Rome. Jesuit superior general Father Arturo Sosa identified the area of discernment in common as a key contribution that the Society of Jesus can make to the synodal process. Discernment in common is a process where a group of people work together to identify the best course of action in a given situation. It’s often used in a religious context, where it’s seen as a way to discover God’s will for the group, explained Father Cardozo, who currently holds the post of vice provincial and the superior of the Jesuit community at Miramar, near Panaji.

More than 10,000 people braved heavy rains to attend a ceremony to elevate Calicut diocese as a metropolitan arch-diocese and its bishop as its first metro-politan archbishop. Apostolic Nuncio to India and Nepal Archbishop Leopoldo Girelli led the May 25 ceremonies at St. Joseph’s Church, in Kozhikode (formerly Calicut). In his homily during the inaugural Mass, Cardinal Baselios Cleemis, head of the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church and president of the Kerala Catholic Bishops’ Council, stressed the deep spiritual signi-ficance of occasion. He commended the faith and leadership of the faithful of the newly erected archdiocese. The cardinal paid tribute to St. Francis Xavier, whose missionary zeal in the Malabar region laid the foundation for the Syro-Malabar and Syro-Malankara Churches. He noted that Calicut’s new archdiocesan status stands as a testament to this enduring spiritual legacy, rooted in centuries of evangeliza-tion and community witness.

The top court in southern Indian Tamil Nadu state has ruled that persons marrying under the Christian personal law should be considered to have converted to Christianity and abandoned their eligibility for caste-based social benefits. The ruling came in a case seeking the court’s order to disqualify the “illegal” election victory of a lower caste woman to a local body seat that is reserved for lower caste people, officially referred to as Scheduled Castes. In October 2022, Prime Mini-ster Narendra Modi appointed a three-member panel to exa-mine the implications of exten-ding benefits to Christians of lower caste origin, following the court’s request for the go-vernment’s view on the issue. The hearing is halted again due to the panel’s failure to submit its report to the government. Out of India’s 1.4 billion people, 201 million belong to the Dalit community, and nearly 60 percent of India’s 25 million Christians trace their origin to Dalit and tribal communities.

A legal rights group on a fact-finding mission in a tribal district of India’s eastern Odi-sha state has found that aggre-ssive Hindu mobs are denying poor Christians from tribal and Dalit communities the “right to belief and a dignified burial.”
The Odisha Lawyers Forum, in a May 14 report titled: Free-dom to Be Buried, A New Stru-ggle for Christians in Odisha, has cited recent cases of “denial of the rights of the deceased” in Nabarangpur district, which they say are a clear violation of the Indian Constitution and laws. The report has docu-mented many such cases between 2022 and 2025, based on testimonies provided by survivors in the villages.
“The Odisha Lawyers Forum found gross violations of fundamental, constitutional and human rights of the most vulnerable communities of Adivasi, Dalit and religious minorities in terms of equality before law, right to freedom of expression, thought, belief and association, more importantly, the right to life and a dignified burial in Nabarangpur district in Odisha,” the report said.

Police in Uttar Pradesh in northern India have arrested four Christians after they were accused of violating the state’s stringent anti-conversion law. “Our four faithful were arrested on May 12 after they were accused of attempting to convert gullible indigenous people with job offers and financial aid,” said a Church official providing legal help to the victims. They were arrested and taken to Chandan Chawki police station in Lakhimpur Kheri district in the state, which witnesses high levels of persecution against Christians, according to rights activists. The four were remanded in custody the following day. Efforts to secure their bail were still ongoing, according to the Church official, who did not wish to be named. This was the latest in a series of arrests of Christians for alleged violations of the anti-conversion law, which carries up to 20 years in jail. Christian leaders and rights activists say these laws are tools to persecute minorities by right-wing Hindu groups and have called on the Supreme Court to declare them unconstitutional.