Government officials in a remote area of central Indian Madhya Pradesh state have impounded the property of a Catholic mission and forced its priest out of the premises, allegedly under pressure from right-wing Hindu activists.

The 20-year-old mission in Mohanpur village of Guna district was “sealed” over a land title dispute and Father Siljo Kidangan forced out on Sept. 12, local Bishop Anthony Chirayath told ucanews.com. Father Kidangan said government officials acted under pressure from members of hard-line Hindu groups who are opposed to the mission’s work and accuse it of trying to secure religious conversions.

The mission aims to help poor villagers by coordinating several welfare projects.

Mohanpur and some 40 nearby villages are provided with basic amenities and a hostel for about 15 boys studying at a nearby government school.

A Hindu right-wing activist group on Sept. 11 went to the mission demanding that the priest and schoolboys vacate or face dire consequences, Bishop Chirayath said. The priest refused to move.

However, the next morning govern-ment officials, a village headman and two police constables threatened the priest and confiscated the hostel by locking and sealing it. Local Sub-Divisional Magistrate Dinesh Shukla confirmed with ucanews.com that the government has taken over the land and the hostel building as the Church “lost a case” with the Land Revenue Board on Sept. 8.

Two local Hindus filed a case in 2005 claiming that the Church did not have mandatory title deeds for the mission land, which was donated to a tribal Catholic priest by a local tribal villager.(see Focus)

The Synod of the Syro-Malabar Church has called for finding solutions to the problems faced by families and the larger society by taking into consideration the perspectives of the laity.

It was observed that the progress made by lay people has significantly influenced the multifarious activities of the church. Priests and church officials should try to understand the sentiments of the laity regarding issues such as unemployment, housing, diseases, alcoholism, consumption of addictive substances and frictions in families. The church attached critical importance to renewal of families. The priests and the church officials should constantly communicate with the laity for the comprehensive understanding of problems faced by families and society which called for novel solutions, reported the Hindu.

The Synod took pride in social activities undertaken by the laity such as the running of old-age homes, orphanages, and institutions for mentally challenged children and distribution of food in hospitals. The Synod held at Kakkanad Mount St Thomas concluded.

A government-funded institute for tribal advance-ment in the eastern Indian State of Odisha has become the nation’s first tribal university, however Christian leaders have expressed doubts as to how much it will achieve. The central criticism is that the focus will continue to be on teaching the Hindu religion and culture rather than on preserving tribal traditions. The Federal Ministry of Human Resource Development on August 25 awarded “deemed university” status to the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences, a facility for indigenous children from kindergarten to postgraduate level.

The institute, based in Odisha’s capital, Bhubaneswar, was established in 1992. It offers residential education to some 25,000 “poorest of the poor” indigenous children and plans to educate some 200,000 children in the next decade, its website states. Among those who believe the new status will not help tribal people is Father Nicholas Barla, Secretary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India Commission for Tribal Affairs. He says in the past 25 years of existence the institute had “done more harm that good.”

Heads of more than 40 minority schools in the national capital met on September 2 to seek ways to remain alert to attempts to erode constitutional freedoms and protections provided to such institutions.

They belonged to the Forum for Minority Schools in Delhi and Bishop Theodore Mascarenhas, secretary general of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI), brought them together. The meeting at the CBCI Centre “was a step towards creating a joint platform for exchange of ideas and concerns relating to minority education institutions,” says a press release issued by Bishop Mascarenhas, who is also the conference’s spokesperson.

The meeting, the prelate noted, came as these institutions have gone to the court challenging orders of the Delhi government’s Directorate of Education regarding refund of fees. The minority schools also face statements and policy matters regulating admission and staff administration and other concerns. These moves affect the constitutional freedoms and protections provided to such institutions, it added.

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) is to soon release a set of guidelines to prevent and deal with sexual harassment, esp-ecially of women, in Church-run institutions. The document titled “CBCI Guidelines to Deal with Sexual Harassment at Workplace” will be released on Sept 14 at a press conference at the CBCI Centre in New Delhi.

“The Church, while wanting to ensure the protection and respect for women at workplace and without in any way under-estimating the seriousness of sexual harassment of women at workplace, wants to address all forms of sexual harassment at work place,” said the Council for Women of the CBCI, in a statement on Sept 11. The statement signed by council chairperson, Bishop Jacob Mar Barnabas of Gurgaon and secretary, Sr Talisha Nadu-kudiyil SD, explained that document will be “gender in-clusive and has been formula-ted to create a safe, healthy and loving environment that enables its employees to work without the fear of prejudice, bias and sexual harassment and creates a mechanism for pre-vention of any form of harass-ment.”

An acute lack of space has forced Christian ceme-teries in New Delhi to reuse graves after five years, with a Catholic priest advocating that Christians opt for crema-tion. The Indian Christian Cemetery Committee that manages two cemeteries for various Christian deno-minations in New Delhi, announced that from Sept. 1 burial plots to families of the deceased will be given only for five years.

Reverend Samson R. Nath, the committee chairman said this was because “very soon we will have no space to bury our dead.”

He said requests to the Delhi government for more land for use as cemeteries have not been successful.

“Asking people to opt for cremation will be the last resort when we will have no other choice. It is a very sensitive issue,” said Reve-rend Nath, a Methodist. The lack of space for Christian and Muslim graveyards has been a growing concern in Delhi and other Indian cities, the Delhi high court in July observed. As the population increased, the death rate also increased but cemetery land remained the same.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision on September 3 to induct former bureaucrat K.J. Alphons into his council of ministers has left the BJP’s long-standing leaders out in the cold. Not surprisingly, the state head office of the Bharatiya Janata Party here looked deserted when Alphons took oath even though Kerala was getting its first representation in the three-year-old Modi government.

But there was celebration in Alphons’ hometown Manimala in Kottayam district.

Newly inducted Union minister Alphons Kannanthanam said Prime Minister Narendra Modi is doing what a good Christian is supposed to do. Addressing a public rece-ption on Sept 10 at Muvattupuzha near Kochi, the Minister of State for Tourism said, “People ask why I, a Christian, joined BJP. My answer to them is that Modi is doing what a good Christian is supposed to do. I would do whatever possible to realise the PM’s dream of creating a new India where all Indians can live with dignity.”

The Church of South India (CSI) has decided to pull out from the Kerala Council of Churches (KCC), an ecumenical forum of non-Catholic Protestant Churches in Kerala, in protest against the KCC decision to provide membership to the Believers Church. The second largest Christian denomination after the Catholic Church, CSI is the largest Protestant denomination in India. The CSI Moderator, Bishop Thomas K. Oommen, said the CSI could never accept inclusion of the Believers Church in the KCC strictly on moral and ethical grounds.

Believer’s Church is the country’s top foreign-funded NGO. Its head K.P. Yohannan, who is also founder of Gospel for Asia, is facing a lawsuit in the US for fraud and misuse of charitable donations.

Bishop Oommen told The Hindu that the regional forum of the CSI Synod members had unanimously decided to disassociate with the KCC and its programmes. The latest development has to be viewed in the backdrop of the controversy over the episcopacy claims of the Believers Church that its head, K.P. Yohannan, was consecrated by then CSI Moderator Bishop K.J. Samuel in 2003.

The CSI has outright rejected this claim of the Believers Church, saying that the former has never done such a thing at any point of time.

According to Bishop Oommen, the CSI had never consecrated Yohannan and whatever news spread in this regard were baseless.

“The CSI never considers the Believers Church as an episcopal church or accept its leader, K.P. Yohannan, a bishop. As per the CSI view, K.P. Yohannan is a layman and the KCC decision, overlooking the CSI objection, was unfortunate,” he said. He said the bishop was the constitutional head of CSI. As per the constitution of the Church, the Synod executive has to authorise the Moderator to consecrate a clergy as a bishop. The CSI Synod executive never authorised the Moderator to consecrate K.P. Yohannan as a bishop, he said.

Christians in India are pro-testing the “inhuman behavi-our” of some villa-gers from north-eastern Manipur State for refusing the burial of a woman who left the Baptist Church to become a Catholic.

More than 200 Christians from various denominations gathered in front of the Catholic Sacred Heart Cathedral in New Delhi Aug. 17, holding candles, singing hymns and praying. They condemned the incident in a statement and sought help from the government to bury the woman who died Aug. 7. Leingangching villagers in Manipur state denied permission to bury the woman because the village council had excommunicated her family about seven years ago for leaving the Baptist Church and becoming Catholic.

Rita Haorei, the deceased is still not buried, according to Father Vialo Francis of Imphal Archdiocese, based in Manipur.

Fr Francis told ucanews. com that the predominantly Baptist village refused permission to five families, including that of Haorei, to become Catholic saying the village constitution holds that it “shall be a Baptist village.”

Manipur is a Christian strong-hold State. More than 40 percent of its 2.73 million people are Christians, mostly Baptists. Some pockets are almost entirely Christian. The Ukhrul district where Haorei hails from is 95% Christian.