A priest of Lucknow Catholic diocese was among seven people remanded to judicial custody on February 6 for allegedly trying to convert poor Hindus.
Father Dominic Pinto and others were presented before the court of Chief Judicial Magistrate in Barabanki, some 90 km northwest of Lucknow, capital of Uttar Pradesh state. The arrested included five Protestant pastors.
The court remanded them in judicial custody.
Father Pinto is the director of Navintha, the pastoral center of Lucknow diocese, that was used by the Protestant pastors and around 100 Khrist Bhakts (followers of Christ) for their routine prayer meeting.
The arrest took place on February 5 after they were accused of trying to convert the poor to Christianity.
The arrest took place after Hindu radicals protested in front of Navintha that comes under the Deva police station in Barabanki district.
The First Information Report named 15 persons, including five women, as accused.
The arrested are charged under the provisions of the state’s anti-conversion law and, if found guilty, they could be imprisoned for a maximum of 10 years.
“Our people are arrested based on totally baseless charges,” bemoans Father Donald de Souza, chancellor and spokesperson of Lucknow diocese.

Church leaders have expressed their strong disapproval of a pro-Hindu state government’s attempt to clandestinely profile Christian missionaries in a central Indian state.
“Some of our institutions indeed got a questionnaire from the local police, but we are yet to reply,” said Bishop Gerald Almeida of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh state.
Police are circulating the questionnaire among the Christian community seeking details of missionaries working in the state, the institutions run by them, and their funding sources.
“I do not know why single out Christians and collect such details. I see some ulterior motives behind it,” Bishop Almeida told on Feb. 7.
The police want details like the name and address of the individual missionary or institution, work objectives, bank account, and sources of foreign funding. They are also seeking names and phone numbers of those working with the missionary in case he/she runs a non-governmental organization (NGO).
The questionnaire also sought to know whether Christians resort to religious con-version activities, which are banned under a stringent anti-conversion law passed by the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in 2021.
“We will seek legal opinion before sharing any information as police are trying to gather the information unofficially,” Bishop Almeida said.
Most of the information sought is already there in the public domain or filed with government agencies, he added.
“It seems that the government wants to harass Christians who have been working for the poor,” the prelate said.

A survivor of the 2008 anti-Chri-stian violence in Odisha’s Kandhamal district is the first Catholic priest or-dained for the Sons of the Immaculate Conception, an Italian congregation.
Vincentian Bishop Aplinar Sena-pati Rayagada ordained Uchhaba Pradhan as a priest during a solemn Mass St. Joseph’s Nivas Community, Serma, Gumuda parish, some 100 km from Rayagada district headquarters.

Syro-Malabar Church Major Ar-chbishop Raphael Thattil on January 13 appointed Bi-shop Joseph Kollamparampil as the administrator of Shamshabad diocese, a seat he vacated on being elected the head of the Oriental Rite.

Francis on January 13 appointed bishops for five dioceses and an auxiliary for one in four states of India.
Four of the bishops-elect are natives of Tamil Nadu that celebrated Pongal, its harvest festival, on the day. The announcement came a day ahead of the feast of Saint Devasahayam Pillai, the first native saint of Tamil Nadu.
According to a press statement from the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India (Latin Rite), the Pope has also accepted the resignations of Bishops Gerald Almeida of Jabalpur in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and Antonisamy Francis of Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu, southern India.
The new bishop for Jabalpur is Father Valan Arasu of the same dio-cese, currently serving as the principal of Saint Aloysius College in the city, the legal headquarters of Madhya Pradesh.
In Kumbakonam, the Pope elevated its vicar general Father Jeevanandam Amalanathan as its new bishop.
Another diocese in Tamil Nadu, Kuzhithurai, got Father Albert George Alexander Anastas, a priest of Kottar, as its new bishop.

The Conference of Religious Women India has trained 46 nuns to create awareness about the grievance redressal cell among its members in northern India.
The Jan 19-21 Training of Trainers program was attended by participants from Andamans, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, North East, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal.
The training at Jesuit’s Dhyan Ashram Retreat Centre in Diamond Harbour Road aimed at educating nuns about the grievance redressal cell launched in December 2022.
The participants observed that information about the cell has not reached most nuns in the country. Lack of knowledge of law, legal process and safeguards have caused unnecessary troubles, they added.
The program also dealt with Pope Francis document, “Motu Proprio,” the Child Protection Policy of the Indian bishops, and PoSH (Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013).
After the training the participants will conduct similar programs for women in their dioceses and the regions and units of Conference of Religious India (CRI).

A police case has been re-gistered against a retired Indian archbishop and six priests for posing a threat to the life of a bishop who quit this month.
Police in southern Karnataka state have launched a probe against retired Archbishop Leo Cornelio of Bhopal and six diocesan priests based on a complaint by the younger sister of Bishop Kannikadass Antony William of Mysore who resign-ed on Jan. 13.
Father A. Rohan from M-sore diocese, one of the accused, denied the allegation “as base-less and fabricated.”
“We are ready to join any probe as we do not have anything to hide,” he said.
Some of us were at the forefront to expose the “illegal deeds of Bishop William,” noted Rohan.
In her complaint registered with Narasimharaja Police on January 19, the sister who calls herself “Mary Help of Chri-stians,” said there was a serious threat to the life of her brother from the people she named and sought a probe.
“Except Archbishop Cor-nelio, we all visited the police station on Jan. 23,” Rohan told UCA News on Jan. 26.
The Vatican accepted the resignation of the 58-year-old William, who was accused of murder, rape, and misappro-priation of funds.
The Vatican, however, has made it clear that it accepted the resignation due to “the distressing situation” in the diocese rather than as a puni-shment for the charges leveled against him.
Archbishop Cornelio headed a three-member Vatican panel that examined the charges against William following com-plaints from priests in the diocese.
William’s sister claimed that the accused priests and the archbishop conspired to kill her brother. But William would not file a police complaint as he is a religious person. Thus, she had to do it.

The chief minister and oth-ers in Tripura have applauded a Salesian school in a village in the northeastern Indian state after its girls’ band, formed less than a year ago, made history at national level.
The Girls Brass Band of St Xavier’s Pathaliaghat clinched third place at the National School Band Competition held in New Delhi, January 21-22.
Tripura Chief Minister Manik Saha, on his Facebook page, congratulated the band for the achievement. The school, located 36 km south of the state capital of Agartala, set up the band only in April 2023.
The band’s rise to fame “is an incredible story of hard work, discipline, tenacity, and grit,” says principal Salesian Father Babu Stephen.
The band consists of 25 girl students, aged between 11 and 16 and studying in grades 6-8.
Father Stephen confirmed that the students were all “ab-solute beginners, totally new to playing music” before the school launched the brass sand. He said it felt “surreal that even before completing a year of existence, the band has already made a mark at the district, state, zonal, and natio-nal levels.”
To reach the national level competitions the team had to win three earlier stages: the district, the state and the zonal stage. At the zonal stage of the competition, held in Bhubanes-war on December 22.

Religious conversion for marriage must be done only after fully knowing the rituals and customs of the chosen faith, an Indian court has said amid controversies surrounding inter-faith marriages in the South Asian nation.
People who convert to marry should be fully aware of “the consequences of such actions,” A.C Michael, a former member of the state-run Delhi Minority Commission, told on Jan. 23, while reacting to the order by the Delhi High Court in India’s national capital.
High Court judge, Swarana Kanta Sharma, cautioned agai-nst religious conversion for the purpose of marriage on Jan. 19.
It is important to inform the individual with exhaustive infor-mation concerning “doctrines, customs, and practices asso-ciated with the chosen faith,” Sharma observed.
Eleven Indian states, most of them ruled by Modi’s party, have enacted a sweeping anti-conversion law, criminalizing religious conversion with a jail term of up to 10 years.
Petitions are pending in the Supreme Court challenging these anti-conversion laws.
Leading states like Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh have criminalized inter-faith marri-ages, especially between Hindu girls with Christian and Muslim boys.
Modi’s party calls Muslim youths marrying Hindu girls “Love Jihad”.

A Catholic archbishop in the central Indian Chhattisgarh state has urged his Catholics to remain united in their faith amid claims by a Hindu group of having converted about 250 Christian families to the Hindu religion.
Archbishop Victor Henry Thakur of Raipur told UCA News on Jan 29 that “it is time we should be united and firm in our faith as there will be attempts to divide people in the name of religion, caste and creed.”
A group of some 1,000 people from 251 families, two of them Muslim and the rest Christian, were welcomed into the Hindu religion, reported Organiser, a mouthpiece of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an umbrella forum of pro-Hindu groups.
The conversion ritual involves washing feet with water from the river Ganges. It was reportedly held on Jan. 27 in Raipur, the state capital, in the presence of Pandit Dhirendra Krishna Shastri, a Hindu seer, and Prabal Pratap Singh Judev, state secretary of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
“Hindus who had once come under some pressure or greed, and joined other religions or sects… They are now coming back to the Sanatan Dharma [eternal religion],” Judev said.
Judev claimed that “large-scale conversions to Christianity have taken place in Chhattisgarh” and so “the Ghar Wapsi [homecoming] campaign will go forward with all might.”
The homecoming is a nationwide campaign initiated by hardline Hindu groups aligned with the BJP and its ideological parent RSS three decades ago. It aims to convert Christians and Muslims to the Hindu religion, claiming Hinduism is the common home and original religion of all Indians.
Though Christians comprise less than 2 percent of Chhattisgarh’s 30 million population, the Hindu groups claim the actual number is much higher.