“If on the one hand I accept the Supreme Court’s verdict on Kashmir, on the other I hope that the young people who live in the region are educated to become good citizens and that ordinary people can live in peace.”
These are the words of Sr. Maria Suzette, of the Congregation of the Apostolic Carmel, after Decemebr 12 a constitutional panel made up of five judges ruled that the Indian government acted legally in 2019 when it revoked the auto-nomy of Jammu and Kashmir, guaranteed by Article 370 of the Constitution.
The bench, headed by Jus-tice D.Y. Chandrachud, ruled that Article 370 was a tempo-rary provision “necessary due to war conditions in the State” and was not intended to develop “internal sovereignty”, the ruling said. The special status was to be considered “a characteristic of asymmetric federalism, not of sovereignty,” the court specified.
However, in its verdict, the Supreme Court did not rule on the validity of what is called the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Act, the 2019 law that provides for Jammu and Kashmir to join the Indian Union as two Separate states. However, he ordered that local elections be called by September 2024.

Chakkalakkal Varghese Joseph hardly ever gets five hours of sleep. His roadside tea shop in the southern Indian state of Kerala opens at 5.00 a.m. and closes at 10.00 p.m.
Joseph is used to the hard life. As a teenager, he began working as a mason and, a few years later, became a carpenter and is now the owner of the tea shop.
In between these unending struggles, he married Mary in 1992, and they are happily busy eking out a living and bringing up three children.
“I have strong faith in God,” says the 55-year-old Catholic.
Joseph had been a carpenter for some three decades and also ran timber mills that cut logs into smaller pieces for carpenters to work with.
He began the teashop after his businesses collapsed due to extended lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, the tea shop remains the primary source of income for the family.
Customers, mostly day la-borers and commuters rushing to their faraway workplaces come for hot milk tea, coffee and snacks that Joseph sells at a crossroads in his sleepy Neerikode village.
“My life is full of struggles. But I am happy. I can say that with confidence. These problems will come and go,” says Joseph with a smile.
Besides tea and coffee, Joseph also sells fritters fried in fresh coconut oil. But his bestseller is congee (rice porridge) with vegetable curries that dozens of people buy on their way to the nearby market.
He wouldn’t reveal his average income. “I make just enough to survive,” was all he said with a smile.
Inside his tin-roofed tea shop, Joseph works alone most days. His wife Mary comes to help him only occasionally as she is busy with the household chores.
“I am proud of our children. The bond that I have with them is my greatest strength,” Joseph said.
The eldest is Anu, who is now married and lives with her husband. Their son Anfin recently started working in a private firm and the youngest son Akhil is preparing for university studies.
As a carpenter, he had to travel to distant places, and always took his wife along.

More than 10,000 Catholics from across the state of Manipur, which in recent months has witnessed a surge in ethnic violence between Hindus and Christians, attended the Dec. 8 installation of the new archbishop of the Imphal Archdiocese, Linus Neli. The Imphal Archdiocese, comprising the entire state of Manipur, held a solemn service led by outgoing Archbishop Dominic Lumon with Apostolic Nuncio to India and Nepal Archbishop Leopoldo Girelli delivering a special message to the assembled, calling for unity in this time of conflict and hardship.

Devotees flocked to shrines dedi-cated to Venerable Agnelo in various places in India on his 96th death anniversary.
“Venerable Agnelo is an inspi-ration for Catholics in their journey of faith,” said Cardinal Filipe Neri Cardinal Ferrão, president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India, in his homily during the co-mmemorative Mass on November 20 at Pilar hillock, 13 km southeast of Panaji, capital of Goa state.

Frustrated with the pervasive and paralyzing levels of unemployment in the state of Telangana, in southern India, and with no real hope of finding an employment in the near future, Karne Sirisha, a graduate woman, chose to graze buffaloes, and thereby to support her family.
At 25, she lives with her mother (who is abandoned by a drunkard-husband, not uncommon in rural India) and two younger brothers.
In spite of all odds that go with being born into a poor rural Dalit family, Sirisha fought her way and excelled in studies.
She is one of the angry and frustrated millions in Telangana who remain unemployed, recruited neither by the state nor by the private firms. Instead of remaining idle at home, Sirisha chose to add a few more buffaloes to the flock. Buffalo-milk consumption is popular in many areas in India.
By making and circulating a partly-critical and partly-humorous video in which she describes herself as Barrelakka, buffalo-sister (she uses it descriptively and not derogatorily), she ingeniously invented herself. As she got much attention and as her video got numerous views and shares, the panic-stricken government of Telangana, slapped cases against her. She has been fighting them all alone.

Ratan Singh Masram does not remember seeing his father, who abandoned his mother a few months after he was born. His mother left him in the care of her parents.
Both mother and father remarried and “practically forgot about me,” he says.
Masram, a Gond tribal Catholic from central India, works hard as a day laborer to be a good father to his two children.
“Although I grew up almost like an orphan, my Catholic faith has helped me lead a decent life and bring up a Catholic family,” the 48-year-old says.
No one in Masram’s family was literate. The Gonds, a group of indigenous people in central and south-central India, did not send their children to school until recently.
“They also did not allow me to go to school,” he recalls.
As a child, he remembers working hard under the scorching sun in the fields, helping his grandparents cultivate rice, millet and oil seeds, besides grazing cattle and performing other daily chores like fetching water and firewood.
“God protected me. My life shows his plan,” says Masram who lives in a village in Dindori district of Madhya Pradesh state.
As a teenager, he was forced to move out of his grandparents’ home in search of work.
In nearby villages where he found work, Masram often spotted “some educated and well-behaved” people who wore “clean dresses.”
They regularly visited local people and took an interest in solving their problems.
He soon gathered they were Catholic priests and nuns from Jabalpur diocese.
“I wanted to be like them. But being illiterate, I knew very well that I could not become like them,” he recalled.
Despite the fact that nobody in his family even knew about Christianity, he made up his mind to become a Christian.
He was told by an acquaintance to meet the priest in nearby Junwani parish.
“The priest told me to learn more about Christianity before becoming one,” Masram said.
Though unable to read, he was determined enough to learn by heart the basic catechism.
A few years later, he was baptized.
At the age of 18, Masram married a Catholic woman named Chaity who was three years younger than him. This was in keeping with their tribe’s customs and practices at the time. However, he has ensured his children do not marry young.

A restaurant in Malaysia sacked an employee after a video of him wearing a crucifix at work went viral last Sunday, kicking off a public outcry.
The latest mass expression of discontent linked with food could further widen the racial and religious divide in the Muslim-majority Southeast Asian nation.
The video of the crucifix-wearing man was meant to show the serpentine queue outside a restaurant in the heart of Kuala Lumpur well-known for its meat-filled flatbread.
However, many Muslim-Malay viewers were annoyed seeing the crucifix hanging from the worker’s neck. More-over, he was wearing the son-gkok, a Malay traditional headgear.
The restaurant faced a barrage of criticism. Was it trying to hoodwink the public into believing it was a halal establishment by making a non-Muslim wear a Malay-Muslim songkok? Some also questioned if the food and the preparation were halal.

Archbishop Joseph Li Shan of Beijing stressed the importance of building unity between Chinese Catholics across the mainland and Hong Kong by promoting Catholic spirituality and evangelization efforts in line with the process of sinicization following his three-day visit to Hong Kong.
Sinicization is a process by which religious practice is enculturated into the context of Chinese society so that it is assimilated within the local customs, styles, and language. However, for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) it has come to take on a new, political dimension whereby religious belief and practice are modified in order to fit into the frame-work of the party’s ideology.
“We pray that under the guidance of the revelation of the Holy Spirit of God, under the direction of the spirit of the Church’s communion, and under the diligent exploration of all of us, the Chinese Church will be able to promote the work of evangelization and spirituality along the direction of sinicization,” Li said after his Nov. 13-15 visit.

“Peace is possible. It takes goodwill,” said Pope Francis on Sunday and he implored men and women of goodwill never to resign themselves to war.
“Peace is possible. Let us not resign ourselves to war.”
Reiterating his belief, already voiced on many occasions, and repeating the word “always” three times, the Holy Father cried: “War always, always, always is a defeat,” and he noted the only ones who gain from conflict are those who manu-facture weapons. “War always, always, always is a defeat. Only the weapons manufacturers gain.”
The Pope’s urgent appeal came as he addressed the faithful after the recitation of the Angelus Prayer in St.Peter’s Square.
Shining the spotlight on Myanmar where an escalation of hostilities between the country’s military junta and ethnic minority armed group, the Arakan Army, have spread to various townships where civilians have been caught in the crossfire, the Pope said “I renew my closeness to the dear people of Myanmar who unfortunately continue to suffer from violence and suppression. I pray that they will not be discouraged and always trust in the Lord’s help.”
“I renew my closeness to the dear people of Myanmar who unfortunately continue to suffer from violence and suppression.”
Never neglecting to remember those suffering from the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and in the war between Israel and Hamas, the Pope asked for prayers “for the tormented Ukraine and for the people of Palestine and Israel. “Let us continue to pray for the tormented Ukraine, and for the people of Palestine and Israel.”

Capuchin Father Suresh Mathew, editor of Indian Currents, a leading Church publication in the country, has been transferred to Punjab as a manager of a school.
A November 5 message from Father Raphie Paliakara, the new leader of the Capuchin’s Krist Jyoti province, says Father Mathew will take charge as the guardian and manager of St Joseph’s School in Bhrariwal near Amritsar on November 30.
Father Suresh Mathew, the outgoing editor of Indian Currents weekly, says the Church should not identify with regre-ssive and repressive governments as its mission is to stand with the oppressed masses with little voice to raise their demands and grie-vances.
The 50-year-old Capuchin priest regrets that journalism is at peril as fascist tendencies gnaw at the fourth pillar of the largest democracy in the world. Journalists’ prophetic voices that once kept governments on tenterhooks have turned feeble.
He says his role model is Saint Titus Brandsma, a Dutch Carme-lite priest, who stood alone against the Nazi regime that exterminated people by poison gas or shooting. “Titus Brandsma would probably be the only journalist-saint in the family of the ‘holy persons,’” he says.
In an interview with Matters India, Father Mathew shares his days with Indian Currents and his expectations from media people, especially Catholic journalists:” Speaking truth to those in power is always risky. John the Baptist was beheaded for speaking truth to the king. Oscar Romero was killed for confronting the powerful establishment.
“Indian Currents was established to speak the Christian con-science to the secular society. Hence, I could not compromise on the vision of the founding fathers and my predecessors. Moreover, a follower of Christ can never align with fundamentalist, fascist regime nor keep silence over their policies. If anyone is supping with the devil, no doubt they are either too diplomatic or have skeletons in their cupboard. They must read the Bible, especially the book of Prophets and the Gospels through the eyes of a follower of Christ, rather than through the eyes of a ritualist. The Church had many daring personalities in its chequered history.”