First community radio of Darjeeling bagged National Award for Entertainment and Development Excellence along with awards for Industry giants.
On receiving the award, Director of Salesian Radio 90.8 FM, Father C. M. Paul, said, “This award has come to us solely due to the sincere efforts of Radio Salesian RJs, both past and present. Cheers to TEAM Radio Salesian!”

Although no Indian is among the 21 new cardinals named by Pope Francis on July 9, the country has a link with one of two Asians.
Bishop Sebastian Francis Mechery of Penang is the new cardinal from Malaysia. The other Asian is Jesuit Bishop Stephen Chow Sau-yan of Hong Kong.
Bishop Mechery was born on November 11, 1951, in Johor Bahru, which was then part of the Federation of Malaya. His grandparents had emigrated to Malaya in the 1890s from Ollur in Thrissur district, Kerala.

Pope Francis on July 8 appointed Father Ferdinand Dkhar, as the bishop of Jowai in the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya.
The 59-year-old bishop elect is currently the administrator of the diocese of Jowai.
Bishop elect Dkhar was born February 26, 1962, in Longkaluh, a parish under the diocese.

A mob has attacked the principal of a private high school in the western Indian city of Pune.
The incident took place on July 4 when a group of parents, accompanied by the members Bajrang Dal, assaulted the principal of the D Y Patil High School for allegedly singing a school prayer with the phrase “Dear Lord.”
The school, established in 2002, is situated in Pune’s Talegaon Dabhade area.
The attack was captured by some school staff and it went viral forcing the police to intervene. The video shows the principal Alexander Coates Reid, a Christian, being chased by some 30 people who shouted “Har Har Mahadev.”
The newindianexpress.com reported that the mob attacked Reid and the police booked him for forcing the students to take part Christian prayers.
It also reported that several parents had complained about their children being forced to recite Christian prayer. They also said that the students were not given holidays for Hindu festivals.
However, the wire.in portal quoted an official from the Talegaon police station to say that Reid was a “strict teacher” and a few parents were waiting to confront him. “They decided to make an issue out of a non-issue, involve local vigilante groups and attack the principal,” said Police Inspector Ranjit Sawant.

We meet many people in our day-to-day lives, known and unknown. But many do not realize the goodness of the people we come across.
They may be saints who are making changes in the lives and others. In the fast-moving world, people have no time to sit and talk with others; they have shut their ears to listen to the cry of the poor, and there is no time for people to see what is happening next door.
We live in a period where we eat, live, sleep, and die on or with social media. We get up with WhatsApp and go to sleep on social media without having any time for others. Though the world is less generous, less kind, less charitable, and less courageous, there are people who dedicate themselves to serving others and remain superheroes of charity and kindness.
This is the story of Father Benjamin Chinnappan, who brightened the lives of poor, marginalized children, abandoned widows, and drop-out girls. This pioneer of charity is from a remote village called Kakkanur in the Villupuram district of Tamil Nadu, India.
Father Ben, as he is fondly known by everyone, was ordained for the Archdiocese of Pondicherry-Cuddalore in 1988 and has been a citizen of the United States since 2004.
He was inducted into the Archdiocese of Pondicherry, India, in November 2020, and became a member of Voluntas Dei Secular Institute, USA.
St Patrick Academy studentsFather Ben obtained a Licentiate Degree in Biblical Theology from the University of St. Paul, Ottawa, and after a year of training in Clinical Pastoral Education, he was certified by the USCCB (United States Catholic Bishops’ Conference) as a chaplain to work in hospitals.

Christians in the eastern Indian state of Odisha seem elated that Pope Francis has created a commission for new martyrs. They hope the new commission would address their demand that the Church recognize as martyrs their people killed during the 2008 anti-Christian violence in Odisha’s Kandhamal district.
“The Vatican move is a welcome step in the right direction,” says Ajay Kumar Sin-gh, a human rights activist and part of a seven-member committee that prepared a document on the Kandhamal victims.
Archbishop John Barwa of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar, the head of the Catholic Church in Odisha, points out that the Kandhamal Christians were killed solely because of their “unwavering faith” in their faith.
“They were not criminals, nor were they anti-socials or a burden on society. They were well-liked community members,” asserted the Divine Word prelate in his foreword of the book “Kandhamal Massacred in Anti-Christian violence in 2007-2008” sent to the Vatican for the recognition of 36 Catholic martyrs of Kandhamal.

A court of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on July 12 pronounced 6 of the 11 accused guilty, 13 years after they chopped of the hand of T J Joseph, a college professor in the southern Indian state of Kerala.
The special court of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) here on July 13 awarded life imprisonment to three of the convicts in the college teacher hand-chopping case of 2010. Three others were sentenced to three-year imprisonment each.
The court in Kochi, Kerala’s commercial capital, found Popular Front of India (PFI) members Sajil, Nasar, Najeeb, Noushad, Moydeenkunju, and Ayoob guilty of the charges. It acquitted five other accused of the crime.
The court stated that the terrorism charges and the conspiracy against the accused have been proved beyond doubt.
Responding to the verdict, Joseph said the law had caught up with the accused. However, he does not believe he got justice in the case. “The people who are the accused came under the influence of religious bigots. I believe the real culprits behind this conspiracy and terror are still at large,” he lamented.

Two Christian Pakistani teenagers, one 18 and another 14, were arrested in their homes in Lahore in May 2023 on charges of blasphemy after a policeman claimed he heard them being disrespectful of the Prophet Muhammad.
Among Muslim-majority countries, Pakistan has the strictest blasphemy laws. People jailed under these laws risk a sentence of life in prison and worse still, even death. Christians and other religious minorities make up a mere 4% of Pakistan’s population, but they account for about half of blasphemy charges.
As if navigating blasphemy laws weren’t hardship enough, Christians who live in major cities like Lahore are often relegated to poorly paid and hazardous jobs like sanitation work. The nation of Pakistan was created 76 years ago but during this time the lives of its Christian citizens have grown ever more difficult.
As a scholar of world religions, I have studied how the evolution of a hard-line version of Islam in Pakistan has come to shape this country’s national identity and contributed to the persecution of its Christian minority. Many Christians in Pakistan trace their religious affiliation to the activities of missionary societies during the 19th and early 20th centuries in the Punjab region of what was then British-ruled India.
Early evangelization efforts by both the British and Americans in Hindu-majority India focused on upper-caste Hindus. The evangelizers assumed that these elites would use their influence to convert members of the lower castes. However, this approach led to few converts.

Capuchin Father Nithiya Sagayam, who works among gypsies in southern India, has been conferred with a lifetime achievement award by the federal Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment.
The ministry gives the “Atal Bihari Life Time Achievement Award” to those with the record of consistent commitment to social justice and empowerment of the powerless.