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.

Archbishop Emeritus Thomas Menamparampil of Guwahati, apo-stle of peace in no-rtheastern India, has gone to Mani-pur twice where ethnic violence has raged since May 3.
“It is not easy to describe what I am doing. I have visited Manipur already twice, spending three days each. I have been to the Kuki areas of Churachandpur and Kangpokpi, meeting with people in the relief camps. I have also been to the Meitei areas, meeting with their leaders,” the 87-year-old Salesian prelate told Matters India June 15.

We hear a lot about Christians indulging in “forced conversion.”
Those who propagate that theory seem to say: “Let those who have seen or experienced wait, let those who have heard, speak.”
I have nothing to say to such people
Allow me to share how I became a Catholic at the age of 34. I was then Devi Menon who came from an orthodox Hindu family in Kerala’s Thrissur district. I have two masters in business administration and one masters in another subject. I have worked with many national and overseas firms.
It is not that I decided to be a Catholic on December 31, 2014, and became one the next day. Becoming a Christian was not even in my wildest dreams. I did not become a Christian because of coercion, enticement, appeasement, temptation, provocation, allurement or out of fear.
I had my personal reasons for becoming a Christian. It was the culmination of my search for meaning in life by reading the sacred scriptures of various religions, including the Bible. What drew me to Jesus was my reading about the Holy Eucharist — the real presence of Jesus in the Holy Communion.
No one can become a Catholic expecting some material gain, because no such option or offer exists in the Church.
What I have inherited is spiritual contentment. My Jesus is my gain.
I only know about the Catholic Church. It does not baptize right away anyone who wants to become a Catholic
The Church must be convinced that that desire is the need of the person’s soul. The Church must be convinced of the accuracy, reality, and divine intervention in the circumstances leading to such sentiments. The person should know the essentials of the religion, learn and practice them.
He or she must be clear about the faith. One can become a Christian only after passing many great hurdles. In other words, one must be convinced that the faith in Christ is the need of the soul more than that of the person.
Thousands of missionaries of the Church now work in remote areas of India and overseas, among those who do not know Jesus or follow human values.
The Church will gain nothing by converting the economically backward and culturally deficient people in those areas.
These missionaries serve in those places fully aware of the dangers to their lives. They proclaim the love of Jesus and impart virtues and values to them because the Church is the reflection of the unbiased love of Christ.
People accept Jesus attracted by his message and the lifestyle of his missionaries. They also realize that Jesus’s love recognizes them as humans and not treat them like animals as some in society do.

A newly professed nun, who was jailed along with four others for alleged conversion charges, were on June 13 granted bail by a court in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.
Sister Vibha Kerketta was arrested June 6 and jailed the next day along with her mother and three others after her family organized a Mass in their home to thank God for her profession in the Daughters of St Anne, a Ranchi-based congregation.
The family lived at Schoolpara lane of Balachhapar village in Jashpur district, Chhattisgarh.
A group of Hindu fundamentalists, who barged into the house, accused her mother and others for conducting a healing session and insulting other religions.
A magistrate sent the nun and the other four to jail and set the bail hearing for June 13.
The Sessions Court of Jashpur accepted their bail application on furnishing 15,000 rupees by each of them, Jesuit Father Fulgence Lakra, a lawyer, told Matters India.

Cardinal Filipe Neri Ferrão of Goa and Daman, president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops in India, has urged people to use the social media responsibly and avoid becoming social hermits.
The cardinal said this June 23 while releasing the Indian edition of the book “Towards Full Presence — A Pastoral Reflection on Engagement with Social Media” at function in the Archbishop’s House in Panaji, capital of Goa state.
“Social media offer a chance to encourage interaction with others, but they can also make us feel more alone. While using the social media, some people may develop the perilous tendency to isolate themselves from society by becoming ‘social hermits,’ which is a dangerous phenomenon,” the cardinal added.
Also present were Fathers Stephen Alathara, CCBI deputy secretary general, Duming Gonsalves, executive secretary, Commission for Catechetics; and Barry Cardozo, director of Goa Archdiocesan Centre for Social Communications, along with Menino Menezes and Hazel Rodrigues

The Madhya Pradesh high court June 28 ordered the state police to demolish a boundary wall they built seven days ago that blocked access to a Catholic school.
A single bench of Justice Sanjay Dwivedi also directed the police to make immediate access to St John’s Senior Secondary School with more than 2,300 students in the Damoh district of the central Indian state. The wall forced the school to start online classes.
School principal Sister Sophy Bharat said the police on June 22 night came with workers and built the boundary wall in front of the school’s main gate that prevented the students’ entry.
The students and parents, who reached the school the next day, were forced to return, unable to enter the school campus.
“We then started online classes to avoid any loss to the students,” Sister Bharat told Matters India on June 28.
The school is managed by the Servite Sisters Society under the diocese of Jabalpur. It is some 250 km northeast of Bhopal, the state capital.
The high court’s order says, “Looking to the interest of students and also of the general public, I am directing the respondents to provide an access to the school students to reach the school for a further period of 30 days.”
“In the meantime, the petitioner may also file a civil suit claiming right over the land and also move an application for injunction before the competent court and till then the respondents are directed to provide access by demolishing that portion of the boundary wall which is just in front of the school and covers the road, which would make it accessible to the commuters,” the order added.
The court wants the police to comply with the order immediately “without wasting any further time so as to avoid any loss to the students of their studies.”

A more than five decades old Catholic Church, presby-tery, and boarding school were burned down, while a convent was taken over by suspected outlaws in riot-hit Manipur state in northeastern India at the weekend, Church officials said. The fresh wave of violence erupted on June 4 as the federal government appointed a three-member judicial commission to probe ethnic violence in the state that has claimed 98 lives so far and displaced over 45,000 people.
“We were informed that St. Joseph Church, its presbytery, and a school boarding attached to the parish were set on fire and the Franciscan Clarist Congregation (FCC) convent in the parish is currently under the control of outlaws whose identity is not yet established,” a senior diocesan priest from the Archdiocese of Imphal, who did not want to be named, told on June 5.
St. Joseph Parish at Sugnu, a small township at the southern tip of the Kakching district inhabited by the Meitei and Kuki communities, is one of the oldest Catholic churches in the archdiocese.
Hundreds of houses belonging to Christians in the township were burned down a couple of days before.
“We cannot go to the affected locality to get a ground report due to restrictions, but credible sources informed us about the arson and other developments,” the priest said.
He said the parish has more than 4,000 members from 35 villages in its vicinity, where Christians have abandoned their houses and fled to safer places including relief camps.