Church leaders in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Mo-di’s home state have demanded strict legal action in a case of hate speech circulating on so-cial media insulting the pope and Catholic nuns.
Archbishop Thomas Igna-tius Macwan of Gandhinagar in western Gujarat state on March 21 wrote to Chief Mi-nister Bhupendra Patel to take “immediate and stringent” act-ion against a speaker, who is yet to be identified, and organi-zers of the event where defa-matory statements were made against the supreme leader of the Catholic Church.
A video of the event has been circulating on social media for the past few days and contains provocative sta-tements against local Christians and a Catholic pilgrimage cen-ter called Unteshwari Mata Mandir in Kadi village.
“We do not know the name of the speaker. But from the podium and background of the stage, it is clear that he was speaking at a Vishwa Hindu Parishad [World Hindu Coun-cil] function in Kadi, Mehsana district, north-western Guj-arat,” said Father Telesphoro Fernandes, secretary of Gujarat Education Board of Catholic Institutions.
The speech in the local Gujarati language makes sex-ually explicit references to the pope and nuns and calls on the crowd to not tolerate Christian priests and nuns in their midst.
He said the pope is the hus-band of thousands of nuns the world over because nuns during their initiation ceremony need to accept him so. Therefore, the pope is committing adul-tery, he said.

Church leaders in India have reacted cautiously to the demand of an organization representing indigenous people that the government remove the reservation for tribal people to Christianity or other religions.
A March 26 rally organized by the Janajati Dharma Sans-kriti Suraksha Mancha (JDS SM) in Assam’s Guwahati city also demand a ban on religious conversion of tribal people in Assam. Hundreds of Boro, Karbi, Tiwa, Dimasa, Rabha, Mising and other tribes from 30 districts of Assam report-edly attended the rally.
“Conversion of tribal peo-ple in Assam and elsewhere in India to foreign religions has been a threat to indigenous faiths and cultures for decades. The rate of conversion has in-creased and the ST people fall prey to communal theocratic foreign religious groups,” alle-ged JDSSM working president Binud Kumbang.
He said conversion could be checked if the converted tribal people are stripped off the Scheduled Tribe list. “The converted people completely give up their original tribal culture, customs, rituals, way of life, and traditions,” he alleged.
Allen Brooks, spokesper-son of the United Christian Fo-rum of Assam, says Christians would respond to the issue, but would to do it collectively tak-ing all denominations together.

Each morning, 46-year-old Shailaja rises at 5 a.m. Before 8 a.m., she has eaten breakfast and walked a mile up a mountain to an Indigenous village, where she tutors 22 teens in grades 8 to 10 in math and the Marathi language. Before the students begin attending the government school at 10 a.m., she also tries to help them with any other problems they have encountered.
Shailaja, who has been a teacher for 14 years, is one of a group of animators – teachers, health workers and social workers – trained and paid by the Archdiocese of Bombay to work with Indigenous, or tri-bal, villagers. She works out of the mission station in Alibag, a beach town about 60 miles south of Mumbai.
Tribals, sometimes referred to as Adivasis, make up nearly 9% of the Indian population. The Indian Constitution ensures their educational interests, provides economic safe-guards and takes steps for political empowerment. The 2006 Forest Rights Act empowers forest dwellers to access and use the forest resources in the manner to which they were traditionally accustomed and aims to protect forest dwellers from unlawful evictions — much of their land is mineral rich, and corporations have exploited the lack of documen-tation of ownership.

Church leaders in India have reacted cautiously to the demand of an organization representing indigenous people that the government remove the reservation for tribal people to Christianity or other religions.
A March 26 rally organized by the Janajati Dharma Sanskriti Suraksha Mancha (JDSSM) in Assam’s Guwahati city also demand a ban on religious conversion of tribal people in Assam. Hundreds of Boro, Karbi, Tiwa, Dimasa, Rabha, Mising and other tribes from 30 districts of Assam reportedly attended the rally.
“Conversion of tribal people in Assam and elsewhere in India to foreign religions has been a threat to indigenous faiths and cultures for decades. The rate of conversion has increased and the ST people fall prey to communal theocratic foreign religious groups,” alleged JDSSM working president Binud Kumbang.
He said conversion could be checked if the converted tribal people are stripped off the Scheduled Tribe list. “The converted people completely give up their original tribal culture, customs, rituals, way of life, and traditions,” he alleged.
Allen Brooks, spokesperson of the United Christian Forum of Assam, says Christians would respond to the issue, but would to do it collectively taking all denominations together.

A group of students of theology from Delhi’s Jesuit-run Vidyajyoti Institute of Religious Studies on March 26 attended an iftar program, the ritual of breaking the fast during the Ramadan month.
They were invited by Syed Muhammad Nizami Sahib to the iftar at the dargah of Sufi saint Khwaja Nizamuddin Auliya on the fifth day of Ramadan.
Muslims throughout abstain from eating and drinking during the day and end the fast at sunset during Ramadan month. Many Muslims and their groups use the iftar to build and promote interfaith relations.
Reminding the relevance of such interfaith engagements, Jesuit Father Joseph Victor Edwin, who teaches theology and Christian-Muslim Relations at Vidyajyoti, said: In the light of post-modernist thought which takes shape as abhorrence of uniformity, universality, and absoluteness, the Church has a new task of discerning her identity in the context of many religions.”
He reminded the students of the message of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue addressed to ‘Muslim brothers and sisters,’ that urged Muslims and Christians to strive to promote together a ‘culture of love and friendship’ in the context of ‘the culture of hate.’
The Vatican message said the culture of hate is nurtured through the numerous “negative attitudes and behaviors towards those who are different from us,” including “suspicion, fear, rivalry, discrimination, exclusion, persecution, polemics, insults, and backbiting” through social media.
Father Edwin said the message encourages both Muslims and Christians to nurture respect, goodness, charity, friendship, and mutual care for all in the context of negativity.
Syed Muhammad Nizami Sahib said that Sufis emphasize the importance of experiencing God in one’s life. He further said every human is created to love God and love his/her neighbour.

Leaders of the Jabalpur Catholic diocese have denied the allegation which they say is a conspiracy to tarnish the image of a Church institution that serves the poor.
The court in tribal dominated Dindori district of Madhya Pradesh state on March 7 remanded Nam Singh Yadav, principal of the diocesan higher secondary school. Dindori is some 140 km southeast of Jabalpur, the diocesan headquarters, and 460 km east of Bhopal, the state capital.

Three Catholic nuns were among 33 outstanding women entrepreneurs awarded for successfully fighting Covid pandemic with business plans.
The awardees were selected from among 1,408 women supported by Functional Vocational Training and Research Society (FVTRS) through Child Fund and City Bank to rebuild people’s lives after the pandemic.

Police in central India have re-arrested a lay Catholic school principal accused of sexually assaulting young girls, which local people say is part of a conspiracy to deny education to tribal people. Nam Singh Yadav was arrested and detained in judicial custody on March 7, three days after he and three others — a Catholic nun, priest and another lay male teacher — were accused of violating the rights of children.

An estimated 14,000 Christians in southern Vietnam attended a historic religious event organized by an American evangelist association in Ho Chi Minh City.
People including government officials from the city and neighbouring provinces attended the Spring Love Festival held by the US-based Billy Graham Evangelistic Association at the Phu Tho Sports Facility on Mar. 4-5.
Reverend Franklin Graham, president and CEO of the association told the crowds that “God makes and creates you and loves you and Vietnam. Jesus is in the city tonight.”
Each day some 7,000 people attended public Bible talks and Gospel singing, local media said.
Graham said he was in the Southeast Asian country at the invitation of local churches.
More than 900 pastors and church leaders from 60 denominations worked together for the event. This was the first time “so many denominational leaders had been under one roof,” the association claimed on its website.
Before the event, Graham reportedly met with Deputy Prime Minister Le Minh Khai and other officials to discuss the diversity of religions and support for religious freedom in the country.

Archbishop Peter Machado of Bangalore says the Church will continue to do its good works without fear.
“Even if a case is filed against me, accusing me of indulging in conversion, for providing education and healthcare to the Dalits and the marginalized, I would continue with those good works,” Archbishop Machado asserted.
The archbishop is the leader of the Catholic Church in the southern Indian state of Karnataka that has enacted anti-conversion law last year. He also heads the All Karnataka United Christian Forum for Human Rights, an ecumenical body.
“No government can stop us from doing good works; no one can challenge us,” the 68-year-old prelate asserted.
He challenged the government to come out with the data on the number of children converted in Christian educational institutions.
The archbishop was speaking at a function to felicitate Baselios Marthoma Mathews III, the Catholicos of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, in Bengaluru, the state capital.
With a few months left for the Assembly elections in Karnataka, the archbishop’s speech is seen as a sign of the community’s approach to the ruling party and the government’s policies against Christians.
Archbishop Machado slammed the fundamentalists for playing petty politics and spreading fake news that teaching the Bible has been made compulsory at Clarence school in Bengaluru.
Earlier, the archbishop had called the anti-conversion law “dangerous” and termed it a “sad chapter for the Christian community.”
He had also written to Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai appealing not to promote the “undesirable and discriminatory” Bill.
According to the new law, any converted person, his parents, brother, sister, or any other person who is related to him by blood, marriage, adoption, or in any form associated, or colleague may lodge a complaint of illegal religious conversion. The offense is non-bailable.
The bill prohibits unlawful conversion of religion, providing protection to those who were forced to convert from one religion to another by misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, allurement, the promise of marriage, or by any fraudulent means and for the matters connected therewith or incidental thereto.