An Indian American who wrote about pioneering American and Indian women in a Bihar town has won a 74-year-old award that salutes media that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.”
Jyoti Thottam, daughter of an Indian nurse settled in the United States, has won the Christopher Award for her book, “Sisters of Mokama: The Pioneering Women Who Brought Hope and Healing to In-dia.”
Thottam, a senior New York Times Opinion editor, wrote about Americans and Indians – like her mother – who cared for all who came to their hospital in Mokama, a town some 100 km southeast of Patna, the Bihar capital, during the tumultuous period after WWII and the Partition of India.
Her mother, born in 1946 in the southern Indian state of Kerala, left home at the age of 15 and traveled to Bihar, which was among the bloodiest regions of Partition, to study nursing at Mokama’s Nazareth Hospital.
Fascinated by her mother’s story, Thottam set out to dis-cover the full story of Nazareth Hospital, which had been established in 1947 by the six Sisters of Charity of Nazareth nuns.
With no knowledge of Hindi, and the awareness that they would likely never see their families again, the sisters had traveled to Mokama. They opened the hospital a year later and soon began recruiting young Indian women as nursing students.

A Salesian center in north-eastern India has held a series of training to help improve their employment opportunities.
The Anma Integrated Development Association (AIDA) held the training in five villages, with a focus on mushroom cultivation and food processing. The women were part of self-help groups facilitated by the Don Bosco Campus in Dimapur, the commercial capital of Nagaland state.
The training aimed to pro-vide skills training for unemployed youth and women. Self-help groups are set up to help women have better employment opportunities. Women attended hands-on training and had a chance to meet with different organizations and departments for cross-sharing of information in a real-work environment.
The mushroom cultivation training was held at the Mush-room Farmers’ Club in Bade village. It was supported by the Mushroom Development Foundation of Guwahati, Assam. The food processing training on meat and pickles was held at the Ministry Learning Center.
The 50 participants of the mushroom training were taught about the construction of the mushroom house, preparation of straw, incubation and spawning and casing soil. The 27 participants in the food processing training learned about food quality assurance, quality control, and preservation for meat and pickles.
“Salesian missionaries in India and around the globe provide educational programs for women so they can find employment and become self-sufficient, which aids their families and communities,” said Father Timothy Ploch, interim director of Salesian Missions, the U.S. development arm of the Salesians of Don Bosco.

In a display of unabashed syncretism, significant numbers of Catholics are offering flowers, coconuts, fruits, rice, milk, sweetmeats and incense sticks to the idols of Shantadurga Kunkalikarin, a Hindu deity also known as Durga, the goddess of destruction.
“There is a lot of involvement of Catholics. I would say about 30–40%,” said Wendy Gomes, trustee of the Cuncolim Chieftains Memorial Trust told The Times of India, detailing Catholic participation in the “umbrella” festival of Sontrio (Chatrotsav) held earlier in March.
The devotees carry a red “sacred” umbrella representing the goddess and a dozen white umbrellas for each of the 12 local clans. Dancing while carrying the umbrellas, the red-powder-smeared participants toss handfuls of powder in the air around the goddess Shantadurga’s silver palanquin.
“We have two mothers, one is Shantadurga and the other is Saude Saibinn [Our Lady of Health],” Alister D’Souza, a local Catholic, told the Indian newspaper. The local parish of Our Lady of Health was first built between 1600 and 1604.
The Goan church’s website puts the number of Catholics in the parish of Our Lady of Health at 10,000. The Franciscan Order of Friars Minor and the religious sisters of Maria Bambina are also located in the parish.
Retired superintendent of police, Tony Fernandes, narrates how he has always taken part in the festival as a Catholic: “We were originally Hindus and were converted (to Catholicism), so the belief (in Shantadurga) has always been strong.”
As the deity’s procession stops at designated places along the route, Catholics join Hindus in throwing vermillion powder and rose petals. They rush forward to the idol to make offerings and seek the goddess’ blessing.
In the predominantly Catholic ward of Gotton, where the procession makes a ritual stop, Catholics don’t even store meat in their refrigerators as a mark of respect to the goddess.
Prominent Catholic Neeraj Aguiar from Gotton insists that local Catholics have celebrated the goddess’s arrival since “time immemorial” and “with great pomp.” The Aguiars have even built a special concrete platform to rest the palanquin and allow people to worship the goddess. “It is our belief that Shantadurga Kunkalikarin is the patron of Cuncolim. We have strong faith in that,” says Aguiar. “It’s not about being a Hindu or Catholic. We celebrate this together.”

A Catholic school in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh has been sealed and its principal arrested after an investigation team found objectionable materials in the pre-mises.
A Church official in the state, who refused to be identified, told Matters India March 27 that efforts are on to get bail for the priest. He also said only the priests’ residence inside the school campus has been sealed. Earlier, a report in the Free Press Journal said the collector of Morena district ordered the closure of Saint Mary’s School in the town after a surprise inspection by the state’s Child Protection Commission along with District Education Officer and the police.

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.