Unidentified persons have set fire to a Protestant church in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
Police have launched a probe against those behind the burning of the Evangelical Lutheran church under Kesla police station in Narmadapuram district.
People came to know about the incident only on February 12 morning when they went the church for their Sunday service.
“I do not know when it happened, but we came to know it on Sunday morning,” Church pastor Mahesh Kumre told on February 13.
According to him, the vandals entered the church through the grill after breaking it open.
They burnt everything inside the six-year-old church including a copy of the Bible, prayer books, fans and chairs among others.
Since none stayed in the church the vandals had sufficient time to destroy everything in-side the church, the pastor said.

India’s top court has directed seven state governments to present details of the action taken by their law enforcement agencies in cases of alleged attacks against Christians and their institutions.
A Supreme Court bench headed by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud on Feb. 6 ordered the state of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh to present the information within three weeks.
The order came while hearing a public interest petition (PIL) filed by Archbishop Peter Machado of Bangalore along with the National Solidarity Forum and the Evangelical Fellowship of India.
The Supreme Court at an earlier hearing on Sept. 1 last year had directed the federal home ministry to obtain reports from eight states to enable it to assess the claims of the Christian petitioners on the alleged violent incidents against their community members and institutions.
The eights states were to provide information on the incidents of “criminal wrongdoings” that occurred in 2021, as alleged in the petitions, verifying the registration of cases by police on receiving information about the crime, the status of investigations, the arrests made, and charges filed in court for prosecuting the culprits.
The Supreme Court said the verification exercise was needed to determine whether directions issued by it in a number of earlier judgments were being followed by the provincial authorities. The judgments made the states accountable for preventing violence and taking action against perpetrators of sectarian violence, especially the lynchings of minorities.

Three alleged black-market immigration agents have been arrested in western India in connection with the case of an Indian family who froze to death on the United States’ border with Canada last year, police said Wednesday.
Deputy Commissioner Chaitanya Mandlik with Ahmedabad Police’s crime branch named the suspects as Yogesh Patel, Bhavesh Patel, and Dashrath Chaudhary.

Rights activists in Indonesia’s restive, Christian-majority Papua province have hailed life-term imprisonment for an ex-soldier accused of killing four Papuans. The sentence is the toughest against a member of the security forces long accused of gross human rights violations in the conflict-torn region.
Catholic priest and rights campaigner Father John Djonga said the verdict “signals that there are efforts to take firm action against state apparatus who are perpetrators of crimes in Papua.”

Pope Francis has appointed Father John Panamthottathil of the Carmelites of Mary Immaculate (CMI) congregation as the new bishop of St. Thomas Syro-Malabar Diocese of Melbourne, Australia.
The Holy Father has accepted the resignation from the pastoral care of the eparchy of Saint Thomas the Apostle of Melbourne, Australia, presented by Bishop Bosco Puthur, who completed 75 years of age.

A 73-year-old Dominican nun and a 36-year-old diocesan priest have died in tragic accidents at two different pa-rts of India.
Father Melvin Abraham Pallithazhathu of Bijnor diocese died January 19 when his vehicle fell into a gorge of 500 feet deep at Joshimath in the Chamoli district of the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand. He had gone there with relief materials from the diocesan headquarters of Kotdwar, some 275 km southwest.
Sister Jussina Pulikkottle, OPSister Jussina Pulikkottle died January 16 when she fell on railway tracks near Bengaluru, southern India. Her funeral took place at 11 am on January 19.

In this week of prayer for Christian unity, we are called to pay attention to the diversity of Christians as well as to their mutual relations. We explore here some of the ways through which Asian Catholics respond to the presence of evangelical Christians.
Evangelical churches, which stress that one has to be “born again” to follow Christ, have been the trendy Christianity of the past 40 years in Asia. Evangelicals are seen as having strong feelings against ecumenical relations compared to Anglicans and Methodists, who are more supportive.
The evangelical branch of Christianity has grown significantly across Asia. The Evangelical growth was second only to Pentecostalism, which we consider an intrinsically different tradition. It would be interesting to focus on Evangelical-Catholic relations since Evangelicals are a relatively newer Christian force to consider in Asia.
But before focusing on the Catholic-Evangelical encounter, we must first consider the immense diversity of ecclesial, political, and socio-economic situations that Asia represents. Depending on whether we look at Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, or Bhutan, the socio-economic context, the local history, the vitality of local Churches, and their mutual relations vary tremendously.

In what amounts to the latest failure to resolve an almost 25 year-old liturgical feud, a six-day meeting of bishops of the Syro-Malabar church concluded Saturday without any new consensus on how Mass ought to be celebrated.
Centered in the southern Indian state of Kerala, the Syro-Malabar Church has more than four million followers worldwide, making it the second-largest \of the Eastern churches in communion with Rome after the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine.
Since at least the 1990s, members of the church have been divided over the proper way to celebrate their version of the Mass, known as the “Holy Qurbana.” Historically, some branches of the church celebrated ad populum, meaning facing the people, for virtually the entire liturgy, while others did so ad orientem, meaning facing the East.
In 1999, the church’s bishops agreed on a compromise formula: The Mass would be facing the people during the Liturgy of the Word, and facing East during the Liturgy of the Eucharist. That agreement broke down in practice, however, when some elements of the church refused to accept it, especially the Archeparchy of Ernakulam-Angamaly, the largest diocese in the church with around a half-million followers,
Pope Francis intervened last July, insisting on a unfirm liturgy based on the 1999 formula, which was supposed to be adopted in August. Efforts to enforce it, however, have been met with resistance including street fights, hunger strikes, the burning of pastoral letters and the burning in effigy of Cardinal George Alencherry, head of the Syro-Malabar Church.
Meanwhile, representing the priests of Ernakulam-Angamaly, Father Jose Vailikodath said they would continue to say Mass facing the people, claiming that Alencherry’s statement creates more problems than it solves.
Father Paul Thelakat, a former spokesperson of the Syro-Malabar synod, told Crux the dissenters would not object if uniformity were being imposed “on a matter of faith or morals.”
“All we are asking is something we were already doing, [which is] to have the complete Mass facing the people,” Thelakat said. “It is only a question of orientation, where there is nothing wrong at all.”

A Catholic priest sought police protection for his non-governmental organization (NGO) in western India a few days after his staff members were attacked by Hindu nationalists on a running train alleging they were missionaries involved in conversion activities.
Seven teachers of a Catholic NGO working in Dhule district in the western state of Maharashtra were assaulted by a mob of around 15 Hindu youth while traveling by an express train.
The team was out on an education tour when the attack took place at Sangli railway station on the night of Jan. 16.
“I was pulled down from the berth and hit on my head with a steel object until blood began to ooze out from a wound,” says Gunilal Pawara, supervisor of a team of 42 teachers including 14 females who work for the NGO named Shirpur Vishwa Mandal Sevashram.
The mob accused the team of trying to convert indigenous tribal people and kept asking for Father Constancio Rodrigues, the director of the NGO, Pawara said.
Father Rodrigues told UCA News on Jan. 20 that he was to accompany his team but could not join them at the last minute.

For the first time, tribal people in India are a much sought-after community as nine Indian states face elections this year, ahead of the crucial general election next year when Prime Minister Narendra Modi will seek a third term.
Tribal people can tilt the balance in seven of the nine states going to the polls this year, including Christian-majority tribal states of Meghalaya and Nagaland.
The other tribal heartland states that go to polls this year are Tripura and Mizoram along with Karnataka and Telangana. The term of legislatures in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan—the three other tribal stronghold states—are ending early next January and so elections are expected by the end of this year.
Never in the poll history of India have tribal people enjoyed such limelight. Of the 543 seats in the national parliament, 131 seats or close to 25 percent seats have been reserved for tribal and Dalit people since 2008. Tribal people alone get 84 seats.
Modi’s pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) nominated Droupadi Murmu — a woman from eastern India’s Santal tribe — as president last year, making her India’s first tribal president.