The beatifica-tion of Sr Rani Maria has seen the elevation of her home parish in Kerala as a pilgri-mage centre of the Syro-Malabar Church. The St Thomas Church at Pulluvazhi near Perumbavoor has been declared a pilgrimage centre by Syro-Malabar Major Archbishop Cardinal Mar George Alencherry on Nov 20.

Sr Rani Maria was beatified in Indore earlier this month. The nun was stabbed to death 23 years ago by a goon hired by landlords peeved at her work among landless labourers in a Madhya Pradesh village. In a rare act of forgiveness, her family accepted the assassin as a member of the family.

Sunday’s ceremony started with a procession carrying the blessed nun’s relics.

Clarist Sister Rani Maria Vattalil, 41, was stabbed in front of more than 50 bus passengers on a remote jungle track in Madhya Pradesh state as she was on her way home to Kerala state.

Samandar Singh, then 22, murdered her on behalf of money lenders upset with Sister Rani Maria’s work setting up self-help groups in the Diocese of Indore. Singh has since been forgiven by the nun’s family and was released from prison.

“Whatever happened has happened. I am sad and sorry about what I did. But now I am happy that the world is recognising and honouring Sister Rani,” Singh, a Hindu, told Catholic News Service in a telephone interview from his village of Semlia.

Singh was convicted of the murder and initially was sentenced to death; the sentence was later commuted to life in prison. He said that Sister Rani Maria’s younger sister – Clarist Sister Selmy – had formally accepted him as her “brother” while he was in prison and facilitated his early release. Court officials agreed to the release in 2006 after mandatory declarations were signed by Sister Selmy, her parents and Church officials.

When Sister Selmy was preparing to return home to southern Kerala state in January 2007 to visit her ailing 82-year-old father, Paul Vattalil, Singh accompanied the nun and apologised to her parents.

“I am now eagerly waiting for the big day,” Singh told CNS.

Bishop Chacko Thottumarickal of Indore told CNS the beatification of Sister Rani Maria “will be an inspiration for those serving the needy and poor in difficult circumstances in the country.

“Sister Rani Maria challenges all to carry on their work even if there is opposition and not to get disheartened by obstacles,” added Bishop Thottumarickal.

Sister Selmy called the beatification “a miracle.”

“Sister Rani urges us all to go forward fearlessly,” said Sister Selmy, who serves in a remote village in Uttar Pradesh state.

Two recent cases have vindicated church leaders’ belief that Christians are being targeted falsely in “kidnapping for conver-sion” cases to tarnish their image and handicap their work, lawyers say. A state court in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, on Oct. 30 released seven children taken to a shelter a week earlier. Two women traveling with them, Anita Joseph and Amrit Kumar, were arrested and accused of kidnapping them.

Police said the women were arrested after a group called Dharma Jagran Manch (Vigilant Group for Hindu Religion) complained that the children, all aged under 14, were being taken to Mumbai by train for conversion to Christianity.

The two women are still in jail as their bail application was not heard by the court.

Six other Christians from Simdega in eastern Jharkhand state arrested on charges of religious conversion were granted bail October 27. They were detained a month earlier and accused of distributing money for the purpose of converting villagers.

Parents of the seven children released from the shelter said at a October 30 press conference, that all the youngsters were baptized Christians and the women were taking them to Mumbai with their permission.

The group of some 200 Hindu hardliners who went to the rail station had also attacked some of the parents who had come to see off their children. Police who detained the children and two women, sent the youngsters to a shelter without allowing their parents to go with them.

The pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has governed Madhya Pradesh state for the past 14 years.

“This is becoming a politically motivated pattern to harass Christians,” said A.C. Michael, an official of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a forum of volunteer lawyers providing legal advice to Christians.

Michael said the false accusation is “deliberately done knowing very well that such accusations will not stand up in a court of law.”

For the first time in five decades, a church bell rang on Sunday at the largest Catholic church in the main city of India’s portion of Muslim-majority Kashmir.

Members of Srinagar’s tiny Christian community assembled at the 120-year-old Holy Family Catholic Church and celebrated the installation of the new bell, weighing 105 kilograms.

The church lost its original bell 50 years ago in an arson attack.

According to church officials, the church and its belfry were damaged in the attack by protesters demonstrating against the 1967 Mideast war.

The bell was badly damaged and rendered useless in the incident, said Sydney Rath, a local Christian member of the church. He said the bell was not installed all these years because “the community didn’t have enough resources to order a new bell after its damage.” He said one of the roughly 30 Christian families living in Srinagar donated the bell.

People from other faiths, including Muslims and Hindus, also participated in the event on Sunday.

The upcoming beatification of an Indian nun murdered over 20 years ago, will be an inspi-ration for India’s persecuted Christians, say local church leaders. Indian Catholics are preparing for the Nov. 4 beati-fication ceremony of Sister Rani Maria Vattalil who was killed in a knife attack on Feb. 25, 1995 as she travelled on a bus near the city of Indore on her way to her home state Kerala for a vacation.

Sister Rani Maria was a member of the indigenous Franciscan Clarist Congregation in Indore Diocese situated in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. She was 41 years of age when she was murdered.

Her “beatification, obvious-ly, is going to be a great source of inspiration for the Church in India that faces persecution,” said Paul Abraham, a Catholic writer based in Madhya Pradesh where attacks on Christians are frequently reported.

Abraham, a former journalist who closely followed the cause of the heroic nun, said her life and death will become a focus for local Christian communities.

The Catholic Church in India cannot become directly involved in politics, but it can help guide its members to make politically mature judgments, says Cardinal Baselios Cleemis, president of the country’s Catholic bishops’ conference.

He said hate-mongering political ideologies and crimes that target Christians in India are best countered when Christians live out their faith heroically. The cardinal, 58, said a minority of Hindus are aggressively opposed to other religious communities. “They take aggressive steps to curtail the freedom of other religions. That is something very, very alarming,” said Cardinal Cleemis of the eastern rite Syro-Malankara Church.

Christian leaders have accused hardline Hindu groups of targeting Christians after the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014 in a landslide victory. These groups, who consider BJP their political wing, took the electoral victory as a mandate to accelerate turning India, which under the constitution is secular, into a Hindu nation. Christians, who make up only 2.3 percent of India’s 1.2 billion population, cannot change the development, the cardinal said.

In view of Nov. 2 All Souls Day, Catholic Church officials in Goa have advised not to use plastic and other toxic items to decorate graves to beat pollution and to safeguard environment.

The Church’s social welfare wing Caritas, in a letter to all parish priests and chaplains in the state, said these items should be shunned particularly on the occasion of All Souls Day, when Catholics visit and decorate their ancestors’ graves and pray for the departed souls.

The Believers Church has filed a defamation case against the head of the southern India’s top Protestant group for allegedly issuing statements against their supreme head and constitution.

Father Sijo Panthappallil, spokesperson of the Kerala-based Believers Church, issued a statement on October 16 saying their Bishop Joju Mathew of Niranom filed the case against Bishop Thomas K. Oommen, moderator of Church of South India (CSI).

The Judicial First Class Magistrate in Alleppy has admitted the case for issuing what he says are defamatory statements against their supreme head Archbishop K.P.Yohannan Metropolitan and other bishops. The petition claims the Believers Church was established with historical and constitutional episcopacy. Questioning the Church’s epis-copacy and making misleading and defamatory statements against their leaders were unfortunate and motivated by malice and personal hatred, it says. The petitioner states that the ceremonial consecration of K.P.Yohannan as the first bishop of the Church was solemnized by none other than former CSI Moderator Bishop K.J.Samuel in February 2003. The consecration ceremony was attended by renowned personalities in the socio-political spheres. The petition also alleged that the CSI moderator has been propagating that the CSI had never considered K.P.Yohannan as a bishop.