The Supreme Court has sought the Centre’s res-ponse on a plea by Dalit Christians seeking parity in quota with their counter-parts among the Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist com-munities. On Aug 21, a bench comprising Chief Justice J S Khehar and D Y Chandrachud issued that notice. The bench was hearing the plea filed by All India Catholic Union challenging the validity of paragraph 3 of the Constitution (Scheduled Caste) Order, 1950, which says no person who professes a religion different from Hindus, Sikhs or Buddhists shall be deemed to be a member of a Scheduled Caste. The plea has sought inclusion of Dalit Christians in the Scheduled Caste category for enabling them to get benefits of reservation under the Constitution.

A 12-member Christian dele-gation on August 23 met Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik to congratulate him for becoming India’s best administrator.

Abp John Barwa of Cuttack Bhubaneswar led the delegation comprising priests, religious and lay people. They met the chief at his office on behalf of all Chri-stians in the eastern Indian state.
The “Outlook,” a weekly magazine published from New Delhi, chose Patnaik as the “Best Administrator of the Country.”

India’s immediate past President Pranab Mukherjee presented the award at a function in New Delhi on August 21. Patnaik dedicated the award to Odisha’s 45 million people.

Patnaik was chosen from six chief ministers — Nitish Kumar of Bihar, Manik Sarkar of Tripura, Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal, Devendra Fadnavis of Maharashtra and Siddaramaiah of Karnataka.

The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth have come to the aid of people in ten villages reeling under flood fury in Bihar’s Madhepura district. Around 24,000 people live in 81 wards of 12 panchayats under the Goalpara block of the district reeling under the flood fury Goalpara block is around 290 km north of the State capital of Patna.

Two women were killed on Aug. 21 as they waded through water flowing over a small bridge in Fulaut village in Madhepura district. Bihar flood death toll continues to rise. As on August 21, the state reported 253 deaths in 20 districts. The water level in the catchment areas continues to rise in incessant rains.

“Although water seems to recede gradually, many houses are under water,” Sister Lilly Thomas, a trained nurse, told Matters India on August 20.

The worst affected districts are Araria, Sitamarhi, Kishan-ganj, Madhubani, East and West Champaran, Purnia, Katihar and Khagaria. Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated and many are left homeless and shelterless.

The Nazareth nun said local people are afraid that they would face a repeat of the 2008 tragedy when the entire area was submerged under water for days.

Goan Catholics are not apprehensive about the beef ban issue in the state’s context, Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar said. He was responding to a query if in course of his campaign for the Panaji by-poll, Catholic voters had expressed their grievances about the beef ban narrative at the national level. “Nothing is coming through. Those who have read and have knowledge, they know the situation vis-à-vis the Goan context,” Parrikar said on Aug 17. Catholics account for more than a quarter of the state’s 1.5 million population and are a sizeable votebank in the Panaji assembly constituency. The Goa Church has openly criticised the Bharatiya Janata Party regime, both at the Centre and the BJP-led coalition government in the state, accusing it of trying to clamp down on sale of beef, brazenly in the rest of India and subtly in the coastal state, where minorities and a sizeable chunk of the six million plus tourists who visit the state, eat it.

Indian democracy is under threat from “pseudo-nationalism” and “right-wing fanaticism mas-querading as nationalism,” a column published in Renovacao, a Goa Church periodical, has said.
“Quo Vadis India?” by Father Savio Fernandes in the latest edition of the pastoral bulletin of the Archdiocese of Goa and Daman, also bemoans efforts to make India a Hindu Rashtra by 2020 and rues the “political rhetoric” which is triggering hate crimes against dalits and members of the minority community.

“Competition for political and economic power has encouraged pseudo-nationalism, which uses religion as a tool to gain accept-ance,” Fernandes said in the column.

He heads the Council for Social Justice and Peace, the social arm of Goa’s influential Roman Catholic Church, which is the religious and spiritual leader of more than 26 percent of the state’s Catholic population.

“This is an important turning point in India’s politics, because after being dominated for several decades by Left-leaning policies, the political space is now being rapidly cornered by Rightwing fanaticism masquerading as anationalism.”

“From the much talked about pluralism and diversity being the hallmark of the Indian nation, there are attempts to impose one culture, one religion, one langu-age ideology – a Hindu Rashtra by 2020 which marks the 75th anniversary of our nation’s inde-pendence,” the column stated.

Nine years ago, Christians in the Kandhamal district of Odisha, India suffered the worst attacks against Christians in modern times in the country.

Around 100 people lost their lives and more than 56,000 lost their homes and places of worship in a series of violent riots by Hindu militants that lasted for several months.

But since the devastation, the local area has seen an “unprecedented” increase in religious vocations, including Sr Alanza Nayak, who became the first woman from her area to join the order of the Sisters of the Destitute.

Sr Nayak told Matters India that she decided to dedicate her life to God through the poor and needy after she heard “how a herd of elephants meted out justice to the victims of Kandhamal anti-Christian violence.”

A tenth-grader at the time of the attacks, Sr Nayak said she remembers escaping to the nearby forest so she wouldn’t be killed.

A year after the attacks, a herd of elephants came back to the village and destroyed the farms and houses of those who had persecuted the Christians.

“I was convinced it was the powerful hand of God toward helpless Christians,” Sister Nayak told Matters India. The animals were later referred to as “Christian elephants,” she added.

After completing her candidacy, postulancy and novitiate with the order, Sr Nayak took her first profession on October 5, 2016, at Jagadhri, a village in Haryana. She is now a member in the Provincial House, Delhi.

On January 26, more than 3,000 people from Sr Nayak’s village of Mandubadi, honored her with a special Mass and festivities.

The Syro-Malabar Church in Kerala has planed a series of programs to celebrate the Nov. 4 beatification of Sister Rani Maria, a Franciscan Clarist missionary nun murdered in Madhya Pradesh 22 years ago.

Archdiocese of Ernakulam-Angamaly and the Franciscan Clarist Congregation are jointly organizing the programs with involvement of other two Catholic rites in the state—Syro-Malankara and Latin, said press release from the Archdiocese of Ernakulam-Angamaly. As part of the program relics of the nun will be brought to the Major Archbishop’s House in Ernakulam from Indore, where the ceremonies of beatification are palnned. It will be then taken in procession to Perumbavoor, her place of birth, on November 15. A thanksgiving Mass and related ceremonies will be held at Pulluvazhy on November 19.

Beatification is the penultimate stage in the four-phased canonization process in the Catholic Church. Rani Maria’s cause of canonization began in 2003 and she was declared a Servant of God four years later.

The nun was 41 when Samandar Singh, hired by some landlords, stabbed her inside a bus on February 25, 1995. She was on traveling to Indore, the commercial capital of Madhya Pradesh State, en route her native place in Kerala, southern India. The attacker followed her when she ran out of the crowded bus and continued to stab her. She died on the roadside at Nachanbore Hill, near Indore.

The next Youth Day will take place in India in 2020, the second time the South Asian nation will be hosting the continental-level Catholic Church event since 2003. Card. Oswald Gracias made the announcement on August 5 at the end of the concluding Mass of the 7th Asian Youth Day (AYD7), which he presided over in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

The venue of the AYD8 will be discussed and decided upon by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI). Cardinal Gracias, Archbishop of Bombay, together with Indian Church officials and some of the Indian youth delegation received the simple bamboo AYD cross from their Indonesian counterparts for the next AYD to take place in 3 years’ time.

Differences cannot separate us. Among those who flanked Cardinal Gracias, the main celebrant, at the altar were Filipino Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila and Archbishop Ignatius Suharyo of Jakarta, who delivered the homily in Bahasa Indonesia.

“We do realize our differences: We are of different nationalities, different languages, different cultures, and so on,” noted the archbishop who is president of Indonesia’s bishops’ conference (KWI).

“However, in this event, we do realize and experience that those differences cannot separate us, but the differences show the richness of the united humanity instead. It proves that the power of faith, hope and love unites us.” Arch Suharyo wished that the AYD7 help the young people to “diligently and faithfully live out the Gospel so that we may be filled with the joy of the Gospel.” “Thus, our life could mirror the glory of the Lord, which changes our lives,” he said.

Catholic Church officials are backing a hunger strike in support of demands for com-pensation and rehabilitation for 40,000 families affected by a major dam project in central India’s Madhya Pradesh State. Protesters say increased water levels in the Sardar Sarovar Dam will submerge 912 villages while officials maintain that affected people have already been compensated and benefited from ‘rehabilitation’ measures.

Police on Aug. 7 ‘cane charg-ed’ supporters of 12 people on hunger strike since July 27 at Chikhalda, a village in Dhar district. Activist Medha Patkar was hospitalized as a result of the encounter.
Police also forcefully took six others to hospital as their health deteriorated, but more joined the hunger strike to replace them.

Archbishop Leo Cornelio of Bhopal, who is based in the Madhya Pradesh State capital, said the current situation is a matter of great concern as nobody should be deprived of his or her “right to life.” He called on the government to conduct a fresh survey to determine how many more people should be offered rehabilitation packages.

A leader of pro-Hindu BJP party wants morning prayer calls from mosques and sounds of bells from churches be replaced with shouts of nationalist slogans.

President of the Bihar unit of the party Nityanand Rai said “sound of ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ (hail mother India) should replace azaan from mosques and sounds of bells from churches.” He was speaking at a BJP function in Patna Aug 8. However, he made U-turn soon, reported media.

After realizing that he has made a controversial statement, Rai corrected himself before the media and said: “I told that sound of Bharat Mata Ki Jai and Vande Matram should come from mosque and church and did not mean in place of azaan and bell.”

The function, the Sankalp Sammelan of the BJP to honour all the 12 ministers of the party in the newly formed coalition government in Bihar, also turned controversial when Vinod Kumar Singh, state minister for Minister of Mines and Geology, made a similar demand.

Singh wanted all people to join him in loudly shouting “Bharat Mata Ki Jai.” However, when the media persons present did not shout “Bharat Mata Ki Jai,” he expressed his displeasure and anger over it.