Maria was 9 and a fourth grader in a convent school when she tested positive for HIV.
She had lost her mother when she was just 3; her father, also an HIV patient, died last month in February.
Maria (name changed) recalled her father and the hostel warden bringing her 17 years ago to Jeevadaan (Life giver), an HIV/AIDS rehabilitation center managed by the Daughters of St. Camillus in the outskirts of Mangaluru, a southwestern Indian port city. “I was shocked and crying for leaving my friends,” she told Global Sisters Report.
Now married with a 2½-year-old son, Maria thanks the nuns for providing her care and support when everything seemed bleak.
“We are now positive about our life and our son keeps us occupied,” said Maria, who, with the intervention and support of Jeevadaan, married an HIV-positive young man.
The Catholic woman is among more than 400 HIV-infected women and children whom Jeevadaan has helped and who have settled into lives with jobs or marriage.
That’s because of the hope and confidence Jeevadaan teaches its beneficiaries, Maria said.
“With proper care and support, we could bring them up as normal children, giving them education at a public school and helping them settle with good education and jobs,” said Camillus Sr. Shiji Madathithazhe, who is in charge of education and has served the center for seven years.
“Our children have become smarter and healthier as they began interacting with the other children in the school,” she said.

A delegation of Christians of Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh on March 21 met city Police Commissioner P. Jogdand regarding a spate of accusations and arrests for alleged forcible conversions.
The UP Prohibition of Unlawful Conversions of Religion Act 2021 aims to stop conversion through allurement, coercion, force or fraudulent means. The law was implemented with retrospective effect from November 27, 2020.
Under the law, even an assurance of a “better lifestyle” or threat of “divine displeasure” is considered an offence. The act defines “mass conversion” as that of two or more persons. So even if a married couple converts it becomes a case of mass conversion.
Unfortunately, the provisions of this Act have been used to harass Christians across the State. Members of certain fundamentalist organizations have been complaining against prayer meetings being held in houses and pressurising the police to arrest those conducting such services.

Catholics across India have reacted angrily to an archbishop in Kerala, who has offered condi-tional support to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that heads the federal coalition government.
Archbishop Joseph Pamplany of Tellicherry on March 18 assur-ed the BJP at least one seat from the southern Indian state if the federal government raises the price of rubber to 300 rupees.
The Syro-Malabar prelate was addressing a farmers’ rally at Alakode, a village in the east-ern region of Kerala’s Kannur district where rubber is the main crop.
The Hindu nationalist BJP currently has no parliamentary or legislative seat in Kerala, where Christians form more than 18 percent of 35.77 million.
Archbishop Pamplany’s statement “cannot be accepted as the stand of Christians in Kerala, though there have been attempts by Christian leaders to align with the BJP,” says Father Suresh Mathew, editor of Indian Currents weekly.

India’s Supreme Court has restored the powers of Catholic bishops in Kerala to transfer diocesan properties and quashed a state court’s order that restricted them to dealing only with spiritual matters.
“The Supreme Court order setting aside the high court observations is a matter of great relief to bishops and the entire Christian community in the state [Kerala],” said Father Jacob G Palakkappillly, spokesperson of the Kerala Catholic Bishops’ Council, a regional Indian Bi-shops’ Conference.
The Supreme Court on March 17 said the state High Court’s order was “unwarranted and de-serve to be quashed and set aside, and are accordingly quashed and set aside.”
Kerala High Court in August 2021 held that Catholic bishops, notwithstanding their canonical powers, had no powers to alienate landed assets of their dioceses because their “powers are con-fined to religious and spiritual matters.”

In a verdict that will have far-reaching implications for minority Christian-run higher educational institutions in India, the country’s top court has ordered that while a minority educational institution is free to devise its own fee structure, the state has the power to regulate it.
The Supreme Court ruling came while hearing a petition that challenged the authority of a committee set up by the central Indian Madhya Pradesh state to regulate fees and admissions in minority-run higher education institutions in the state.
In its March 17 order, the Supreme Court said the minority institutions of higher education “should not claim complete immunity” in admissions and fee structures and “seek exemption from any interference” from the government.
The state established the committee in 2007 to fix the fees and supervise the admission process in the state’s private higher education institutions following complaints that these institutions were charging exorbitant fees.
The Church “accepts the verdict with mixed feelings,” said Father Maria Stephen, the Church spokesman in Madhya Pradesh.
He said Church institutions “do not fix admission fees and other fees with the intention of making a profit. Our aim is to provide excellent structures and modern facilities. The fee regulatory committee should not compare private institutions with government-run colleges,” he said.

More than 50,000 people on March 5 gathered at a Marian pilgrimage center in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, when it celebrated its feast two years after a gap of two years.
“We are here after the Covid pandemic to thank God who loves unconditionally and who is always willing to grant Mother Mary’s intercession for all of us,” said Archbishop John Barwa of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar, the main celebrant of the feast day Mass at the Marian shrine in Partamaha, a small village in Odisha’s Kandhamal district.
The Divine Word prelate remembered Komoladevi, a local Hindu widow whose vision of the Blessed Virgin led to the setting up of the pilgrimage center in 1994 in the village, some 250 km southwest of Bhubaneswar, the state capital. She died of Covid-19 in 2020.
Father Mukund Dev, the parish of Our Lady of Holy Rosary Daringbadi and a member of managing committee of the shrine, said more than 50,000 people attended this year’s feast. The gathering included 55 priests and 25 nuns.
People gathering in such huge number is the sign of growing faith in God and accepting Mother Mary, the priest told Matters India.
Saraj Nayak, the secretary of development committee of the shrine, the people prayed for Mother Mary’s intervention to bring peace and harmony between warring Russia and Ukraine. “We also pray that the Vatican declare 36 Catholic victims of anti-Christian violence 2008 as martyrs of the Church,” he added.
The Archdiocese of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar comprises of nine civil districts of Boudh, Cuttack, Kandhamal, Kendrapara, Khurda, Jagatsinghpur, Jajpur, Nayagarh and Puri. It has 39 parishes serving around 70,000 Catholics. Kandhamal district alone has about 50,000 Catholics in 26 parishes including recently erected Sonpur and Barokhoma entrusted to the Capuchin priests.
The shrine was built after Komoladevi went to Partamaha Mountain to collect fire wood on March 5, 1994. She saw a bearded man in white dress and long hair coming closer to her. He disappeared after sometimes.
A beautiful woman from a distance called her and told her to request the local priest to build a church where people could pray the Rosary for the sinners to repent. The neighbors laughed at her when she first shared the experience .

Sister Prasanna Devi, a Catholic hermit nun who was an inspiration for many, especially Hindus, died February 27 in the western Indian state of Gujarat. She would have turned 89 on March 13.
Sister Devi was suffering from age-related illnesses for the past few years.
The death occurred at 2:33 pm at the parish presbytery of St. Ann’s Catholic Church in Junagadh, a town in Gujarat where she had been staying for nearly a decade.
Carmelite Father Vinod Kanatt, the parish priest who looked after the nun, told Matters India that she was discharged from Christ hospital Rajkot two days ago. She was taken to the hospital on February 3 after her health deteriorated.
The funeral is scheduled at 10 am on March 1 in Junagadh.
Sister Devi had lived four decades among lions, panthers and other wild animals deep inside Girnar mountain range, the only home for Asiatic lions in India.
Devi does not belong to a particular religious order. She had chosen the contemplative life of an ascetic, devoting her life to God and sharing Christian blessings with thousands. She was the only female member of the Syro-Malabar Church to choose such a life.

A Christian hospital that has served a northern Indian city for more than a century faces closure after it became a victim of religious bigotry since one year.
The Broadwell Christian Hospital managed by the Evangelical Church of India (ECI) in Fatehpur has faced “physical, mental, and emotional abuse due to the false allegations of forceful religious conversions,” bemoans Sujith Varghese Thomas, the institutions senior administrative officer.
Fatehpur, a city situated between the Ganga and Yamuna rivers in Uttar Pradesh state, is some 550 km southeast of New Delhi.
Some Hindu nationalist groups have accused the hospital of indulging in forcible religious conversions, which the hospital authorities say are false allegations.
In “an open letter” to the media, Thomas claims the hospital that provides dedicated service in social development and healthcare has remained a “vital resource” for the local community for the past 114 years.
“For over a century, the hospital, its staff and its management have shared a fraternal bond with the community – something that goes beyond mere doctor and patient association. This bond is a deep two-way relationship of care, of trust, of service and of dignity – the metaphorical blood flow that has kept us connected, healthy, motivated and in service through the years,” adds the February 23 letter.

Indian police have arrested a Protestant pastor and his wife for allegedly indulging in religious conversions, say Christian leaders.
Police in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where a sweeping anti-conversion law is in force, arrested Pastor Santosh John and his wife, Jiji John, on Feb. 26 based on a complaint by Bajrang Dal, an ultra-Hindu outfit.
“Pastor John and his wife were summoned in the morning for questioning and were freed later in the evening. But they were arrested after a mob protested in front of the police station,” Minakshi Singh, a Christian activist, told UCA News on Feb. 28.
John and his wife were holding a prayer service in a rented basement in Indrapuram in Uttar Pradesh near India’s capital New Delhi when the mob created a ruckus and accused them of religious conversion.
The couple appeared before a magistrate on Feb. 28 and were denied bail.
Singh, general secretary of Unity in Compassion, a charity based in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, said, “Pastor John and his wife are lodged in the Dasana jail in Uttar Pradesh.”
Police came under pressure from the administration, headed by Yogi Adityanath of the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the Bajrang Dal, which is affiliated to the parent organization of the BJP, said Singh, who was seeking legal aid for the couple.
“Why should they arrest the pastor and his wife without any evidence?”

As many as 93 former civil servants have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi about what they assay are recent increase in attacks on Christians in India.
Banded under the Constitutional Conduct Group, the retired bureaucrats, urged Modi in their March 4 open letter to reassure Chri-stians in the country that it will get equal and unbiased treatment from administration and the law.
“We are a group of former civil servants of the All India and Central Services who have worked in the Central and State Govern-ments during our careers. As a group, we have no affiliation with any political party but believe in impartiality, neutrality and share a commitment to the Constitution of India,” says the opening of the letter.
The bureaucrats say they write to the prime minister because they are “deeply perturbed” by the continued harassment, through speech and criminal action, of minority groups in the country by persons associated with your government, your party, organizations connected to it, and by mischief makers from amongst the public.
“While we are concerned about the hate crimes and speeches against all minorities, we write to you today about the steadily in-creasing ugly words and actions against a small religious minority, the Christians. Our Constitution clearly spells out that all citizens, irrespective of religion, are equal and have equal rights, but we are compelled to protest to you against the increasing incidents of outright discrimination against Christians occurring in recent times,” the letter adds.
The letter points out that although some groups accuse Christians of indulging forcible religious conversion, the community share in the Indian popular has remained around 2.3 percent since 1951.
“Yet, in the minds of some, this minuscule number poses a threat to the 80 percent of the population that is Hindu,” says the letter.
The accusation has made Christians and their institutions victims of verbal, physical and psychological attacks in various parts of the country. “It is an unfortunate but inesca-pable fact that there are elements amongst us who may feel that the denigration of others enhances themselves,” the letter bemoans.
Noting the contributions of Christians to the education and health sectors and social reform, the former civil servants said that India has been home to “Christianity since the first century CE, long before its intro-duction in many countries that are today predominantly Christian.”