The Catholic Church has started distributing food packets to poor Covid patients admitted in hospital after giving pre-packed lunch packets outside the two largest state-owned healthcare facilities in Ranchi for their attendants and relatives.
“We had started distribution of lunch packets outside both the Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) Ranchi and Sadar Hospital. We have distributed nearly 500 packets at the RIMS and 400 packets at Sadar Hospital since May 4.
“But it was getting difficult to control the crowd and abide by Covid protocols. This made us start distribution of over 300 food packets to Covid patients admitted in the RIMS. We will start distribution of food packets at Sadar Hospital too,” said auxiliary Bishop of Ranchi Archdiocese, Theodore Mascarenhas. According to sources in the Archdiocese, the poorest of the poor come for treatment at the RIMS and though meals are provided by the government to the patients, they don’t have the resources to avail of other items like fruits, biscuits, fruit juices, mineral water, beaten rice, etc.
Archbishop Felix Toppo and auxiliary Bishop Mascarenhas on June 2 blessed the first 300 packets to be distributed and also prayed for all the benefactors to acquire all the resources.
“The Archdiocese will soon launch a programme to distribute dry ration kits containing rice, dal (pulses), potatoes, cooking oil, salt, spices and onions in portions that would last two weeks for a family.
“We would identify the needy persons and distribute the ration packets at their doorstep adhering to Covid protocols. We are able to serve the poor only because many religious congregations and benefactors belonging to the Catholic Church as well as followers of other religions have been generously donating to the cause,” said auxiliary Bishop Mascarenhas.

With close to 3,000 deaths reported in the Christian community since April 1, many of which are COVID-19-related, the five big cemeteries in Bengaluru have run out of space and have been closed for burials. Meanwhile the Karnataka government is yet to act on its promise of providing land for burial.
While the Catholic community alone has seen nearly 1,600 deaths since April 1, at least 1,200 deaths have been reported among other denominations, sources in the Archbishop’s office said. In the last few days, burials in new graves have stopped taking place in Kalpalli, Mysuru Road, Hosur Road and Ulsoor, since the cemeteries are full. Only families that have designated graves are conducting funerals in these cemeteries, church sources said.
Archbishop Peter Machado’s appeal to the State Government earlier in April for five acres on the City’s outskirts that all Christian denominations is yet to be addressed. It is learnt that even the Church of South India (CSI) has made a similar appeal to the Government.

A photograph of Congress President Sonia Gandhi has gone viral, which purportedly shows a bookshelf behind her with a book titled ‘How to convert India into a Christian Nation’. The image also shows a copy of the Holy Bible and a statue of Jesus Christ on the shelf.
A Twitter user ‘No Con-version’, first shared the image with the caption ‘Who reads all these books?’ It was retweeted by over 1,000 people and garnered more than 2,900 likes. The tweet has since been deleted.
In another tweet, the user with more than 200,000 followers, accused the Congress of “ramp-ant conversion appeasement, nd brainwashing of young gene-ration.” Several other Twitter users also shared the image with similar claims. It was widely shared on Facebook too.
One Twitter user asked if “Sonia Gandhi’s hand” was “behind the conversion in India.”
The viral photograph of Sonia Gandhi with the book on Christian conversion is fake and has been morphed.

When some 30 people thronged a church-managed clinic run by three Carmelite sisters in the western Indian state of Gujarat early April 7, Sr. Lisset Vadakkekara saw it as an unusual sign to bear witness to her role as a Catholic nun and a follower of Christ in a predominantly Hindu area.
Vadakkekara, a member of the Congregation of the Mother of Carmel, is the supervisor of the Jyoti (light) clinic in Chachana, a remote village in Gujarat state’s Surendranagar district that falls under the Rajkot Syro-Malabar Eparchy.
The 58-year-old nun said she had not seen so many people seeking medical help at the same time in her 28 years as a nurse in the five-bed clinic. She and two other sisters, also nurses there, scurried to fashion an open-air clinic with donated cots on Jyoti’s campus to handle the overflow.
In Indian villages, nuns run clinics, called dispensaries, often the only health care available to the local people. Facilities like Jyoti are small with an outpatient section and a few beds. Seriously ill patients are referred to a city hospital.
When Vadakkekara approached the crowd that day, she was surprised to see them looking so pale as they experienced the fever, cough and throat pain symptoms of COVID-19.
“They seemed frightened and utterly helpless. With folded hands, they asked me to check their health and provide medicines,” Vadakkekara told Global Sisters Report.
The three Carmelite nuns checked temperatures, blood pressures and pulse rates.

It was three weeks ago when journalists combing obituary pages in Prime Minister Na-rendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat found authorities were concealing Covid-19 deaths that people started asking hard questions about the real number of Indian coronavirus fatalities. Now, epidemiologists and scientists around the world are struggling to solve the question.
The latest to enter the fray is top epidemiologist Bhramar Mukherjee, who holds the biostatistics chair at the University of Michigan. She calculates that 1.2 million Indians had died and 495 million had been infected by the virus up to mid-May. These fatality and infection totals contained in her preprint study, meaning it still must be peer-reviewed, are vastly higher than the government’s numbers which showed a cumu-lative 25 million Covid cases and 270,000 deaths on May 15.
“I’ve tried to be very con-servative in terms of the assu-mptions we’ve made in the mathematical model.”

The Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples has honoured an Indian Claretian priest for his two decades     of service. Fr Joseph Koonamparampil received insignia of honour from Card. Luis Antonio Tagle, prefect of the congregation. The occasion also marked the Father Koonamparampil’s golden jubilee in the Claretian congregation.

Delhi High Court has directed the federal Information and Broadcasting Ministry to expeditiously consider a Catholic nun’s demand to ban a movie accused of portraying priests and nuns as “sex maniacs”.
The direction from the state court of the national capital came on May 17 while it was hearing a petition from Sister Jessy Mani, a member of the indigenous Sacred Heart Congregation.
The nun petitioned the court seeking to ban Aquarium, a movie made in the Malayalam language of southern India’s Kerala state.
The movie was due to be released on May 14 through online platforms. However, Kerala High Court stayed its release on May 12 for two weeks, accepting a petition by two nuns to ban it permanently because of highly offensive content.
Sister Mani expects the Central Board of Film Certification, which functions under the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, “will understand our concerns and take appropriate action.”
The nun’s petition said the movie depicted nuns and priests having same-sex and heterosexual relationships besides having sex with animals. “It painted a very vulgar picture about Catholic priests and nuns,” she told.
Lawyer Jose Abraham, who represented Sister Mani in court, said the nun “can go back to the High Court again in case the federal government fails to address the concerns raised about the movie.”
The Kerala Church has been fighting the movie’s release since 2013, said Father Jacob Palackappilly, deputy secretary general of the regional bishops’ council.
In 2013, the certification board blocked the movie’s release because of its vulgar and blasphemous content, he said.

A day after the Indian Medical Association (IMA) took yoga guru Baba Ramdev to task for remarks criticizing allopathy, his aide Acharya Balkrishna claimed that IMA president Johnrose Jayalal was conspiring to convert the country to Christianity.
Last week Ramdev in a video clip had said that allopathy — the treatment of disease by drugs or surgery — is a “stupid science” and over 10,000 doctors have died even after taking both doses of Covid-19 vaccine.
“As part of the conspiracy to convert the entire country to Christianity, yoga and Ayurveda [alternative medicine] are being maligned by targeting Ramdev,” Balkrishna tweeted on May 25.
“Countrymen, wake up now from the deep slumber, otherwise the generations to come will not forgive you.”
However, Father Julius Arackal, secretary of the Indian Catholic Bishops’ Conference’s office of health, told that the “Indian government vaccine is a scientifically proven fact.”
He added: “The country is going through very difficult times and struggling to cope with the second wave of Covid-19, so we should promote unity and appreciate all good gestures.” IMA president Jayalal is a Christian and comes from the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
“How can Balkrishna claim that the IMA is trying to convert people in the name of vaccination just because the IMA’s president is from one particular group and from one particular state?” Father Arackal asked.
“Our priorities should be to save lives instead of creating differences between caste and creed.”
Father Arackal ponited out that even last July, long before vaccines reached final trials, Ramdev’s Patanjali Ayurved drug company claimed Coronil could provide strong protection against the coronavirus.

India’s Supreme Court has intervened for the third time in a year after it learned of the plight of migrant workers during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The apex court said on May 24 that its main concern is that benefits and schemes meant for migrant workers must reach them.
The court also said it was concerned about the slow process of registration and asked the federal and state governments to expedite it for migrants and those working in unorganized sectors.
“The intervention from the Supreme Court was much needed because the federal and state governments have failed miserably to handle the case of migrants who are left to cope with hunger, diseases and struggling to go back home to their respective states,” Father Jaison Vadassery, secretary to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India’s Commission for Migrants, told UCA News.
The federal government had not learned from its mistakes last year when migrant workers were left in the lurch, resulting in hundreds of casualties, he said.
India should take the lead from other countries who have declared pandemic deaths as accidents so that insurance companies can provide compensation, he added According to the 2011 census, internal migrants account for 37 percent of India’s population

A land dispute in Ghaziabad district of India’s Uttar Pradesh state is preventing the Christian community from using a cemetery as the country reels from the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Even today, two of our members died of Covid-19 and we are running from pillar to post of the administration office to perform the last rites. If we cannot use the cemetery, we will take them to the neighbouring state of Delhi,” Maneswar Das, a pastor of the Eternal Life Fellowship Society, told UCA News on May 17.
“We have been using the cemetery from 1988 and there was no such problem before, but two persons claimed their share of this land in 2014. Once the case came to our knowledge, we informed the local municipal corporation who asked us to approach the court. The municipal corporation passed a pro-posal in 2018 to give land for the construction of a cemetery for the Christian community.”
However, the contract letter was not given on behalf of the municipal corporation.