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.

St John’s National Academy of Health Sciences, a prestigious Church institution in Bengaluru, has begun guiding a diocese in Odisha in Covid protocol behaviour.
“My diocese is grateful to St John’s Medical College helping us to deal with the present crisis due to the coronavirus pandemic,” Bishop Niranjan Sualsingh of Sambalpur told Matters India May 25.
As part of the project, the academy on May 24 organized a two-hour webinar for priests, nuns, Brothers, and lay people on how to follow daily pandemic protocol behaviors.
Around 45 people attended the first virtual conference on professional medical guidance on Covid-19 conducted by Doctor Bobby Joseph, head of the Department of Community Health at St John’s Medical College, Bengaluru.
Doctor Joseph explained how the virus spread and suggested ways to identify its symptoms. He also dealt with steps needed for maintaining mental health among the affected and their families and how to care and protect children from the virus. He also stressed precautionary measures to avoid infection and home isolation for the infected, the urgency of treatment and post vaccination care.
Doctor Joseph said he would guide the Church people in Sambalpur through WhatsApp, telephone and email. “Those with symptoms of Covid virus can seek my advice,” he added.

India’s sex-selective abortion holocaust astronomically eclipses COVID-19 fatalities, with up to 22 million female babies estimated to have been massacred in the last three decades, according to a new study in The Lancet.
Writing in the world’s most prestigious medical journal, seven Indian researchers posit “a total of between 13.5 million and 22.1 million missing female births from 1987 to 2016” due to sex-selective abortion — a consequence of “daughter aversion.”
India accounts for half of the world’s suppressed female births. The trend “conti-nues to increase” and “should be a cause for serious alarm,” the Lancet editorial noted.
“This ongoing slaughter of unborn baby girls dwarfs the number of recent COVID-19 deaths. It is a human tragedy of enormous proportions that will haunt India for generations,” social scientist Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute (PRI) told Church Militant.
“Since 1990, approximately 15.8 million women have gone ‘missing’ from annual birth cohorts,” a 2019 PRI report revealed. “We at PRI are confident that our number of 15.8 million missing girls in India is close to the mark,” Mosher said.
India conducted 12.7 million sex-selective abortions between 2000 and 2014, according to Mosher’s 65-page report, which lamented, “Since 2014, approximately 550,000 girls go ‘missing’ from the birth cohorts every year due to the practice of sex-selective abortion and other forms of prenatal sex selection.”
This ongoing slaughter of unborn baby girls dwarfs the number of recent COVID-19 deaths. It is a human tragedy of enormous proportions that will haunt India for genera-tions.
Among other factors for daughter aver-sion, religious groups like Hindus display a higher preference for sons, who are valued for carrying out funeral rites for their parents (as most Hindus believe that a son must fulfill this role).
PRI reported that Hindu women are, therefore, “significantly more likely than non-Hindu women to resort to abortion.” Church Militant asked statistician and mathematician Dr Will Jones to put the abortion versus COVID-19 fatality figures in global perspective.
“Around 1.8 million people died world-wide with COVID-19 in 2020, according to the official tally. Yet this is eclipsed by the number of unborn children whose lives are ended by abortion each year — an estimated 73.3 million in 2019,” Jones explained.

Things are taking gory turns for India on multiple fronts. Even those who sympathize with Prime Minister Narendra Modi are upset with his decision-making style, which is centered only on the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).
Subramanian Swamy, an MP of Modi’s own Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), recently said Modi should leave the management of the worsening Covid-19 pandemic situation to a crisis management team instead of making decisions on his own.
“We need a serious crisis management team now instead of PMO psychos to monitor and strategize the response,” tweeted Swamy, a former federal minister and a person known for calling a spade a spade.
The suggestion come amid experts warning of a more virulent and destructive third wave of Covid-19 in India. The second wave is reportedly reaching its peak, killing close to 4,000 people a day and adding more than 400,000 cases daily.
With more than 20 million cases and thousands dying daily, the crisis has exposed India’s rickety healthcare system. Besides, political and administrative chaos and governmental indecisiveness have resulted in the collapse of the existing healthcare system amid an impending economic disaster.
Uddhav Thackeray, chief minister of Maharashtra, which is leading the tally with more than 4 million cases, said a third wave is “inevitable given the higher levels of circulating virus, but it is not clear on what time and scale this phase three will occur.”