As fear and confusion persist about burying Covid-19 victims in some parts of India, the Kerala-based Syro-Malabar Church has formed squads to give a dignified burial to people dying from the pandemic.
As Covid-19 began to claim lives in the southern Indian state, several burials led to disputes as ill-informed villagers opposed burials, fearing the spread of the disease from buried bodies. Confusion about safety, non-availability of undertakers and an inability to dig graves 10 feet deep as per government norms often resulted in Catholics not having a Christian burial.
The Church has asked all its dioceses to form burial squads — if needed, in parishes too — to help Covid-19 victims “get a decent and dignified burial.”
The volunteers are trained to handle bodies as per Covid-19 protocols to ensure that “we follow government guidelines strictly,” he said.
With a population of some 33 million, Kerala has added close to 1,000 new cases each day of the last fortnight. The first Indian state to report Covid-19 in January, it had reported 63 deaths and some 20,000 cases as of July 28.
Cases have been increasing across the country. India had reported 1.4 million cases and 33,000 deaths as of July 28, making it the most affected country after the US and Brazil.

The Indian government has released an ambitious education policy aiming to transform the country’s learning system to match global standards, gene-rating mixed reactions from church officials.
The federal cabinet approved the National Education Policy 2020 on July 29, replacing a 34-year policy.
The policy was in the making for more than six years and the first draft was released in 2016. The process to formulate a new policy was accelerated soon after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pro-Hindu party came to power in 2014.
Officials of the Catholic Church, which claims to be managing the largest network of educational institutions in the country after the government, were reserved in their comments, saying they need time to study the policy in depth.

A funeral pyre in a Catholic cemetery is usually unimaginable in India, where Christians prefer burial to dispose of the bodies of their community members.
Contrary to this belief and centuries-old practice, a Catholic diocese in southern India has decided to cremate Covid-19 victims in parish cemeteries, indirectly adopting a Hindu way of disposing of the bodies of the dead. Thresiamma Sebastian, 62, a parishioner of St Augustine Church in Mararikulum village in the Diocese of Alleppey in Kerala State, became the first local Catholic to have a dignified cremation in a parish cemetery. The parish priest and Catholic volunteers, helped by an outsourcing agency, prepared her funeral pyre with firewood and placed her body on it in the July 27 cremation. Health officials monitored the entire process. Her body was reduced to ashes within two hours and her ashes were collected in an earthen pot and buried in her family tomb in the presence of one of her family members on the same day.
The Latin-rite Diocese of Alleppey is mostly based on the coast and most of its parishes face the same situation.

Two women were raped and killed among six Christians murdered for their faith in India in the first half of this year, according to a newly released report.
Three others — two Christian women and a 10-year-old girl — were raped for their refusal to give up their new faith, said the half-yearly report released on July 28 by Persecution Relief, a Christian group.
Persecution Relief, an ecumenical body that records Christians’ persecution in India, said its data shows “a very grim picture” of religious freedom in Hindu-majority India. “Hate crimes against Christians in India have risen by an alarming 40.87 percent despite a nationwide lockdown in place since March 25 in the country,” the report stated.
Between January and June, India witnessed 293 cases of hate crimes against Christians, including five rapes and six murders.
“Persecution against Christians has become very common,” said Shibu Thomas, who founded Persecution Relief, which assists Christians in distress, especially widows and orphans of those killed for their faith.

Church and political leaders in India’s southern State of Karnataka have expressed dismay over the state removing chapters on Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad from the school syllabus. The state run by the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has also removed chapters on prominent leaders like Tipu Sultan and Hyder Ali who once ruled the state.
“It is very sad to know that our children who are the future of this country will miss important subjects such as Christianity and Islam and their contribution to building brotherhood among all humanity,” Archbishop Peter Machado of Bangalore told.
“India is known for unity in diversity around the world. The respect and communal harmony among us is the best example in this world and if that subject in disturbed we will lose the secular India which we all are proud of.
“What India can give to this world is the uniqueness of our communal harmony, but depriving our children of this subject is an injustice to our children. We should teach them about brotherhood and communal harmony, which all religions teach.”
Archbishop Machado said the government is interfering with the constitution’s secular values and urged the state government “to take its decision back, if possible.”

Catholic dioceses in northern India plan to set up centres to help migrant labourers.
This was decided on August 7 during a virtual meeting organized by the Commission for Migrants under the Regional Bishops’ Council of the North (RBCN) in collaboration with its counterpart under the Conference of Catholic Bishops’ of India (CCBI).
The diocesan migrant resource centres along with helpline services to migrant workers will be prepared in collaboration with various CCBI commissions and coordinated by the conference’s secretariat based in Bengaluru.
The various commissions of CCBI will prepare a concept note on data collection, besides setting up the centres and launching helpline services to migrant workers.
The purpose of the centre is to collect data on migrants and make its services accessible and available to them. The concept note prepared at the online meeting has specified the quality of the data.
Other plans include engaging the migrants into mainstream society and encourage them to join the Church’s spiritual and welfare programs. It will also link them with the Church’s educational and healthcare insti-tutions that would accommodate and serve the migrants.
The migrant commission is to network with dioceses, reli-gious congregations, lay associa-tions and government for an integrated approach.

Police in Kerala have registered a case against Bishop Remigiose Inchananiyil of Thamarassery for breaking coronavirus restrictions.

The Syro-Malabar prelate is among 40 people charged by the police for participating in a protest at the Forest Range Office in Thamarassery, near Kozhiko-de, a town in northern Kerala.

A collective of 15 farmer organizations under the banner of the Karshika Purogamana Samiti (KPS, Forum for the advancement of agriculture) staged a fast at Sulthan Bathery on June 25, raising a series of demands including effective steps to tackle the increasing wildlife attacks in the district.

Bishop Inchananiyil, who opened the protest, said that wildlife attacks had increased considerably in Kerala over the past decade, especially in hilly areas such as Wayanad.

Though a tribal youth was mauled to death by a tiger at Pulpally in Wayanad, the Forest department officials could not capture the animal, the bishop said. He said that successive governments in Kerala had not taken any steps to address the issue. The collective protest by the farming community against the escalating wildlife attacks was the need of the hour, he added.

The protesters demanded that the administration capture the man-eater, adopt scientific steps to divide forest areas and human habitations, amend Forest Acts, erect of hanging fences on the fringes of forests to curb man-animal conflicts, and increase the compensation for crop losses suffered in wildlife raids.

Bishop Franco Mulakkal of India’s Jalandhar Diocese, who is facing trial on charges of raping a Catholic nun, has appealed to the country’s top court to clear him, pleading innocence after two lower courts rejected a similar petition.

The Supreme Court of India registered Bishop Mulakkal’s discharge plea on July 24 and agreed to hear him, according to court records published on its website. However, the court has not given a date to hear the case.

Lawyers connected with the case told UCA News that the 56-year-old bishop moved the top court after the High Court in Kerala State dismissed his dis-charge plea on July 7.

His appeal in the High Court came after a district court in Kottayam in Kerala dismissed a similar plea on March 16.

Bishop Mulakkal’s applica-tion pleaded innocence. It said a 43-year-old nun, former superior general of the Missionaries of Jesus, a diocesan congregation under his patronage, complained against him with malafide inten-tion following his differences with her.

The nun, based in Kerala, filed a police complaint in June 2018 accusing the bishop of raping her 13 times from 2014-16. The crimes happened when the Bishop, based in northern India, visited her convent in the southern state.

The Supreme Court did not give the Bishop any immediate relief as both the prosecution and the petitioner nun had moved separate caveats before the Supre-me Court pleaded not to decide on the case without hearing them.

The faithful of the Syro-Malabar rite now have a basilica for worship. The community coordinator, Fr Biju Muttathu-nnel, comments: “We are all celebrating, it is a great gift from the diocese and the Vatican.” An estimated 7 thousand faithful belonging to this rite live in the Italian capital and surrounding province: originating in Kerala (Southern India), they are now integrated within the Italian community.

According to Catholic tradi-tion, this Eastern rite church traces its origins to the preaching of St Thomas the Apostle on the subcontinent. For more than 25 years it was sui iuris, and there-fore has the right to erect its own communities where the faithful have emigrated.

There is a large presence of Syro-Malabarians in Chicago, Melbourne, Canada and the United Kingdom. In Europe the community has an apostolic Visitor, Msgr Stephen Chirappa-nath, who coordinates the com-munities of Zurich, Cologne, Frankfurt and Vienna.

A bishop of the Protestant Church of North India (CNI) has broken away and declared his diocese autonomous following differences with the church’s national administrative body. Bishop Basil B. Baskey of Chotanagpur Diocese in Jharkhand State was asked to go on leave soon after he announced the rebellious move.

The CNI synod, its top decision-making body, constituted a probe into the bishop’s move to decide what action to take.

“I have already declared the diocese as an autonomous church and have no link with the CNI to follow its order,” Bishop Baskey told UCA News on July 22.

The synod’s disciplinary action against him came on July 21, four days after the bishop declared his diocese independent of the mother church.

The synod has appointed Chotanagpur diocesan secretary pastor Joljas Kujur as diocesan administrator and formed a new committee to assist him until other arrangements are made for the management of the diocese.

Bp Baskey claimed to have the support of all the pastors ser-ving in the diocese’s 52 parishes.