Revival of grant-in-aid to Christian minority schools, land for cemeteries and stringent action against those attacking Christians are in an eight-point charter of demands that the Telangana State People’s Assembly on September 7 submitted to opposition parties in the southern Indian state. The assembly that met on September 4-7 in the state capital of Hyderabad also demanded that the state government allot necessary budgets to help Christians face problems from Coronavirus pandemic.
More than 3,000 people attended the webinar that heard eminent activists, academicians and legal luminaries address issues of social protection and welfare, rights of vulnerable sections such as minorities, women, transgenders, Aadivasis, Dalits, the disabled and children. The assembly approved the charter of demands presented by Montfort Brother Varghese Theckanath, director of Montfort Social Institute in Hyderabad. Brother Theckanath, one of the organizers, told Matters India that a delegation from the assembly presented the charter to the opposition parties so that they can take them up in the state legislative assembly sessions that began on September 7.
He said the charter stressed democratic rights and the state’s responsibility.

Cardinal Baselios Cleemis, head of the Syro-Malankara Church, has come to the aid of the Jacobite faction of the Syrian Orthodox Church that has lost its places of worship in a legal battle.
“With great joy, we are offering you the Syro-Malankara places of worship to conduct services until you have made your own alternative arrangements,” says a letter from the cardinal addressed to Joseph Mar Gregorious Metropolitan, the metropolitan trustee of the Malankara Jacobite Syrian Church.
The August 24 letter began by expressing the Catholic Church’s respect and love for the Jacobite Church, its leaders and the faithful.
“We are painfully aware of the recent anguish the Malankara Jacobite Church. We also pray for the Church before the Lord,” Cardinal Cleemis says.
The Jacobites’ decades-old feud with the Syrian Orthodox faction reached the climax on August 17 when the Kerala government took over the Jacobites’ mother church, the ancient Cathedral in Mulanthuruthy near Kochi, Kerala’s commercial capital.
The Mulanthuruthy Church, built in 1200, has been managed by Jacobite faction, but the Supreme Court verdict of July 3, 2017, gave its ownership to the Orthodox Church. The church is a fine example of Gothic architecture. The carvings, sculptures, symbolic icons and wall paintings, are a blend of Indian, West-Asian and European architecture. Most parishioners belong to the Jacobite faction.
The takeover was part of implementing a 2017 Supreme Court order that granted possession of more than 1,100 Jacobite churches to their rival.

Jesuit Father P D Mathew, the first Catholic priest to become a lawyer in India, has recently celebrated the golden jubilee of his religious life as a Jesuit. His is an inspiring story of empowering thousands of our citizens through his mission of legal aid.
Father Mathew says a short stay with a group of bonded labourers in early 1960s made a drastic change in his life. During his training to become a Jesuit priest, his superiors had asked him to study chemistry so that he could become a teacher in their college in Ahmedabad, the commercial capital of Gujarat.
But the stay with the tribals in the Bharuch district of Gujarat during 1962-1965, helped him realize the way they were oppressed by powerful people. “Their cries for human rights and justice challenged me as a priest to respond to them in an effective way,” the lawyer priest recalled.
According to him, becoming a lawyer as “a vocation with his choice vocation” where his main mission was to listen to the plight of the simple and suffering people.
“It was in that situation that I first thought of studying law in order to liberate them from the bonded system prevalent at that time in Gujarat. My later studies in social work at the M S University, Baroda, (passed with distinction and gold medal) also inspired me to take up the legal profession as a means of liberating the oppressed people.”
Father Mathew says not all supported his idea of becoming a lawyer. His Jesuit superiors and companions considered law as a “lier’s profession” of those exploiting the poor litigants, who helplessly seek justice through courts. “As a result, no priest in India ever thought of studying civil laws to take up the legal profession as a mission to serve the poor,” he explained. “Consequently I struggled a lot to get permission from my superiors to acquire a degree in law. After a year-long dialogue with my superiors… I got the LL.B. degree with distinction and gold medal which prompted the university authorities to ask me to continue my law studies to take an LL.M. degree and to teach in the Law Faculty of the University.”

The first Catholic medical facility in India fully equipped to serve Covid-19 patients has been inaugu-rated in Bengaluru in Karnataka State.
The Covid care centre at St John’s Medical College, which has 48 isolation beds, a 24-bed intensive treat-ment unit (ITU) and a 24-bed intensive care unit (ICU), was blessed and inaugurated by Archbishop Peter Machado of Bangalore on Aug. 17.
“The Church is always at the fore-front to help the poor and the needy, whether in the education or health fields, and it is an opportunity to give our selfless service to our society and nation,” Archbishop Machado told UCA News.
“Our hospital has taken a leading step to provide healthcare to people during these crucial times. It is a first in the country and I salute and thank people who made this possible.”
He said the medical college has given free treatment worth over 5 million rupees (US$67,000) in the last five months in tackling pandemic cases.
By the end of July, it had screened more than 5,000 fever patients, 2,000 patients in the emergency department, treated more than 600 patients on the wards and taken care of some 500 critically ill patients in the ICU.

The Syro-Malabar Church ended its 28th Synod calling upon its people to help the nation increase its productivity and encourage agricultural and industrial activities.
As many as 61 bishops from around the world attended the August 19-21 Synod held through videoconference because of the health regulations to control the coronavirus pandemic. The second Synod of the year Synod addressed the Church’s commitment to the poor at time of the Coronavirus pandemic. The Syro-Malabar Church, the larger of India’s two Oriental Catholic rites, has spent some US$ 7.3 million to help the poor since the country imposed a nationwide lockdown on the midnight of March 24.
The bishops urged their faithful to cooperate with the authorities to help society’s poorest, irrespective of caste or creed. The Synod’s first session was held on January 7 to 15 at Mount Thomas, the Church’s headquarters at Kakkanad, a Kochi suburb. The Church has total 64 bishops heading dioceses all over the world.

Portuguese India during the 16th century – that is, the colonial enclaves of Goa, Bassein, Cochin and the Pearl Fishery Coast – was blessed with the presence of the Jesuits. They built monumental churches, colleges and residences.
The Portuguese Jesuits lavishly decorated these buildings with paintings, statues and church furnishings, and they commissioned numerous artists, painters, builders and sculptors.
Indeed, the Jesuit Church was designed to represent a particular image of Catholicism in the East: a triumphant Church.
Most of these artists were Hindus. They created ivory and wooden statues and furnishings in a subtle hybrid style, merging the late Renaissance influence of Europe and elements of local Hindu temple art.
While the pictures of Mary, the saints and the angels were derived from Italian and Iberian originals, most of them were usually adapted to Indian sensibilities.
One example of such hybrid art can be found in the courts of the great Moghuls – Akbar, Jehangir and Shah Jehan. They were the result of the early Jesuit missions to the Moghul court in Fatehpur Sikri, near Agra.

Two members of a neo-Christian sect were allegedly beaten a Hindu radical group when they prayed over a sick person in a village near Chatra town in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, Persecution Relief reported August 26.

One Lakhan, a member of the Gospel Echoing Missionary Society (GEMS), on August 22 took preachers Sanjeet and Siddharth to Kharik, a village around 7 km from Chatra, to pray for his relative Ramdev, who has been sick for one and half years.

When the two missionaries were praying for Ramdev and his family, a group of Bajrang Dal members came 11 am and took them out.

The Hindu radicals then started beating the two Christian preachers with sticks and kicked them.

Sanjeet was injured in his head, back, hands, and legs. Siddharth’s left hand and thigh too sustained injuries. Sanjeet now has difficulty in hearing.

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.