More than 6,700 Catholic nuns are among those helping over a million people taking shelter in relief camps after unprecedented floods ravaged Kerala, a south-western Indian state. “This is the biggest rescue and relief operation the Catholic Church in Kerala has under-taken in its history,” says Fr George Vettikattil, who heads the church’s relief operations in the state.

The church deployed its personnel and opened its institutions across Kerala to help people after rains and massive floods devastated 13 of Kerala’s 14 districts from Aug. 15 through Aug. 20. The rain has stopped in many places and water is now receding.

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Aug. 24 told the media that the rains and floods have claimed 417 lives. At least 36 people are still missing. The floods initially displaced nearly 1.3 million people. About 869,000 people were still sheltered in 2,787 relief centres in the state, Vijayan said.

The initial estimated loss was around 200 billion rupees ($2.85 billion).

Vettikattil says all 32 Catholic dioceses in Kerala have joined relief works. As many as 69,821 young people and 99,705 lay volunteers joined 6,737 nuns, 2,891 priests and 354 seminarians to rescue stranded people with the help of government agencies and individually, the priest told Global Sisters Report.

The state also has 2,178 religious priests and 447 brothers who have also joined in helping the flood affected.

“We have formed separate groups comprising priests, nuns and brothers to clean the mud from houses of people living in relief camps,” Sister Modesta, who is a member of the Congregation of Teresian Carmelites, told GSR. “They leave in the morning and work until evening,” she added.

Fishermen in India’s Kerala State are being hailed as heroes for using their traditional wooden boats to rescue men, women and children from swirling flood-waters. “You are like our God,” a woman with folded hands told fishermen who saved her along with another female villager and 30 youngsters trapped in a children’s home in Alappuzha district, an area laced with waterways.

The fishermen, mostly Catholics and Muslims on the Arabian Sea coast, formed their own voluntary rescue service during flash flooding from Aug. 15-18.

While some people were just temporarily isolated by deluges, the lives of others were in serious peril as rising floodwaters submerged homes.

A team led by Raju Thomas from Trivandrum Archdiocese, some 200 kilometers away, carried their boats on lorries to the disaster area in central Kerala.

“We could not see the children’s home,” he said. “We found them after we heard the children screaming.”

Christians in India are marking the 10th anniversary of the brutal violence that Christians of eastern India’s Odisha State faced in 2008, with a Mass in the state capital , Bhubaneswar, on August 25.

Archbishop John Barwa together with the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) are celebrating the 10th anniversary Mass at St Joseph Convent School of Bhubaneswar on the theme, “Reconciliation, Thanksgiving and Grace.”

The anniversary day is dubbed as Kandhamal Day, as most of the violence was perpetrated in the State’s Kandhamal District that comes under the jurisdiction of Cuttack Bhubaneshwar Archdiocese.

However, Arch. Barwa said that many will not be able to come for the Mass in Bhubaneswar on August 25 because of the distance and the current rainy season. But the day will be marked locally at various different levels.

The archbishop told Vatican News that 3 days after the 10th anniversary, Christians are organizing a demonstration to press for their demands.

On August 28 Christians plan to hold a public rally in Phulbani during which they intend to hand a memorandum to the state chief minister Naveen Patnaik, to demand justice and compensation that many victims and their families have been waiting for 10 years now.

But more than all these external manifestations, the archbishop said, Christians are relying on prayers.

It was under late Archbishop Raphael Cheenath that the August 2008 anti-Christian violence flared up in Kandhamal. Archbishop Barwa who took over in February 2011 noted that in the past 10 years the life of the Church in Odisha and Kandhamal has grown and enriched enormously.

“True joy, much akin to a child-like feeling of bliss can only be experienced when we put our faith and trust in God,” said Brian Lobo, a Catholic top manager in Mumbai. AsiaNews spoke to him and his wife Ninette about the World Meeting of Families that opens today in Dublin, Ireland. The couple talked about their experience as Catholic parents and discussed the challenges that families currently face, not only in India but also around the world.

“Our faith has proven pivotal for us as a family and allowed us to accept the cross regardless of its weight and the burden it carries, to take joy not just in the circumstance but take refuge in His plan and design of the cross we carry,” Brian said.

He is the executive vice president and head of Corporate Affairs with one of India’s largest financial services firms with more than 10,000 employees. He is also involved in the pro-life movement in the Archdiocese of Mumbai and has built a tomb dedicated to unborn children.

Ninette has a degree in microbiology but gave up her career to dedicate herself to the family. She heads the Archdiocesan Commission for Human Life (DHLC) and last year represented India at a Bioethics Conference in Thailand. The couple have three children: a boy, Alston (the eldest), and twin daughters Desiree and Danielle. All three live and work abroad.

President Ram Nath Kovind on August 9 lavished praise on the Christian community in Kerala, saying it was a symbol of India’s non-negotiable commit-ment to diversity and pluralism. Inaugurating the centenary celebrations of St Thomas College, Kovind said the community’s heritage and history was a matter of “immense pride” for the country.

“The Christian community in Kerala is one of the oldest not only in India but anywhere else in the world. Its heritage and history are a matter of immense pride for the entire country – and a symbol of India’s non-negotiable commitment to its diversity and pluralism,” Kovind said.

Kovind said the real value of education lies in how we learn to help fellow human beings and not in degrees. The greatest service to God is to help another person, to heal another person and to spread the light of knowledge and St Thomas College has been part of this noble culture.

Last year during his visit to Ethiopia, President said he was moved as people there remember-ed the services of Indian teachers, many of them from Kerala and from the commu-nity, who had educated generations of Ethiopian children. The college is the alma mater of two former Kerala chief ministers — EMS Namboodiripad and C Achutha Menon. Spiritual leader Swami Chinmayananda was once a student here, Kovind said.

All nine Catholic bishops of India’s north-eastern Jharkhand State have sought federal intervention to stop Christians being treated like terrorists as part of alleged state government harassment.

The bishops told governor Draupadi Murmu, who is the representative of the Indian president, that the state government led by the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had used its Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) to probe Christian institutions.

On July 30, three days after meeting Murmu, they also sent a memorandum to federal Home Minister Rajnath Singh seeking his assistance on the issue.

“We are now treated as terrorists and officials of the ATS are after us as if we are involved in terrorist activities,” Auxiliary Bishop Telesphore Bilung of Ranchi, who organized the meeting, told ucanews.com.

He said for the past few months, police had been arresting church people on trumped-up charges and investigators had raided Christian groups in “clear state-sponsored harassment.”

In some cases, the ATS served notices on Christian institutions ordering them to produce financial details within 24-hours, the bishop said.

In a ceremony lasting over two hours, Archbishop Felix Toppo was installed as the new Archbishop of Ranchi in St Mary’s Cathedral. Ranchi is the capital of the eastern Indian State of Jharkhand.

The state has a large proportion of India’s marginalized tribal people, who exist outside of Hinduism’s traditional caste system, and many of them become Christian – Jharkhand has a Christian population of over 4% double the national average.

A nine-year-old girl from an Indian family that had recently converted to Christianity was gang-raped and murdered on Sunday, 5 August, in Punjab State. Anjali Masih was playing with her friends in the city of Gurdaspur, near the Pakistan border, when a group of men lured her away by showing her a guava.

She was then gang-raped and strangled with a telephone wire.

Local Christians told World Watch Monitor that there has been a rise in anti-Christian feeling in the area, which is predominantly Hindu and Sikh, since a number of families converted to Christianity.

One Christian, who did not wish to be named, suggested the brutal attack could have been carried out by people wanting to discourage others from changing religions. India has seen a wave of anti-Christian violence in recent years, with a notable increase since Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP came to power in 2014.

Church leaders in the southern Indian State of Tamil Nadu have expressed condolences at the death of Muthuvel Karunanidhi, a five-time state chief minister who supported freedom of religion despite being an atheist.

Karunanidhi died on Aug. 7 of an age-related illness in a hospital in state capital Chennai. He was 94.

The self-proclaimed atheist politician “always had a soft corner for religious minorities and especially for Christians whether in power or not,” said Father Vincent Chinnadurai, former chairman of the state’s Minorities Commission.

The church in Tamil Nadu has lost a friend and a well-wisher, the priest said about the leader of the powerful Dravidian political movement in the state over six decades.

During his last term as chief minister from 2006-11, Karunanidhi gave special reservations for low-caste Christians in education institutions and government jobs, Father Chinnadurai said.

“He really cared for the poor and came up with various schemes for helping poor and minority groups. He was a real champion of social justice,” the prelate added.