The Catholic Church in India cannot become directly involved in politics, but it can help guide its members to make politically mature judgments, says Cardinal Baselios Cleemis, president of the country’s Catholic bishops’ conference.
He said hate-mongering political ideologies and crimes that target Christians in India are best countered when Christians live out their faith heroically. The cardinal, 58, said a minority of Hindus are aggressively opposed to other religious communities. “They take aggressive steps to curtail the freedom of other religions. That is something very, very alarming,” said Cardinal Cleemis of the eastern rite Syro-Malankara Church.
Christian leaders have accused hardline Hindu groups of targeting Christians after the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014 in a landslide victory. These groups, who consider BJP their political wing, took the electoral victory as a mandate to accelerate turning India, which under the constitution is secular, into a Hindu nation. Christians, who make up only 2.3 percent of India’s 1.2 billion population, cannot change the development, the cardinal said.
