Editorial

What defines Spiritual Authority?

The Catholic Church is facing a crisis of moral leadership. We have innumerable holy and upright priests, bishops and religious men and women in the Church. But a few rotten apples are enough to create a crisis. It will pass away. Socrates distinguished himself as the “inventor of morality,” wrote Hegel. By way of inventing […]

The Monster of Lynching Mob

Mob lynching has taken on monstrous proportions. The epics both of India and outside speak of monsters. The Oedipus tragedy of Sophocles tells of a sphinx that kills people in Thebes who fail to answer a question: “What is it that walks on four legs in the morning two legs at noon and three legs […]

Disaster Creating Communion

The flood in August of this year was the second that devastated my home. Flood waters inundated, bringing along with it stench of putrefied carcasses and decayed debris. When my home got submerged in 1961 by overflowing Periyar, I knew how to swim and to row a boat or a raft. I collapsed in the […]

For whom the Bell Tolls?

On August 01, 2018, the honourable Supreme Court of India described the back-to-back sex scandals involving Catholic priests as a ‘disturbing trend.’ A bench of the country’s top court expressed its disappointment with the cases of sexual assault emerging from one of the country’s most respectable churches. Jose’ Saramago, the writer, who secured a Nobel […]

The Fundamental Symbol of being-for

The presence of Christ in the Eucharist is conceived not as substance, but as ‘ad-esse.’ Louis-Marie Chauvet, professor of sacramental theology at the Institut Catholique in Paris sees not as the sacrament as an objective instrument for the production of grace but an instrument of transmission in the sense of a revelatory sign of God. […]

Holy Language is Missing

Public spectacle of mob lynching of unfortunate human beings for reasons of child–snatching or cow-stealing and crowds watching curiously, but with astounding patience, and taking videos, as if a beautiful tableau passes by – artistic! – have become disturbingly common. It is like a banquet in the midst of a plague. Moral shudder has disappeared, […]

Aspiration to a Just Society

Emmanuel Levinas wrote: “the aspiration to a just society… is an eminently religious action.” The Old Testament clearly equates holiness with Justice. The prophetic books repeatedly speak of the divine call of Justice, because Judaism is a religion of divine call and promise. Where are you? To which Abraham, Jacob, Moses and others all respond, […]

Christianity in Secularity

Today, religion is no guarantee for the safety of human culture; it is a place where civilization and its partner, barbarism, are highly visible and fundamentally questionable. In the West such religiosity is dead. With religion unhappiness, unrest, become mighty in the world. The cross of Constantine was a sign of conquest (in hoc signo […]

Indian bishops slam terror attack on tourists in India’s Kashmir

No action taken against police who assaulted Catholic priests in India