Pope Francis on December 30 appointed an archbishop and three bishops in India. The Pope transferred Bishop Vincent Aind of Bagdogra, a diocese in West Bengal, to Jharkhand state as the new archbishop of Ranchi, the mother diocese of India’s tribal Church.
The two new bishops-elect are Father Peter Rumal Kharadi (photo) as the bishop of Jhabua in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and Father Bernard Lancy Pinto as the bishop of Aurangabad, another diocese in Maharashtra.
Kerala archdiocese’s Buon Natale presents 15,000 Christmas papas
The Archdiocese of Trichur together with the general public has organized the annual Buon Natale (Merry Christmas) presenting nearly 15,000 Santa Clauses, or Christmas Papas.
The colorful and joyful program showed Santa, irrespective of age, dancing, walking, roller skating and on wheelchairs. More than 500,000 people watched the procession that started from St Thomas Ground before returning to the same ground after four hours.
Nepal police arrest spiritual leader over rape charges
Nepal police said January 10 they had arrested a spiritual leader whose followers believe him to be a reincarnation of Buddha over allegations of disappearances and rape at his ashrams.
Ram Bahadur Bomjan, known as “Buddha Boy” among devotees, became famous as a teenager after followers said he could meditate motionless for months without water, food or sleep.
The 33-year-old guru has a devout following but has long been accused of physically and sexually assaulting his followers, and had been hiding from authorities for several years.
“He was arrested after absconding for several years,” police spokesman Kuber Kadayat told AFP.
Police apprehended Bomjan in Kathmandu on a warrant issued for his alleged rape of a minor at an ashram in Sarlahi, a district south of the capital.
They said he was caught with bundles of cash amounting to 30 million Nepali rupees ($225,000) and another $22,500 in foreign currency.
High hopes pinned on new Syro-Malabar leader
The election of Bishop Raphael Thattil as the Syro-Malabar Church leader has brought high hopes for its members, especially the Catholics in the troubled Ernakulam-Angamaly archdiocese.
“I am sure he will listen to the sane voices on the controversies concerning the Syro-Malabar Church,” says Capuchin Father Suresh Mathew, former editor of Indian Currents weekly who sees in the new major archbishop “a good shepherd with the smell of the sheep” as he was always seen with the people in the peripheries.
Father Mathew, a member of the Syro-Malabar Church now based in the northern Indian state of Punjab, says the new major archbishop’s success as an administrator will “depend on his capacity to accommodate diversities. His pastoral experience in the mission will be an added asset to him.”
Among those welcoming the new major archbishop are the Almaya Munnetam (laity front) and the Archdiocesan Protection Committee of the Ernakulam-Angamaly archdiocese.
“The faithful and priests of the Ernakulam-Angamaly archdiocese are looking forward to the new Major Archbishop with hope,” says Riju Kanjookaren, spokesperson of the laity front that is involved in the liturgical dispute, a vexing problem for the larger of the two Oriental Catholic rites in India.
A statement from the laity front sees “a pointer to the future” in the new major archbishop’s opening statement that the Church is not only for bishops, but for everyone – the faithful, priests and the religious.
“The entire Ernakulam-Angamaly archdiocese listened with great hope to the new leader’s explanation that synodality is walking with and listening to the faithful and priests. “We also felt assured when he said he would continue to be the same priest and the bishop we are familiar with,” the statement added.
Therefore, the laity front expects the new leader to resolve the problems in the archdiocese, as a first priority after his installation on January 11.
Activists, women hail Supreme Court verdict in Bilkis Bano case
A sense of joy and hope spread across activists and women groups in India January 8 after the Supreme Court set aside the Gujarat government’s premature release of 11 convicted in a gangrape case.
The apex court termed the Gujarat government order a “fraud act” and asked the convicts to surrender in two weeks and return to jail.
“The verdict brings to the entire nation a silver line of hope in the judiciary. People’s trust in the judiciary increased,” says Sister Jessy Kurian, a lawyer who was present when the apex court pronounced its decision.
Sounding the same sentiments, Teesta Setalvad, secretary of the Citizens for Justice and Peace that works for the victims of 2002 Gujarat riots, says the apex court has “re-validated the ordinary citizens’ faith in its commitment to the rule of law, the Indian Constitution.”
She noted that the court quashed the Gujarat government’s “brazen conduct” in passing the remission orders, set aside the Gujarat High Court judgement that endorsed the government decision and turned down the federal home ministry’s role in allowing convicts to walk free.
Indian priest arrested under anti-conversion laws released from jail
Almost three months after his arrest, a Catholic priest in northern India charged under the country’s controversial anti-conversion laws after a complaint from a member of a Hindu nationalist organization has been granted bail and is set for release.
Father Sebastian “Babu” Francis, director of social work of Allahabad diocese in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, had been taken into police custody Oct. 2.
On Oct. 1, a local leader of the right-wing BJP party of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with a group of supporters, reportedly had barged into a Pentecostal prayer service falsely accusing the pastor of religious conversion. When police arrived on the scene, they also detained the pastor’s brother, who is a Catholic and who is employed with the diocesan social work department.
Eventually four members of the family were arrested, and, when they phoned Francis for help, the 56-year-old too was taken into custody.
Bishop Gerald Mathias of Lucknow, the capital city of Uttar Pradesh, told Crux at the time that the arrests amount to “sheer harassment of Christians.”
Church services in the forest and help for refugees: Priests are close to the people
Two years of civil war, which has gradually intensified, have shaped the face and pastoral approach of priests, consecrated persons, catechists and pastoral workers in many dioceses of Myanmar, especially in the areas most affected by the conflict between the army and the People’s Defense Forces rebel groups, which have joined forces with the ethnic militias that have traditionally been active in Myanmar’s border areas. The social situation was characterized by the presence of massive flows of internally displaced persons: people forced to leave their homes to find refuge in the forests, far from violence, where they began to struggle to support themselves; or families seeking refuge in makeshift refugee camps – set up as best they can, sometimes by Catholic parishes. In order – in the words of Pope Francis – to “smell like sheep”, to be close to people and to share with them the needs and sufferings of daily life, priests, religious and catechists also temporarily leave their churches (for long periods or sometimes permanently) to go to places where the displaced people live under precarious conditions in barracks, huts or tents. A striking example is the Diocese of Loikaw, whose territory extends over the state of Kayah (eastern Myanmar), where the civil war is ongoing. Here even Bishop Celso Ba Shwe was expelled from the cathedral, which was first attacked and then occupied by the Burmese army, which made it their base camp. As confirmed to Fides, the Bishop lived a “Christmas among refugees”, traveling to the different areas and parishes of the diocese, celebrating the sacraments, visiting refugee camps, blessing and consoling families tormented by war and misery. “The Lord has given me a period of forced travel,” says the Bishop. “Despite the pain of having to leave the cathedral, all the goods and documents of our local Church – we do not know what we will find when all this is over – I welcome this grace with an open heart. The Lord allows me to meet so many people, to be closer to people than ever before, to listen and to comfort.”
Amid row over same-sex blessings, Pope laments ‘splitting into groups’ in the Church
Pope Francis on the feast of the Epiphany lamented the sharp division among Catholics of differing views, saying believers must imitate the three wise men in putting God at the centre of their lives, rather than their own ideas of the faith.
Speaking to attendees of his Jan. 6 Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, the pope said that as members of the church, “instead of splitting into groups based on our own ideas, we are called to put God back at the center.”
“We need to abandon ecclesial ideologies to find the meaning of holy mother church, the ecclesial attitude. Ecclesial ideologies no, ecclesial vocation yes,” he said, saying, “The Lord, not our own ideas or our own projects,” must be the focus.
“Let us set out anew from God; let us seek from him the courage not to lose heart in the face of difficulties, the strength to surmount all obstacles, the joy to live in harmonious communion,” he said.Focusing on three aspects of the biblical narrative of the Magi, Francis noted that they are described as having their “eyes are raised to the heavens.”
Martin Scorsese says new Jesus film aims to ‘take away the negatives’ of organised religion
Adaptation of book by Shûsaku Endô, who wrote the source novel for 2016’s Silence, is understood to be set mostly in the present day
Martin Scorsese is to follow up his triumphant true-crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon with an 80-minute film about Jesus designed to “take away the negative[s] … associated with organised religion”.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Scorsese explained the thinking behind the project, an adaptation of A Life of Jesus by writer Shûsaku Endô (a Japanese Catholic whose 1966 novel Silence was previously adapted by Scorsese). Scorsese said he and his writing collaborator Kent Jones had finished the screenplay and were “swimming in inspiration” for a film reportedly set largely in the present day that “focus[es] on Jesus’s core teachings in a way that explores the principles but doesn’t proselytise”.
Scorsese said: “I’m trying to find a new way to make it more accessible and take away the negative onus of what has been associated with organised religion.”
The director, 81, added: “Right now, ‘religion’, you say that word and everyone is up in arms because it’s failed in so many ways. But that doesn’t mean necessarily that the initial impulse was wrong. Let’s get back. Let’s just think about it. You may reject it. But it might make a difference in how you live your life – even in rejecting it. Don’t dismiss it offhand. That’s all I’m talking about.”
Scorsese said he was preparing to shoot the film in 2024, having been inspired to begin work on it after meeting Pope Francis in 2023 and participating in a conference title The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination, organised by Jesuit publication La Civiltà Cattolica. At the time Scorsese told the press: “I have responded to the pope’s appeal to artists in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus.”
Scorsese has a significant track record with films with overt religious themes. His 1988 adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ triggered worldwide controversy and protests for its depiction of an alternative timeline for Jesus’s life, while Silence, released in 2016, portrayed the struggles of Jesuit priests persecuted for their religion in 17th-century Japan. In 1997 Scorsese also released Kundun, a biographical film about the Dalai Lama.
Top Ukraine prelate says Vat doc on same-sex blessings applies only to Latin church
Amid a broad spectrum of reactions unleashed by Fiducia Supplicans, a new Vatican document permitting non-liturgical blessings of same-sex couples, Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church has become the first eastern communion to declare explicitly that the document does not apply outside the Latin Church.
“On the basis of canon. 1492 of the CCCC this Declaration concerns purely the Latin Church and has no legal force for the faithful of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church,” said Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Church, in a Dec. 22 statement.
Shevchuk was referring to a provision of the Code of Canons for the Eastern Churches, which states: “Laws enacted by the supreme authority of the Church, in which the passive subject is not expressly indicated, affect only the Christian faithful of the Eastern Churches insofar as they treat matters of faith or morals or declarations of divine law, or these Christian faithful are explicitly included in these laws, or they grant a favour which contains nothing contrary to the Eastern rites.”