Vatican urged to raise India’s anti-Christian violence in talks

Vatican’s Secretary for Re-lations with States, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, met with India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar amid calls to make increasing attacks against Chri-stians a bilateral discussion point. Gallagher, on a week-long visit to India, met Jaishankar in New Delhi on July 17, the third day after arriving, following some church functions and meetings with church officials. Jaishankar, in a social media post, said he was “pleased” to meet the Vatican official. It was “a good conver-sation about the importance of faith, and the need for dialogue and diplomacy to address conflicts,” the post said. Neither the Vatican nor India issued any public statements on the issues the officials discussed. Church officials in India also refused to comment on the “conflicts” Jaishankar mentioned in his post.
However, the archbishop was asked to take up the increasing Hindu attacks against Christians in bilateral dialogues with Indian officials in a memorandum that an ecumenical Christian group submitted. The violence against Christians “should be taken up in bilateral human rights dialogues with India, specifically highligh-ting the targeted use of anti-con-version laws on religious minori-ties,” said the memorandum United Christian Forum (UCF) submitted to Gallagher. The Vatican’s engagement should not be limited to the federal govern-ment but also include state govern-ments that “aggressively enforce” anti-conversion laws, it said.
Archbishop Anil Joseph Couto of Delhi submitted the memora-ndum on behalf of the group during a meeting with Gallagher at the Vatican Nunciature in New Delhi on July 17. The memoran-dum wanted the Vatican to issue official statements “condemning the rising incidents of violence and systemic discrimination against Christians in India.”
It also wanted the Vatican to take steps to “ensure judicial transparency” in trials under anti-conversion laws and to have “monitoring and fact-finding missions” to assess ground realities, particularly in states witnessing recurring violence. “Anti-Christian violence has been consistently increasing,” A. C. Michael, convenor of the ecumenical forum, told UCA News, pointing to the numbers in the memorandum. The forum, which documents violence targeted at Christians in the country, recorded 834 incidents in 2024, from 734 incidents in 2023.