2023 sees Indian Church make news for the wrong reasons

The year 2023 has put the Indian Church on the global map for all the wrong reasons — sectarian violence, persecution, clerical abuse, financial irregularities, and a dispute over the liturgy.

The ongoing sporadic violence in northeastern Manipur, where an unprecedented ethnic riot began on May 3 and claimed some 200 lives, stands out as a case of hostility against Christians.

The violence has displaced more than 50,000, mostly Christian Kuki tribal people, who continue to languish in state-run relief camps as they lost their houses and belongings.

They have practically been crippled after Church institutions, their strong pillar of support, were unable to back them owing to the unmindful violence.

Churches and Church-run institutions, including schools, social work centers and seminaries, were razed either with bulldozers or by fire.

Christians who make up 41.29 percent of the 3.2 million people in the tiny hilly state are from indigenous communities. The violence against them will remain as an indelible mark of “utter helplessness” as their women were paraded naked and gang-raped among other grave crimes under the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rule.

The state continues to be in a state of lawlessness and nobody knows when normalcy will be restored.

The steady rise in persecution

Persecution against Christians has broken all previous records this year to become a pan-India phenomenon. Every day at least two incidents of persecution against Christians have been reported.

This year from January to November, 687 cases of persecution against Christians have been reported, which is the highest since 2014 when the BJP under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power.

The United Christian Forum (UCF), a Delhi-based ecumenical body that tracks persecution against Christians, in its latest report said that out of 687 incidents, the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh with 200 million people, the highest in any state, has recorded 287 incidents where Christians make up a mere 0.18 percent.

The UCF has not included the ethnic violence in Manipur against Christians.

Most of those attacks in Uttar Pradesh were on the false allegation of fraudulent religious conversion, a charge Christian leaders vehemently deny.

India’s 11 states among 28, most of them ruled by the BJP, have enacted anti-conversion laws, criminalizing religious conversion through allurement, forces and coercion, among other means.

These laws, Christian leaders say, have become tools in the hands of right-wing Hindu groups who portray even a routine Sunday prayer service as mass religious conversion and register false cases.

Sex scandals

The Church was also rocked by sex scandals involving bishops and priests. Bishop Kannikadass A William of Mysore (now Mysuru) was removed from office after he was accused of serious crimes such as murder, rape and misappropriation of funds in January 2023.

The prelate was also accused of having mistresses.

In another similar development, in June 2023, the Vatican accepted the resignation of Bishop Franco Mulakkal of Jalandhar in the northern Indian state of Punjab, a year after he was acquitted of charges of raping a Catholic nun 13 times from 2014-16.

Mulakkal, however, is allowed to keep the title of former Bishop of Jalandhar and does not face any canonical restriction on his ministry.

A couple of Catholic priests, such as Father Benedict Anto, a member of Marthandam diocese of the Eastern rite Syro-Malankara Church, and Father Francis Fernandes, under Shimoga Latin diocese in Karnataka, were arrested and placed in custody for allegedly sexually abusing women and children.

Anto faced charges of sexually abusing a teenage student and four other women in April this year, while Father Fernandes was accused of abusing a minor girl. Both of them have denied the charges against them.

Raids on Church-run institutions

Several Christian schools, hostels and orphanages witnessed a series of surprise raids from India’s federal and state child rights protection bodies. The raids followed the registration of criminal cases for alleged charges of religious conversion of children and abuse of children, among other things.

Bishop Gerald Almeida of Jabalpur diocese in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, a couple of his priests and nuns had to go underground after they were charged under the state’s stringent anti-conversion law. They had to appeal to the court to get protection from arrest.

A layman Catholic school principal, arrested for sexually abusing minor girls in a Church-run hostel, was released after it was found the charges against him were fabricated.

Christian leaders assert the outcome of other cases will also be the same.

The police also raided several houses of the Church of North India and arrested Bishop P. C. Singh, moderator of the Church of North India (CNI) on Sept. 12 on charges of misappropriation of funds, forgery and cheating. The Church soon removed him from all official positions.

Sainthood to 35 Kandhamal victims

The Vatican has given its permission to initiate the beatification process of 35 indigenous Christians who were martyred in the 2008 anti-Christian riot in Kandhamal district in Odisha (formerly Orissa) in eastern India in October.

Oriental Church head resigns

Cardinal George Alencherry, head of the Eastern rite Syro-Malabar Church based in Kerala state in southern India, resigned on Dec. 7 on account of the raging liturgy dispute in his seat of power — Ernakulam-Angamaly archdiocese.

Cardinal Alencherry is also accused of incurring an archdiocese loss of about US$10 million by selling Church land.

The same day, Archbishop Andrews Thazhath, apostolic administrator to the archdiocese, resigned after priests and the laity boycotted him for his autocratic style of functioning. Thazhath is also accused of aggravating the liturgy crisis in the archdiocese and also misleading the Vatican, including Pope Francis.

Priests and the laity in the troubled archdiocese, perhaps for the first time in the history of the Catholic Church, sought a probe into the contents of a video message Pope Francis addressed to the priests and the laity of the archdiocese, claiming several factual errors.

They blamed Thazhath for giving such misleading and incorrect information to the pontiff through his pontifical delegate, Jesuit Archbishop Cyril Vasil from Slovakia, and the Dicastery of Oriental Churches in Rome.

The five-decade-old liturgy dispute witnessed street fights, hunger strikes, and clashes inside a cathedral church, leading to its closure since Dec. 24, 2022, and troubles for minor seminaries for close to six months.

Vasil, who visited Kerala in August to settle the dispute, however, returned to Rome after his controversial decisions and a court case against him.

However, he returned to the archdiocese on Dec. 13 and held talks with all stakeholders to settle the dispute amicably with the assistance of the new apostolic administrator Bishop Bosco Puthur, ahead of the pope’s Dec. 25 deadline to end the row.

A three-decade-old fight to end endogamy in the Catholic archdiocese of Kottayam in Kerala took an ugly turn this year when a member was forced to have a symbolic marriage in front of a closed church after in May after archdiocesan authorities refused to issue mandatory permissions for marriage.

The archdiocesan move violated an April 2021 court order, forcing the arrived party to sue his archbishop and parish priest for contempt of court. The litigations continue.

This article is originally published on  https://www.ucanews.com/news/2023-sees-indian-church-make-news-for-the-wrong-reasons/103640