Indian Bishops Counter Anti-Christian Violence

Bishops expressed solidarity for the Kandhamal Christians.

JAMSHEDPUR,INDIA (UCAN) - During their recent meeting, India's Catholic bishops held two unscheduled sessions to study recent attacks on Christians in Orissa state.

The 28th biennial plenary of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI) also discussed a proposal to coordinate the Church's civil and political activities to counter increasing anti-Christian violence in India.

Hindu extremists attacked Christians in Orissa's Kandhamal district during the last Christmas season. However, the matter could not be included in the plenary agenda as the CBCI Standing Committee had formed this in April 2007.

The Feb. 13-20 meeting in Jamshedpur, 1,300 kilometers southeast of New Delhi, focused on discussing topics related to women's empowerment in the Church and society.

Archbishop Raphael Cheenath of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar, whose diocese covers Kandhamal district, addressed the unscheduled sessions on Feb. 18.

His audience included Cardinal Paul Cordes, the Vatican official in charge of the pontifical council for charity work, and two officials of Misereor, a German Church aid agency.

Archbishop Cheenath urged the Indian prelates to shed their complacency and come up with a plan to deal with violence and false propaganda against Christians in various parts of the country.

Several bishops who also spoke during the sessions expressed solidarity for the Kandhamal Christians and offered financial and legal assistance. They also agreed the Church needs to devise a national plan to address growing threats to Christians in the country.

Cardinal Telesphore P. Toppo of Ranchi, who ended his term as CBCI president on Feb. 20, said the attackers in Orissa looted whatever they could carry away from Christian houses and Church institutions. "What they could not carry, they heaped them together and burned," added the cardinal, who visited Kandhamal at the end of January. He described the destruction there as "diabolic."

Archbishop Cheenath said that over three-and-a-half days starting Dec. 23, the Church lost whatever it had built in Kandhamal during more than 100 years.

On Dec. 23, Hindu radicals forcibly shaved the head of a Protestant pastor. The following day, they disrupted Christmas preparations in a Christian-dominated village. They chased Christians and burned their shops, Archbishop Cheenath added.

Christians who fled to forests to escape the violence have all returned but they remain traumatized, he added. "For three days, there were no police in Kandhamal," he alleged.

The archbishop urged the bishops not to treat such violence as isolated incidents but to come up with a plan to deal with this at the national and regional levels. "Be alert. Today it is Orissa; tomorrow it could be somewhere else," the 73-year-old prelate warned.

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Archbishop Cheenath also distributed a report of an independent group that spent 20 months two years ago studying the impact of Hindu radicals in Orissa. The Indian People's Tribunal (IPT) noted that thousands of Hindu radicals work in 25 of Orissa's 30 districts, using "coercion and force to promote Hindu supremacy and hegemony."

The tribunal, comprising mostly Hindus who work to protect the environment and human rights, was established in 2003, a year after sectarian violence killed hundreds of Muslims in Gujarat, western India.

K.K. Usha, a former woman judge who led the IPT team, also noted that the Hindu radical groups "legitimize their actions against minorities by invoking specific and fabricated threats to Hindus from Muslims and Christians."

Archbishop Cheenath warned the bishops that if Christians continued to compromise in such situations, "we would lose our relentless battle with the evil -- there is no time to rest."

An attacked diocese or a religious congregation cannot fight the fundamentalists alone, he maintained. He also observed the Indian Church suffers from "too many dioceses" and regional, linguistic and ritual divisions. The prelate called for a disaster management team at the national level.

In response, Bishop Yvon Ambroise, chairperson of the CBCI commission for justice, peace and development, proposed to the assembly a draft plan to coordinate the Church's political and civil works in the country.

The plan calls for the Church to formulate ideological positions and disseminate these through statements and the media. Other proposals are to lobby politicians and civil leaders, and network with other groups including international ones. The plan also includes setting up national and regional coordination teams and providing them with training and resources.

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Republished by Catholic Online with permission of the Union of Catholic Asian News (UCA News), the world's largest Asian church news agency (www.ucanews.com).