Who is stalling the pope’s visit to India?

Sep 10, 2024

By John Dayal
The prophetic Monsignor, Benny D’Aguiar, wrote in The Examiner, India’s oldest newspaper which he edited, of Pope Paul VI’s visit to Mumbai in 1964 to attend the International Eucharistic Congress: “There has never been anything like it within living memory, and there will never be anything like it for decades to come. Long after the children who made their first Holy Communion that day have grown to maturity and many of the priests who were ordained that evening will have come to the evening of their days, the memory of the day the Holy Father came to India will be recounted, not without the tears that can only result from a strongly felt experience.”

Breathless prose, perhaps, but Father Benny, who became a dear friend in his stay in New Delhi, had captured what seeing the Holy Father with one’s own eyes would mean to a very devout Catholic flock in India.

This is perhaps what the devout Catholics of Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and Papua New Guinea would have felt in recent days as they welcomed Pope Francis in their midst, filling stadiums for Mass, and other reception areas for just a sight of the “jolly old man,” a sort of a beardless “Papa Santa Claus,” as it were.

Pope John Paul II came in 1986 on his first visit to the land of the Buddha, Mahavira, and the gods of the Hindu Pantheon. And for the secular citizen, equally the land of Mahatma Gandhi and Babasaheb Ambedkar, who is all but worshipped by the Dalits or Scheduled Castes who were once deemed “untouchable,” and who constitute a huge 15 percent of the nation’s population.

Catholics in India are, by a rule of thumb, computed at about 50 percent to 55 percent of the total number of Christians of all denominations in the country. India’s Christians are a mere 2.3 percent of the national population.

This is perhaps what the devout Catholics of Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and Papua New Guinea would have felt in recent days as they welcomed Pope Francis in their midst, filling stadiums for Mass, and other reception areas for just a sight of the “jolly old man,” a sort of a beardless “Papa Santa Claus,” as it were.

Pope John Paul II came in 1986 on his first visit to the land of the Buddha, Mahavira, and the gods of the Hindu Pantheon. And for the secular citizen, equally the land of Mahatma Gandhi and Babasaheb Ambedkar, who is all but worshipped by the Dalits or Scheduled Castes who were once deemed “untouchable,” and who constitute a huge 15 percent of the nation’s population.

Catholics in India are, by a rule of thumb, computed at about 50 percent to 55 percent of the total number of Christians of all denominations in the country. India’s Christians are a mere 2.3 percent of the national population.

Over the last five decadal Census operations, this percentage has not changed, giving a lie to the political charge of forcible and fraudulent conversions to Christianity. This is an allegation that has sired a dozen anti-conversion laws, and much physical violence on hapless pastors, priests and nuns in the last decade. It alas also gives the lie to boasts by evangelisers of all denominations of netting many fish.

The national fraction of faithful believers seems puny, but not when seen in absolute numbers of the massive population of India.

India in 1964 was second to China, as the most populous country in the world with 489,059,309 people. This would mean there were about 11 million Christians in India, of whom some 6.74 million would have been Catholics.

The estimated national population now is about 1.40 billion, and it is China that is now pushed down to the second most populous country in the world. This means there are some 19.32 million Catholics in the total Christian count of 32.20 million. The 2021 Census was put off due to the Covid, pandemic and is now scheduled for 2025.

These are not “outstanding Christians,” the term the community uses for those who drag themselves to Church every Sunday, avoid the sermon, and then join the queue for Communion. Nor are they mere Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter faithful who present themselves only during the major feasts.

These are Christians with an intensity not seen anywhere other than perhaps Latin countries, the Philippines, and parts of Africa. Women come in their hundreds to drape the Blessed Virgin in Indian Saris in every Catholic Church.

You’ll see many Protestants — and several Hindus — at the Marian shrines of Vellankkani in Tamil Nadu, and Sardhana in Uttar Pradesh. Most children have beads of a rosary around their necks. Almost every car owned or driven by a Christian has a little rosary hanging from the rear-view mirror.  It is as much an assertion of identity as a safeguard against Indian road conditions and driving habits.

These Christians (and Catholics) are now asking why they are being deprived the joy of a papal visit. The sharper question is about which kink in the power train is responsible for throwing a spanner in the smooth process of matching dates which suits the even busier globe-trotting Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Holy Father tells visitors who call on him at the Vatican, among them bishops on their annual ad limini journey, that he would love to come to India.

Indian bishops meet the prime minister in various combinations — when newly capped cardinals make a courtesy call, or when bishops of the Syro-Malabar Church, politically the most active rite in India, meet him for one thing or the other, and most visibly when the leadership of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) calls upon the head of the government after their general body meetings.

After every meeting, bishops tell the media they have requested Modi to invite the head of the Catholic Church to India.

In the ten years he has been in office, Modi’s best photo opportunities have been when he embraces the pope — at the Vatican or when he meets the pontiff in international meetings in Europe.

Modi is a champion embracer of heads of government and heads of state and a very few religious heads.

Hindu religious heads do not embrace anyone. They raise their hand in affectionate blessings. Modi does not embrace Indian Muslim leaders, though he has been seen warmly greeting Muslim kings, amirs, and ulema when in the Middle East or places in Southeast Asia.

Modi has told the press he has invited the head of the Catholic Church to visit India.  He has also told this to the bishops every time they meet him.

Some of these meetings are facilitated by his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders from Kerala. The last such meeting was organized with the help of the BJP’s first-ever member of parliament from Kerala, Suresh Gopi. The popular actor won in Thrissur, which has a strong Syro-Malabar Catholic Church presence. Catholic religious leaders have not been able to effectively deny that some of them did indeed facilitate the BJP victory.

If blame has to be apportioned for the failure for an early date for a papal visit, fingers point to the PMO, the acronym with which the Prime Minister’s Office is known. It has Modi’s trusted senior bureaucrats still in service years after their retirement age, intelligence experts, and his close political advisers from the time he was chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 till he won his way to the top job in May 2014.

The PMO, knowledgeable sources say, has refused to take a decision on a papal visit. No reasons are given. It is not even acknowledged in the PMO, the Ministry of External Affairs, or the near-defunct Ministry for Minority Affairs, that there is any hold-up in clearing the visit. Patently the PMO does not think it is an appropriate time. Last year, the general election was looming large. Now there are several important state elections. But in a country of India’s size, there are elections every quarter of the year.

The delay is political. Will the PMO do this without the knowledge of its boss, the prime minister? No one is talking.

For the record, in Pope John Paul II’s second visit, the public relations issue for the Hindutva groups in India was the promulgation of Ecclesiastical in Asia. As Father Dominic Emmanuel, SVD, who was a member of the pontifical press team and was then the official spokesman of the CBCI, recalls, the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), and the Bajrang Dal were riled that the document dedicated the Church in the third millennia to the evangelization of Asia — as rhetoric first had been for Europe and second for Africa.

The redoubtable head of the CBCI, Delhi archbishop the late Alan de Lastic took the religious nationalists head on. “The pope's visit is being opposed by the VHP and the RSS. They say the pope should come here as head of a state and not of a religion; and two, he should declare that Christianity is not the only way to salvation.

“For the first point, we cannot cleave the pope in half and say that ‘now you are acting as head of a state and now of a religion’. As head of state, he will be calling on the president of India. His other engagements are purely religious.

“As for the second issue, who is the VHP to impose its views on the pope? Suppose a swamiji is going to the US and the government there asks him to state certain things which go against his religious beliefs, will he agree? Why should the pope be muzzled and forced to become the mouthpiece of the VHP and RSS? I have never told the RSS what to say.”

The archbishop did not fail to point out, “While I write this, attacks on Christians continue unabated. The Sangh [RSS] has never uttered one word of praise for our work in the fields of health, education and human development. I'm against any religion attacking any other religion. It's a very dangerous trend which can throw the country into turmoil, confusion and hatred.’

Pope John’s Paul II’s second visit passed off uneventfully. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was gracious, and the pope was again accorded full honors befitting a head of state. Planned protests were pre-empted by the authorities.

No one in the security system is anticipating any major protest or riot to break out in the country to oppose a papal visit. This despite the Sangh and all its branches now being stronger than ever before. The ruling party and state governments have weaponized laws against religious minorities.

Various Christian groups have assessed persecution incidents last year — against churches, schools, Catholic fathers, nuns, and non-denominational pastors at anywhere from 650 to 1,250.

At one time this year over 100 pastors were in jail in Uttar Pradesh where the anti-conversion laws have been weaponized to an unbelievable extent. Ultimately the state High Court freeing some pastors from jail had to say that “possession of a Bible was not a crime.”--ucaews.com