The All India Catholic Union (AICU) celebrated its centennial in the national capital, New Delhi, in August, the events reflecting the complex matrix of ecclesiastical, political, cultural, and perhaps even personal heights and depths that a community negotiates in its life in a vast, secular democracy where it is a tiny minority.
The ceremonials were remarkable and will remain in memory. The three archbishops, Peter Machado of Bangalore, Anil JT Couto of Delhi and Albert D’Souza of Agra, who were present much of the three days, in their speeches, homilies and interactions underscored their worry, but also their hope that the systems in place, the Constitution, Parliament and courts would prevail over those who attempt a radical shift in the country’s secular roots.
A carry away of great hope was the strong support all three archbishops, and the bishop of Lucknow, Gerald John Mathias, gave to the laity movement. Cardinal Oswald Gracias, in his message read out at the inaugural, set the tone committing the church to the empowerment of the laity. The backing of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India to the AICU, with Lancy D Cunha as the national president in the organisation’s jubilee year, had never been as clear as now. The credit goes to Cardinal Gracias, the newly appointed ecclesiastical advisor Archbishop Machado, and the former secretary general of the CBCI, Bishop Macarangas.
The key symposium, on the Constitution and the Minorities, will certainly add to the discourse on freedom of religion and belief in India, under stress as never before, evidenced not just in the pressure on the Muslim community in a multi-pronged manoeuvre, but also on Christians in at least three cow-related lynching, the threats to institutions, the coercion of house churches and the Damocles’ sword of a national ban on proselytisation and perhaps all evangelistic activity.
While the keynote speaker, former Supreme court judge Kurian Joseph, a practising Catholic, held hope of the statutes surviving the crisis without erosion, there was palpable unease at the breaking of the solemn covenant with the citizens in the manner in which the Kashmir situation was hardened and Article 370 demolished in a triumphal finale to a sustained political campaign by the ruling party.
Academic Achin Vanaik in his study of the Constitution pointed out a series of aberrations, overlooked over the decades that embedded majoritarian elements in the statutes, and others which clearly favoured the majority community. Much as we tend to swear by the Constitution, it is clear that the ethnic, religious and other strata need to keenly study the statutes. Study and understanding will ensure a mobilisation against any tinkering with the fundamentals of the document that holds the nation together.
But it is in the statutes of the church, irrespective of the Rite, that hierarchy and the leadership of the laity movements at all levels need to interest themselves with an urgency they have not shown in the last hundred years.
The concept of a lay faithful with an identity both connected with and separate from the hierarchy, or the consecrated clergy is not entirely understood by the people at large even fifty years after the publication of the documents of the second Vatican Council. The tension, not always creative, in a parish whether in a metropolitan city of a major diocese or in a small tribal mission parish deep in the hinterland of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand or Uttar Pradesh goes unnoticed, and unstudied, as does the issue of caste that distorts the relationships in a parish in Tamil Nadu, Telangana or Andhra Pradesh.
These tensions may be much reduced, or possibly entirely absent in another culture or society, such as may exist in Latin America or the nation states of Europe, or the smaller nations of the Asia Pacific region. But India is another world altogether. And the interfaces between communities often totally wrap their cohesiveness and the relationship of the parish laity and the parish priest or bishop.
This is a major reason why many in the clergy are loath to encourage the laity unite in organisations such as Catholic associations, which are the building blocks of diocesan laity organisations, and therefore of the AICU. It is surprising that despite Vatican II as a part of the curricula of seminaries – and how one wishes the Constitution were too in the course – many a priest does not understand the difference between Parish council and a Parish Catholic association.
The harshest and most visible hiatus is between the three Rites. The birth of the two sui juris entities of the Syro Malabar and Syro Malankara has robbed many dioceses in the regions outside of Kerala of a united laity in social action. Patently systems need to be devised by the two synods and the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India, CCBI, on how to work unitedly at all levels from the grassroots upwards in facing the myriad challenges that are par for the course in the Indian social and political landscape.
The months leading to the AICU centennial underscored how much more work needs to be done to educate both laity and clergy in the teachings of the church, and in the need of synergy and unity between the two in strengthening the community so that it can derive full nurture, both spiritually and materially in what a mature secular democracy offers to is religious and ethnic minorities. Such a strong bond is necessary to defend freedoms not just of Catholics, or Christians in general, but of the people at large.
(John Dayal from New Delhi is an author and activist).
