While the Gulf Goans are fortunate to pray with the Pope, the Catholics in India have not been so lucky.
The last time a Pope visited India was in 1999. After that there have been efforts made to invite the Pope, but they have not borne fruit.
In 2017 there was a move to invite the Pope to India. A delegation of Catholic Bishops met the Prime Minister seeking that an invitation be sent to the Pope to visit India. Nothing came out of this. Cardinal Oswald Gracias was quoted at that time saying, “I told the Prime Minister about the great love and acceptance of the Pope among the people in the world, also in India, and having him in India will benefit the country.” Gracias had added that Modi had listened “attentively” but had not made any commitment to inviting the Pontiff to India.
Since the Vatican is a sovereign State with diplomatic ties with India, an invitation to the Pope has to go from the Indian government.
In recent years, Pope Francis has visited the Indian sub-continent twice. In January 2015 he visited Sri Lanka and performed the canonization of St Joseph Vaz, the Goan missionary who travelled to Sri Lanka and died there, and is today the Patron Saint of Goa. In 2017, the Pope visited Myanmar, and it was expected that India would have been included in that trip, but it didn’t happen.
When the Myanmar visit had been announced, Bishop Theodore Mascarenhas, Secretary-General of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI), had said: “It was with a heavy heart, we received the news that the Holy See cannot visit India. This is not vis-à-vis just Catholics in the country, a Holy Visit would have been a prestige for the whole country in the eyes of the world. It is indeed embarrassing that the Pope is coming to the neighbourhood, and visiting two smaller countries and not India.”
