Author: Sandhya Jain
Publication: Vijayvaani.com
Date: June 12, 2009
URL: http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayArticle.aspx?id=631
In the name of a strange religious diplomacy
called inter-faith dialogue, Swami Jayendra Saraswati, Shankaracharya of Kanchi
Kamakoti Matham, will today meet Cardinal Jean-Louis Pierre Tauran, president
of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, and other
religious leaders, in Mumbai. The catholic delegation will include native
Catholics like Cardinal Oswald Gracias, president of the Catholic Bishop's
Conference of India and Bishop Thomas Dabre of Pune.
The meeting, at the initiative of the Catholic
Church, allegedly aims to spread understanding among different religious groups,
but actually intends to arraign India's native Hindu majority for so-called
attacks on minorities (read Christians). It highlights problems (sic) of Christians
in Kandhamal, Orissa, but omits to mention the brutal gunning down of octogenarian
Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati and four disciple-monks on Janmasthami day, 2008,
with AK-47 rifles.
Seen in this perspective, the meeting may
be viewed as a precursor to the forthcoming visit of the US Commission for
International Religious Freedom, which the Sonia Gandhi-led UPA scandalously
permitted to enter India to examine the status of religious freedom in Gujarat
and Orissa - states where poor native peoples are constantly being pressurised
to change their faith by groups with access to huge funds and menacing weaponry.
For the Christian West, freedom of religion means only the freedom to convert
non-Christians to Christianity; and never the freedom to practice the faith
of one's birth, if that faith is non-Christian.
More recently, Swami Ramcharan Das of Puri,
Orissa, was hacked to death outside his ashram. Clearly this privilege of
being dispatched to the other world for the offence of the valiant defence
of Hindu dharma has been reserved for sannyasis alone.
Jews exempted
Given the gritty determination with which
all denominations of the church, from the Catholics to the Protestants to
the newer charismatic cults, pursue conversions in the non-monotheistic world,
with money and all kinds of dubious allurements and muscular pressures, it
comes as a shock to learn that the Vatican has chickened out of evangelism
among the Jews.
This is all the more surprising when one notes
that Christians boldly peddle the Bible in Muslim countries or areas where
they feel either dominant or secure - in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, even
our Kashmir Valley! Islam's menacing jihadi visage is apparently no deterrent
in this regard, no doubt because of the comforting presence of American guns
in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the political subservience of the regimes
in all countries. Faith and Empire, Faith and Trade, have ever gone hand in
hand - so it is even today.
Yet on 12 May 2009, the Jerusalem Post reported
- "Vatican to stop missionizing Jews" (by Abe Selig). During his
historic journey to Jerusalem last month, Pope Benedict XVI met the chief
Sephardic and Ashkenazi rabbis at Heichal Shlomo and agreed that the Catholic
Church would cease all missionary activity among Jews.
Christian friends say this abject surrender
of the Church's mission to evangelise the world before the Jewish community
with which the Church has been in fratricidal conflict since its inception
two millennia ago, is the culmination of the Second Vatican Council - a little-understood
but immensely significant meeting which entrenched the Jewish Bible (Old Testament)
as the fountainhead of Christian theology. This completely undermined Christian
resistance to Jewish religious supremacy.
Many Catholics believe the Second Vatican
Council was the consequence of covert Jewish arm-twisting in the aftermath
of Hilter's holocaust, in which the papacy was implicated by Jews.
For non-Christians, the 1962-65 ecumenical
council known as Vatican II was a menacing call to resume the conversion agenda
with gusto to reaffirm the supremacy of the old colonial powers in the new
era. But unknown to non-monotheists, it was also an abject surrender before
the Jews, the first children of the common patriarch, Abraham. [We shall be
dealing with these subjects in subsequent days].
The ecumenical council absolved Judaism of
the historical allegation of having killed Jesus. And now, in May 2009, Pope
Benedict XVI (a German constantly maligned for having joined Hilter's Youth
as a young teenager during the War - an allegation he strenuously denies)
has agreed that the Vatican will not convert Jews to Christianity.
Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona Metzger (suspended
for investigations into allegations of financial impropriety and sexual abuse
of minor boys) hailed this theological surrender by the Pope as an "historic
agreement" and "for us, an immensely important message."
[http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1242029505111&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull]
What does it mean?
1] By accepting the Old Testament as the cornerstone
of the Christian Church, and the Jewish god, Yahweh/Jehovah, as the common
Father in whose name the earth is to be conquered and enjoyed (note the doctrinal-intellectual
origins of colonialism), the Vatican surrendered its claim to be the sole
recipient of the Truth / Light in unbroken apostolic succession.
2] At Vatican II, the Catholic Church accepted
that the Truth/Light, for whatever it is worth to believers, was given first
to the Jews by Abraham and Moses, and still vests with them.
3] The Truth/Light offered by Jesus does not
supersede the Truth of the Old Testament (the repercussions this may have
on the Islamic claim that Mohammad is the seal of a prophetic tradition beginning
with Abraham remains to be seen. What is clear is that the Jewish Avram, Christian
Abraham and Muslim Ibrahim - despite being one and the same - failed to evolve
the compatibility of the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh).
4] This makes the Catholic Church a mere sect
of the True Faith (Judaism).
5] The Catholic Church is right to the extent
that it accepts the Old Testament (Jewish Bible) and false to the extent that
it accepts the New Testament.
6] The Vatican doctrine of Papal Infallibility
lies in tatters, because the (monotheistic world's) Truth is with the Jews
and not with the Catholic Church and its Apostles.
Does this help Hindus?
Yes. The Vatican's traditional denunciation
of moral relativism, the acceptance of moral worth in other religions, and
its propagation of Christian theology as the ONLY True Doctrine for the entire
world, has retreated in the face of Jewish obduracy.
No doubt, the international Jewish financial
clout (read stranglehold) has something to do with this development, but it
demonstrates what a determined leadership can achieve for its people. Sri
Lanka's Buddhist Mahasangha is currently asserting itself against all Christian
denominations in the island in the same spirit, and is bound to achieve its
goals.
A chorus of Hindu voices proclaiming Christianity
as the Religion of Colonial Powers, and freedom of religion a mask for the
political subversion of native faiths, could put all Christian forces on the
defensive. Conversion is nothing but cultural rape and religious annihilation.
Hindus should demand that the United Nations
(another western stooge) declare missionary activity a crime against humanity.
Hindus must shun the mythology that western
colonial countries have abandoned religion and become secular; Christianity
is a political religion and it remains a political tool to penetrate and subjugate
former colonies and semi-colonies. Secularism is a mask of the Christian god,
a snare to bamboozle non-monotheistic traditions to discard the protective
covering (kavach) of their natal faith and traditions.
Love?
As the erudite Cardinal Jean-Louis Pierre
Tauran, president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Inter-religious
Dialogue, has come to India, we must not neglect to ask the holy father what
exactly the Bible means when it says 'love thy neighbour as thyself.'
Given Christianity's bloody and continuing
history of murderous engagement with native communities in every land where
it has made itself a neighbour, what exactly can Hindus expect by way of Christian
'love'?
- The writer is Editor, www.vijayvaani.com