Author: S Gurumurthy
Publication: The New Indian Express
Date: May 31, 2006
URL: http://www.newindpress.com/column/News.asp?Topic=-97&Title=S.Gurumurthy&ID=IE620060531001300&nDate=&Sub=&Cat=&
The Pope wears two hats - one religious, as
the global pontiff of the Catholics, and the other political, as the head
of Vatican State. The second one gives him and the Catholic faith a global
political and diplomatic status which no other faith can match. As the head
of the Vatican State, the Pope relates to all heads of State as a political
equal and more.
When the present Pope's predecessor, John
Paul II, came to India, he proclaimed that the Church planted the Cross on
Europe first, then on Americas and Africa and now, he said, it was Asia's
turn to bear the Cross! Asia was ripe, he said, for harvesting the souls -
read heathens - for Christ.
In Latin America, John Paul II abused the
Protestant Christians as 'wolves' for targeting the Catholics for conversion!
Why the hate for conversions in Latin America and love for it in Asia? Simple,
the more efficient conversions by Protestants in Latin America are endangering
the Catholics, but Asia, with its huge and weak heathen population, offers
itself almost competition-free for the Church to convert.
Working on his predecessor's intent to plant
the Cross on India, the new Pope Benedict XVI has moved further and virtually
abused India for growing religious intolerance and for impeding the church
work by anti-conversion laws. Two weeks back when the new Indian ambassador
to Vatican, Amitava Tripathi, presented his credentials to the Pope as the
head of the Vatican state, the Pope shocked him saying that Indian laws against
conversions offend freedom of faith and should be rejected as unconstitutional.
This angered even the normally timid, secular
Indian establishment to react sharply, call in Vatican's charge de affairs
in Delhi and tell him sternly of the Indian Government's strong disapproval
of the Pope's conduct.
But has the Pope the moral authority to fault
others for lack of religious freedom? In the Pope's own Vatican State no faith
other than his own is allowed. If the Papacy regards even other Orthodox and
Protestant Christians as heretics, where is the question of freedom for idol
worshipping heathens to whom the Bible itself denies freedom. The Vatican
Constitution is named as 'Apostolic Constitution', that is constitution of
Christian missionaries! Spain where till date Catholicism is the state religion
has again a treaty with the Papacy. Will the Pope allow freedom of faith in
Vatican and sermonise on freedom to those countries?
Presumably the Pope was misled by his establishment
in India. The Churches selling his faith in India have been campaigning, but
falsely, that the anti-conversion laws passed by Madhya Pradesh and Orissa
States decades earlier and by the Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh Governments in
recent times are unconstitutional. But long before, in 1977, a five-judge
Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court had overruled the challenge to anti-conversion
laws of MP and Orissa. The Pope's own agencies in India had challenged the
laws. The Court firmly told the soul-harvesters that the religious freedom
under the Indian Constitution was limited to the right to propagate one's
faith and did not extend to convert other faithfuls.
The MP Government did not wake up one fine
morning and pass this law. In 1950s it had appointed a committee headed by
Justice Neogi, which included a Christian member who was also a Gandhian,
to study allegations of forcible and fraudulent conversions of tribal and
illiterate people by foreign missionaries. The committee submitted a voluminous,
unanimous report detailing fraudulent conversions by the Church. The MP Government
then under the Congress party merely enacted the recommendations of the Neogi
committee. The pontiff of Indian secularism Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru was then
the Prime Minister.
The Supreme Court has declared that religious
conversion is not part of religious freedom in the Indian Constitution and
Indian anti-conversion laws are constitutional. But the Pope asserts the other
way round, that is, conversion is part of freedom of faith in the Indian Constitution
and Indian anti-conversional laws are unconstitutional. The question is: who
is supreme in India - the Pope or the Supreme Court?
