Bengaluru: Hundreds of people were seen on July 13 praying with the four-day-old body of a 65-year-old woman inside a church in Bengaluru that was heavily guarded by police.

Chinnamma Chowrappa, a member of the St. Paul the Hermit parish in Vishwanatha Nagenahalli, died on July 10 and a group of parishioners have kept her body in front of the altar inside the parish church. Some 75 people were seen reciting rosary inside the church while hundreds of others outside church, which is some 25 km north of downtown Bengaluru, capital of Karnataka state.

At least three large buses and a dozen cars that had brought the police were parked in and around the parish compound.

The parishioners are demanding the resumption of services in the church that Archbishop Bernard Moras of Bangalore shut down on April 21.

The protesters have alleged that the archdiocese has denied funeral rites to the woman. They have refused to remove the body from the church.

Bangalore archdiocesan officials say Archbishop Moras was forced to close the parish after some parishioners refused to remove the bust of a controversial priest they had put up inside the church premises.

Fr Chowrappa Selvaraj, an archdiocesan priest popularly known as Fr Chasara, died on March 16 after battling several illnesses. He was 60.

chasera4The parishioners installed the priest’s bust ignoring archbishop’s warning and a notice he sent to the serving parish priest.“Despite being fully made aware of the rightful closure of the church, some protestors have also been fanning flames of disharmony by hunger-strike, demanding reopening of the Church,” the archdiocesan spokesperson said in a statement on July 12.

Fr Chasara led a faction that wants Kannada, the local language, given prominence and Kannadiga priests appointed to top posts in the archdiocese. However, nearly 70 of Catholics in the archdiocese are Tamil. The priest had led the Akhila Karnataka Catholic Kristhara Kannada Sangha (All Karnataka Catholic Christian Union).

chasera5The dispute has led to violent protests for the past several decades. The murder of the rector of a major seminary in the city three years ago is also blamed on this dispute. Fr Chasara, a popular Kannada preacher and writer, was among the six people accused in the case.

The archbishop had made alternate arrangements in neighboring Church of St. James in Marianpalaya for the spiritual needs of the members of the closed parish.

However, the protestors have refused to avail the alternate arrangements for the funeral and accused the archbishop of dishonoring the deceased woman and denying Catholics their rights.

Archdiocesan spokesperson Fr A S Anthonyswamy has dismissed the allegations as a “blatant lie aimed at creating communal tension.”

The spokesperson accused the protesters of whipping up communal tension by keeping the woman’s body inside the church that was canonically shut down.

“Some of the agitators/protestors are ill-informed or misinformed and not in any way associated with the Church pastoral and temporal administration,” the priest says.

The priest also accused the protestors of making “highly insensitive, perverted and misdirected statements in public and in the media, falsely accusing the archbishop.”

The parishioners were allowed to enter the church after the Bangalore’s City Civil and Sessions Court on June 20 restrained the archdiocese from denying access to the church.