New Delhi: As the Indian bishops got ready for their biennial meeting, a group of progressive Catholic religious has urged the prelates to stop the scandal of spending millions of rupees on churches and statues in a country where millions remain homeless.
“Building opulent churches and erecting huge statues, investing crores (millions) of rupees squeezed out of ordinary people, is a scandal in the church today,” says the Forum of Religious for Justice and Peace (FORUM).
In a letter addressed to bishops and religious major superiors in India, the forum laments that such “gross misuse of resources” is a “contradiction” where millions, including Christians, have no “dwelling place or the basic necessities of life.”
It wants the Church authorities to use the resources to help the needy.
The forum published the letter ahead of the biennial plenary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) at St. John’s National Academy of Health Sciences, Bangalore.
More than 180 bishops from all 170 dioceses belonging to India’s three ritual Churches will address the main theme, “The Response of the Church in India to the Present Day Challenges” during the March 2-9 plenary.
The letter from the religious was the outcome of a national convention the forum organized two weeks earlier to seek ways to reinvent “Religious Life in the Context of India Today. Seventy delegates from belonging to various religious congregations attended the February 19-22 convention at Kottayam, Kerala.
“We wanted to bring this serious issue to the attention of the bishops and our superiors,” forum president Father Jacob Peenikaparambil told Matters India on March 1. The Carmelite of Mary Immaculate priest, who has spent 33 years among the poor, said they felt compelled to raise the matter as part of their prophetic role as religious.
The February 22 letter says the convention analyzed the present scenario in India and came across certain issues in the Catholic Church that require the Church leaders’ urgent attention.
The religious also noted increasing commercialization of religion and promotion of religious rituals and cults under the garb spirituality in the Church.” The forum wants the bishops to intervene to check clerics using the Sacrament to punish the faith, especially nuns.
Another scandal is the attempt in the Church to domesticate religious life, by bringing the Religious “under the total control of the bishops.” Terming such moves as attacks on the religious life that attempts radical evangelical living “in a prophetic way.” The forum asserted the need to protect and sustain the “legitimate autonomy of Religious Life.”
The letter also notes exclusion of women, including nuns, from the Church governance as “violation of their human right to equality and dignity. The forum regrets that Church leaders have ignored cases of sexual violence on religious women and let their perpetrators go scot free. “This cannot be tolerated anymore,” the letter says.
The religious also appealed the bishops and major superiors to avoid the scandal of caste, ethnicity, rite, language and regional divisions in the Church.