Kochi: A Jacobite bishop has joined the chorus of protests against the refusal of his own Church to bury the grandmother of a Bollywood star in her native parish.
“Burial of a dead person is a sacred act as per Christian tradition. Taking a decision contrary to it is not humane and also against the tradition of Christianity,” Bishop Thomas Mar Thimotheos of Kottayam told reporters in Kochi, Kerala, on June 10.
Madhu Jyotsana Akhauri, maternal grandmother of Priyanka Chopra, died on March 3 in Mumbai, western India, at the age of 94. As she was born Mary John, a member of the Jacobite Church, she had expressed the desire to be buried in St John’s Attamangalam parish in Kumarakom, near Kottayam. She was baptized in that church hat her father had helped design.
When Chopra and her family came down to Kerala for their grandmother’s funeral, the Kumarakom parish refused to bury her in its cemetery citing church rules. The parish officials said the woman had married a Hindu and practiced Hinduism.
Bishop Thimotheos then intervened to bury the woman in an unkempt grave at the cemetery of another Jacobite church at Ponkunnam, some 50 km east of Kumarakom, reports indiatvnews.com.
The actress said the act of the church “was awful. But we should not concentrate on it. Rather we should look that we lost a family member.”
A number of relatives, including Priyanka Chopra, flew down from Mumbai to perform the last rites.
Akhauri was born in the Kavalappara family at Kumarakom. She had gone to Bihar as a nurse and later married Dr Akhouri. She was a freedom fighter, social activist and a former legislator.
George, a family member, told Asia News International, “Priyanka was raised by this grandmother. The two were very close.”
Akhauri’s cousin Elias Kavalappara said the woman had confessed and even taken Holy Communion in the same church two years back. “I don’t see any reason why she should be denied her last wish. I am not going to take this lying down. This is the 21st century, not some dark age,” he told ndtv.com.
The Jacobite Church, or the Jacobite Syrian Christian Church, is an autonomous Oriental Orthodox Christian Church. The Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, Ignatius Aphrem II, is its supreme head. It functions as an organized distinct Indian body within the Syriac Orthodox Church.
The Church, which traces its origin to St Thomas the Apostle, is tradition-bound with strict and rigid laws.
In an unrelated move on June 9, Bishop Thimotheos was removed from the post by the Church’s synod.
Catholicos Baselios Thomas I, the Indian head of the Church, has taken over the Kottayam diocese’s charge. It was for the first time that a Jacobite bishop was being suspended, though temporarily. The bishop has been asked to stay away for six months.
Jacobite Church sources said that the Kottayam bishop had been relieved of his post following a difference of opinion on the holding of church property in his personal name.
There has been a consensus within the Jacobite Church that the bishops should not hold church property as private property.
In the early 2015, Bishop Kuriakose Mar Cleemis of Idukki, was expelled from the Jacobite Church following a decision by the Catholicos and the synod.