Four Indians among 34 archbishops given pallium

Vatican City: Pope Francis has delivered pallium to 34 archbishops, including four from India.

The pallium symbolizes an archbishop’s unity with the Pope and his authority and responsibility to care for the flock the pope entrusted to him. The Pope blessed the palliums after they were brought up from the crypt above the tomb of St. Peter.

According to the Vatican, 34 archbishops from 18 countries who were named over the past 12 months received the palliums on June 29 at a Mass for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul.

Saints Peter and Paul were great not just because of their zeal for the Gospel, but because they allowed Christ to enter their hearts and change their lives, Pope Francis said.

“The church looks to these two giants of faith and sees two apostles who set free the power of the Gospel in our world, but only because first they themselves had been set free by their encounter with Christ,” the pope said during his homily.

The feast day celebration in St. Peter’s Basilica included the traditional blessing of the pallium, the woolen band that the heads of archdioceses wear around their shoulders over their Mass vestments.

“This sign of unity with Peter recalls the mission of the shepherd who gives his life for the flock,” the Pope told the archbishops before concluding his homily. “It is in giving his life that the shepherd, himself set free, becomes a means of bringing freedom to his brothers and sisters.”

The archbishops from Asia included four from India, one each from Indonesia and Pakistan.

The Indians are Archbishops Raphy Manjaly of Agra, Anthony Poola of Hyderabad, Sebastian Kallupra of Patna, and Victor Lyngdoh of Shillong.

Other Asian are Archbishops Petrus Canisius Mandagi of Merauke (Indonesia) and Benny Mario Travas of Karachi (Pakistan).

Keeping with a long tradition, a delegation from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople was present for the Mass and, afterward, went with Pope Francis down the stairs below the main altar to pray at St. Peter’s tomb.

In his homily, the pope reflected on the lives of Saints Peter and Paul, the “two pillars of the church” who, after experiencing God’s love in their lives, “became apostles and ministers of freedom for others.”

Because of Jesus’ unconditional love, Peter was set free “from his sense of inadequacy and his bitter experience of failure,” the pope explained. While Peter “often yielded to fear,” Jesus “was willing to take a risk on him” and encouraged him to not give up.

“In this way, Jesus set Peter free from fear, from calculations based solely on worldly concerns,” the pope said. “He gave him the courage to risk everything and the joy of becoming a fisher of men. It was Peter whom Jesus called to strengthen his brothers in faith.”

On the other hand, the pope continued, Paul experienced a different kind of freedom “from the most oppressive form of slavery, which is slavery to self.”

Christ also freed Paul “from the religious fervor that had made him a zealous defender of his ancestral traditions and a cruel persecutor of Christians,” he added.

“Formal religious observance and the intransigent defense of tradition, rather than making him open to the love of God and of his brothers and sisters, had hardened him,” the pope said.

God, however, did not spare Paul from “frailties and hardships,” such as illness, violence and persecution during his missions, thus revealing to the apostle that “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong,” he said.

Pope Francis encouraged Christians to be free from fear like Peter and, like Paul, to be free “from the temptation to present ourselves with worldly power rather than with the weakness that makes space for God” and “free from a religiosity that makes us rigid and inflexible.”