Mission in TODAY
Vol. XVII x No. 2
FEBRUARY 2005
World Leader
WORLD CAN LEARN MUCH FROM CHURCH IN INDIA
It is already being claimed by the gurus of globalization that the future of the 21st century lies with India and China. With a combined population of 2.7 billion, nearly half of the world’s population lives in those two countries.
Both have the highest economic growth rates in the
world. Both are opening up to global investment to a greater or lesser
extent, and by the mid-21st century, at current projections, the majority of
the world’s poor will live there.
India has a population of 1.3 billion, but despite over 50 years of
independence, and strong democratic participation, efforts in literacy,
education and health provision – and some years after the ‘Green Revolution’
in agriculture – there are still over 300 million people living in poverty
on less than a dollar a day.
So the country with the highest number of graduates also has more of the
world’s poor than any other. In other words, despite India’s development of
the new IT economies of Bangalore and Hyderabad, the new call centre jobs,
mobile phones and Bollywood, India is still a poor developing country.
Most of India’s poor are not in the great cities of Bombay, Delhi and
Calcutta, but in the rural areas. They are small-scale farmers scratching a
living off the land, with a handful of cattle or goats or landless laborers,
the poorest of the poor, often discriminated against by traditional caste
distinctions. India remains an agricultural economy.
National jubilee
To celebrate the anniversaries of the arrival of the
Apostle St Thomas in India, in 52 AD, almost 2,000 years ago, and of the
death of the missionary St Francis Xavier who arrived on the west coast of
India in Kerala in 1542 to spend 20 years working among the poor fishermen,
the Indian Bishops’ Conference held a national jubilee seminar in Cochin,
Kerala, in 2002.
It was chaired by Bishop John Thattumkal of Cochin, who also heads India’s
Justice and Peace Commission and the seminar was a series of reflections on
the history and role of the Catholic Church in India. The conference papers
have recently been published.
Remarkably only 2.4 per cent of Indians are Catholic. There are Baptist,
Protestant and Evangelical Churches also with long missionary histories but
Christianity holds a small percentage in a country mainly of Hindus,
Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists – India, as Pope John Paul II commented
in his visit to Kerala in 1986, is “the cradle of the world’s major
religions.”
Respect
In fact, though India is a secular state, the concept
of secularism conceived by the framers of India’s Constitution is unique in
that it recognizes and respects religions and religious values.
Secularism in India is thus neither anti-God nor anti-religion – rather it
respects and encourages religion, extending tolerant equal treatment to all
religions – “unity in diversity” is India’s defining characteristic.
It was St Francis Xavier who encouraged his companions to be “present to the
heart of the masses.” He could deal equally with the high and low of
society, though his preference was for the poor, the weak, the sick and
suffering.
“Visit those who are sick,” he advised, “strive to make yourselves loved by
these people for then your work will be much more effective.” He made a real
effort to make himself one with the people he worked with, he spoke to the
people in the simple language of the slaves, local merchants, settlers and
servants.
He respected the social customs of the Indians, their dress, their food and
festivals – determined to have his Christian commitment understood from
within.
Selfless service
The legacy of St Francis Xavier remains to this day. He
set the tone for successive generations of Christian selfless service in
India – a legacy that is most notable in the provision of schools and health
care – and a supportive presence among tribal peoples and the “poorest of
the poor”.
With an influential presence far greater than its size, it has remained the
consistent commitment of the Catholic Church in India in all its
organizations and groups to focus on the value of the human person and form
responsible citizens who are persons for others.
Emphasizing that the beauty of India lies in her unity in diversity as a
sign of the presence and working of God, the Indian Catholic bishops’ report
stresses that “a deeper understanding of our faith commitment urges us to
re-dedicate ourselves to the task of building the nation as a communion of
various communities.
“Each community should have genuine freedom in realizing its legitimate
aspirations and, at the same time, should exercise a sense of responsibility
in cherishing and fostering other cultures and religions”.
Nation building
The report is entitled ‘Christian Contribution to
Nation-building’ and in the words of the Bishop of Cochin: “Nation-building
entails the task of community building. Community includes all and excludes
none. It is the context where the principle of equality is practiced and
freedom of thought, expression and dissent affirmed.
“It implies co-existing with and accepting varied cultures and religious
traditions, and rejecting social inequality, or stratification on the basis
of caste, class or religion.
“A nation is built through peaceful, egalitarian, democratic and
participatory practices of self-governance and socio-economic development
with attention to distributive justice. It is the responsibility of every
citizen to contribute towards nation-building and space must be provided for
every Indian to play their part in the process [which] envisages a communion
of communities.”
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Church provided schools and clinics and missions to the poor. Today with an emphasis on a voice for even the poorest of the poor, participation at the local level and deliberative democracy, viewing the development of the person in the community and their “well-being” as the growth of real sustainable wealth, the Catholic Church in India is presently enabling a future world power to be a world leader.
That is, a world leader in new ways of ensuring inclusion of the poor, rebuilding democracy from the rural roots upwards. India, the world’s largest democracy, could become a new model of development for us all.<WM
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