Mission in ASIA
Vol. XVI
No. 8
SEPTEMBER 2004
Very
Different Now
by Fabio Patt, mccj
A Church socially involved with women
Although Christians in India are only a tiny minority of the population (about 2.5% of its 1.03 billion citizens) and only a little more than half of them are Catholics, the Church is very active in the social arena – including in the empowerment of women, as Comboni Brother Fabio Patt saw on a recent visit.
Almost every diocese has a Social Service Society or a Social Action Centre that coordinates many different activities aimed at building a more just society through human development. Together with Natural Resource Management (including sustainable agriculture, prevention of soil erosion, rain water harvesting, etc.) and campaigns against Child Labour, the Empowerment of Women is a top priority in the southern regions of India.
Condition of women
The plight of women in India is far worse than in other patriarchal societies. This is due to the socio-cultural-religious sanctions women have to face in every detail of their lives:
1. The concept of the caste system (which is the intrinsic backbone of life and society). The caste logic professes that human beings are born unequal, live unequal and die unequal. There is no possibility of changing one's caste or having mobility within the caste system during this earthly life. The caste system is culturally deep-rooted, but nowadays things are changing very gradually, thanks to both legislation and education.
2. The male domination due to cultural practices.
3. The dowry system, where the bride’s family has to pay huge sums of money and give expensive gadgets to the groom.
Equality imposed?
The Indian Constitution has imposed equality of persons as the dominant value system. This is creating a conflict between the traditionally in-built values of inequality, and the process of modernization.
The very low and silent role that traditionally has been assigned to women, practically restricting them to the inside of the house, is today being militantly resisted. The mythical value of “a glorious harmony in hierarchy of castes” is now replaced by the new trend of “competition for equality”, where also minority groups (such as women and lower caste people) are given more importance while striving to make their presence felt and enjoy an equal place in society.
Officially, the dowry system has also been abolished by law, and in all Indian states there are laws that mandate the prosecution of those practicing it (although, in practice, convictions are not easily made and this tradition continues to thrive).
New awareness
The Catholic Church aims at eradicating these and other social problems through conscientization of the people and working towards the formation of a just and sustainable social order, where the Gospel values of love, equality and peace are nurtured and lived, so that the human dignity of the poor and marginalised can be restored through a process of empowerment where the poor emerge as persons with a positive self image.
This is the particular Vision and Mission of “Caritas India”, the social concern and action organization set up by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India. Through its regional and diocesan offices throughout the country, Caritas India provides welfare and relief assistance to people in cities and remote villages alike during emergencies and natural or man-made disasters. It also runs programs of capacity building for human development, often in cooperation with local social agencies and/or organizations of different denominations and religions.
Developing harmony
One such case is the Ashraya Trust Organization, which operates in the Mandya District, some 100 Km to the north-west of Bangalore, in Karnataka state.
With one Project Coordinator and five Field Officers, Ashraya Trust works for the empowerment of women in remote rural areas in view of social development and harmony. Availing itself of the expertise and dedication of a dozen Social Workers directly involved in work with the people, in the past four years Ashraya Trust has established 37 Self Help Groups (SHGs) of women in 15 poor villages. The project has been sponsored by Asia Partnership for Human Development (APHD - an association of 23 Catholic social agencies mostly from Asian countries) under the supervision of Caritas India.
Field workers (who are an equal proportion of men and women) enthusiastically report the change of attitude of the local population: from the initial indifference and even hostility by the male villagers (afraid their women were being organized against them), to the present widespread acceptance and recognition of their work, concretely expressed by the fact that some husbands now even take care of the children or cook supper at home in order to allow their spouses to attend the weekly meeting of the Women Group.
Groups’ leaders are also very outspoken: it is clear that these women’s self-esteem is high and they are delighted to inform visitors of all the new opportunities that being organized in SHGs has given them, such as the possibility to access bank loans to start small income-generation projects, or the success in gaining back for public use some village’s land unlawfully encroached by a local administrator.
The present situation is already a great deal different from when the program “Empowerment of Women for Social Change” was started: it is now difficult to believe that just a few years ago these women were not allowed to leave their own houses, and that they were accepting the situation as if it were normal for a woman not to come out in society but be confined to the four walls of her house…<WMCopyright © World Mission Magazine