The Pope wears two hats � one religious, as the global pontiff of the Catholics, and the other political, as the head of Vatican State. The second one gives him and the Catholic faith a global political and diplomatic status which no other faith can match. As the head of the Vatican State, the Pope relates to all heads of State as a political equal and more.
When the present Pope’s predecessor, John Paul II, came to India, he proclaimed that the Church planted the Cross on Europe first, then on Americas and Africa and now, he said, it was Asia’s turn to bear the Cross! Asia was ripe, he said, for harvesting the souls � read heathens � for Christ.
In Latin America, John Paul II abused the Protestant Christians as `wolves’ for targeting the Catholics for conversion! Why the hate for conversions in Latin America and love for it in Asia? Simple, the more efficient conversions by Protestants in Latin America are
endangering the Catholics, but Asia, with its huge and weak heathen population, offers itself almost competition-free for the Church to convert.
Working on his predecessor’s intent to plant the Cross on India, the new Pope Benedict XVI has moved further and virtually abused India for growing religious intolerance and for impeding the church work by anti-conversion laws. Two weeks back when the new Indian ambassador to Vatican, Amitava Tripathi, presented his credentials to the Pope as the head of the Vatican state, the Pope shocked him saying that Indian laws against conversions offend freedom of faith and should be rejected as unconstitutional.
This angered even the normally timid, secular Indian establishment to react sharply, call in Vatican’s charge de affairs in Delhi and tell him sternly of the Indian Government’s strong disapproval of the Pope’s conduct.
But has the Pope the moral authority to fault others for lack of religious freedom? In the Pope’s own Vatican State no faith other than his own is allowed. If the Papacy regards even other Orthodox and Protestant Christians as heretics, where is the question of freedom for idol worshipping heathens to whom the Bible itself denies freedom. The Vatican Constitution is named as `Apostolic Constitution’, that is constitution of Christian missionaries! Spain where till date Catholicism is the state religion has again a treaty with the Papacy. Will the Pope allow freedom of faith in Vatican and sermonise on freedom to those countries?
Presumably the Pope was misled by his establishment in India. The Churches selling his faith in India have been campaigning, but falsely, that the anti-conversion laws passed by Madhya Pradesh and Orissa States decades earlier and by the Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh
Governments in recent times are unconstitutional. But long before, in 1977, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court had overruled the challenge to anti-conversion laws of MP and Orissa. The Pope’s own agencies in India had challenged the laws. The Court firmly told the soul-harvesters that the religious freedom under the Indian Constitution was limited to the right to propagate one’s faith and did not extend to convert other faithfuls.
The MP Government did not wake up one fine morning and pass this law. In 1950s it had appointed a committee headed by Justice Neogi, which included a Christian member who was also a Gandhian, to study allegations of forcible and fraudulent conversions of tribal and illiterate people by foreign missionaries. The committee submitted a voluminous, unanimous report detailing fraudulent conversions by the Church. The MP Government then under the Congress party merely enacted the recommendations of the Neogi committee. The pontiff of Indian secularism Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru was then the Prime Minister.
The Supreme Court has declared that religious conversion is not part of religious freedom in the Indian Constitution and Indian anti- conversion laws are constitutional. But the Pope asserts the other way round, that is, conversion is part of freedom of faith in the
Indian Constitution and Indian anti-conversional laws are unconstitutional. The question is: who is supreme in India � the Pope or the Supreme Court?
