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November      Last updated: Nov 20,  5:00 p.m.

Agenda

Pope's Fundamentalist Agenda

Vatican remains intransigent while the Indian intelligentsia is not yet mature enough to face issues squarely

N.S. Rajaram

The Godman of Rome

The Godman of Rome, who styles himself as the Holy Father, Vicar of Christ, Pontifex Maximums and so on and so forth, but better known as Pope John Paul II, came to India and went. His Holy Mass on amavasya (dark moon) was also symbolic of its message of medieval darkness, seething with intolerance and doublespeak, more of which later. His speech--read from a written text--was an exercise in inspired incoherence.

The conduct of the media was along predictable lines. The same people who clamoured for the Government to disown "fundamentalist" organisations like the VHP and the RSS did not see it fit to comment on the impropriety of extending a royal welcome to the chief of a fundamentalist religious organisation like the Vatican. The media by and large ignored the message of the Asian Bishops’ Synod--that the Church remains as intransigent as ever as regards its main agenda, which is aggressive conversion activities in Asia. The synod report repeated verbatim the famous--or infamous--words of the previous Asian synod: "A great new harvest of faith will be reaped in this vast and vital continent." The attitude of the Indian intelligentsia may be summed up : "The Vatican is a western institution and the Pope is is a westerner. We as Indians have no right either to criticize them or question their behavior. Our sole duty is to bow to him as our superior.

The message

As far as the papal visit itself, what promised to be a bang ended in whimper. While we should be grateful to the Holy Father for demonstrating the aptness of Napoleon’s dictum--"From the sublime to the ridiculous is but one step", there is also a sinister side to the story. His spokesmen were intransigent, even insolent. There was no dilution of the Church’s fundamental claim that salvation is possible only through Jesus. To go with this, people who demanded a retraction of this absurdity were dubbed as fundamentalists, even by the largely secular western media. This shows that the secular-humanist west still views fundamentalism through Christian eyes. Although it might deride and reject Christian fundamentalism at home, when it comes to non-Christian countries, it views opposition to Christian aggression as fundamentalist. As a result, it sees the aspiration of the Hindus in their own country as fundamentalist. This suggests that the west has not yet grown out of tis colonial and sometimes racist mindset.  

The most articulate of the Pope’s spokesmen was Dr.Joaquin Navarro-Valls, a Spanish theologian and lawyer. Now this Navarro-Valls is a colorful character. He is close to Cardinal Ricardo Maria Carles of Barcelona, said to be the most likely candidate to succeed John Paul as Pope. When Cardinal Carles was embroiled in a case involving the smuggling of ‘red mercury’--a key ingredient in a particularly lethal kind of nuclear weapons--it was Navarro-Valls who sprang to his defence. (This was financed by Gaddafi of Libya with money laundered through the Vatican Bank.) The prominence of Spaniards like Carles and Navarro-Valls in the Vatican establishment is a reflection of the increasing clout enjoyed by the Spanish Mafia Opus Dei. It is also indicative of the kind of characters that now dominate the Vatican, that India has to deal with.

In his dealings with the media, Navarro-Valls was at his duplicitous best. He proclaimed that democracy means freedom of religion. Imagine this from a fundamentalist organisation which consigns nonbelievers to eternal hell! And the audacity of the man lecturing to Indians about democracy and religious tolerance when two of its own Popes --Pius XI and Pius XII --were Hitler’s cronies! Even worse, the Indian media supinely accepted such admonitions from this professional hypocrite.

Equating democracy and human rights with religious conversion is the Vatican’s latest ploy to protect its missionary activities. And the Pope’s call for ‘dialogue’ on these terms. But like every position taken by the Vatican, it has a built-in double standard. This ‘religious freedom’ is only for Christians in non-Christian countries. It does not apply to non-Christians, even in their own country, as in India. It is not likely that the Vatican will ever allow a Hindu temple or a mosque to be constructed within its walls. Forget about the Vatican, when a mosque was built in the city of Rome, the appropriately named Cardinal Oddi screamed: "I consider the presence of a mosque, and the attached Islamic centre, to be an offence to the sacred ground of Rome." These are the people lecturing to India about democracy and religious tolerance.

The Goa inquisition

When questioned about the Vatican’s attitude towards the Goa inquisition, the smooth-talking Navarro-Valls held that there was no need to express regrets for an ‘aberration’; in its history that occurred centuries ago. Indian Christian leaders also indulged in some double-talk of their own. Alan de Lastic, Archbishop of Delhi, likened the demand for apology for the Goa inquisition to a demand for the Greeks to apologize for Alexander’s invasion. In effect he was suggesting that the Vatican should not be held responsible for Portuguese atrocities. This is a blatant lie : the inquisition was a church institution, not a Protuguese. The demand for it was made by St.Xavier, not the Portugues rulers. The authority of the inquisitors deputed by the Pope greatly exceeded that of the Portuguese Viceroy J.C. Barreto Miranda, a goanese historian, wrote :

"The cruelties which one in the name of the religion of peace and love which this tribunal practiced in Europe, were carried to even greater excesses in India, where the inquisitors, surrounded by luxuries which would stand comparison with the regal magnificence of the great potentates of Asia, saw with pride the Archbishop as well as the Viceroy submitted to their power. Every word of theirs was a sentence of death and at their slightest nod were moved to terror the vast populations spread over the Asiatic regions,...and who, on the most frivolous pretext could be clapped for all time in the deepest dungeon and strangled or offered as food for the flames of the pyre."

This is what ‘Saint’ Xavier brought to India! The Portuguese inquisition was abolished only in 1812. So the good Archbishop of Delhi is being less than honest in blaming the Portuguese rulers for the atrocities, dragging in Alexander the Great in the bargain. It is also worth noting that the Vatican office authorised and conducted the inquisition still exists. It is no longer called the Holy Office or the Holy Inquisition, but the ‘Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’. Its head is Cardinal Josef Ratzinger of Munich, the present Pope’s favourite Cardinal. He is a living example of the medieval mindset of John Paul II and his followers.

There is another important difference. Alexander and his pretended successors were driven out in less than a generation. But the residue of Christian imperialism remains and continues to make special demands on the majority to pursue their imperialist agenda. One would like also to know what exactly is the role that Archbishop de Lastic and his ilk see for themselves in all this. Are they spokesmen for the Pope’s theocratic ideology or are they his political representatives as the head of the Vatican state?

This cannot go on for ever. India is now catching up with the rest of the world and beginning to see Christianity in its true colours. It is only a matter of time before Christian institutions in India share the fate of those in Europe. This is part of the de-colonisation process. The Pope’s visit has served to highlight all this by bringing the truth to public attention, and exposing the true face of Christian ‘leaders’. These leaders care for nothing but their own survival. It is for the Christians of India to decide whether they want to think and act independently--like their western counterparts--or allow these chameleons in holy robes to lead them to a Dark Age like the one that the Church created in Medieval Europe.