The Vatican and many of the Latin-rite bishops of India are not treating the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church with justice, Auxiliary Bishop Bosco Puthur of Ernakulam-Angamaly in Kerala, India, told Pope Benedict XVI on April 7 during an ad limina visit to Rome. While other Christians and other religions enjoy the freedom to build churches and conduct services anywhere in India, the Eastern Catholic churches “are denied it, paradoxically not by the state, but by our own ecclesiastical authorities,” the bishop said. Generally the leaders of Eastern Catholic churches, like the Syro-Malabar Church, enjoy full freedom to elect bishops and erect dioceses only in their church’s traditional territory; otherwise, the responsibility is left to the pope, often in consultation with the Latin-rite bishops of the region concerned. Bishop Puthur told Pope Benedict that the Syro-Malabar church’s traditional territory was all of India until Latin-rite missionaries arrived in the 15th century. Now any of its faithful who live outside Kerala State are subject to the authority of the local Latin-rite bishop.
Church Conflict in India
Show Comments (
)
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
The latest from america
In this episode of Inside the Vatican, Colleen Dulle and Gerard O’Connell discuss the 2025 Jubilee Year, beginning on Christmas Eve 2024 and ending in January 2026.
Pope Francis prayed that the Jubilee Year may become “a season of hope” and reconciliation in a world at war and suffering humanitarian crises as he opened the Holy Door in St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Eve.
‘If God can visit us, even when our hearts seem like a lowly manger, we can truly say: Hope is not dead; hope is alive and it embraces our lives forever!’
Inspired by his friend and mentor Henri Nouwen, Metropolitan Borys Gudziak, leader of Ukrainian Catholics in the U.S., invites listeners in his Christmas Eve homily to approach the manger with renewed awe and openness.