Pontiff ‘s India Visit Today Stirs Ire of Some Hindus

When Pope John Paul II arrives in India today for a weekend visit, he will greet a Roman Catholic community under siege for allegedly pushing its religion too hard on the rest of the country.

There may be only 17 million Catholics in India, compared with 800 million Hindus, but leaders of several hard-line Hindu groups are demanding a papal apology for what they describe as a coordinated campaign by foreign missionaries to force thousands of Hindus to convert to Christianity. Several groups are promising to greet the pope with protest marches.

The furor surrounding the pope’s visit hits a sensitive nerve for many Indians, some of whom still associate Christianity--which came to India at least 1,500 years ago--with the era of British colonial domination.

The pope’s visit follows a string of assaults on Christians--both Protestant and Catholic--throughout the country, including the burning of churches, the raping of nuns and the killing of a priest.

“The church is trying to subvert our culture,” said R. Sanjay, a senior member of a Hindu nationalist group, the RSS. “We are fighting against colonial influence. The conflict is still going on. The missionaries are trying to take the people away from their roots.”

The RSS, like the other leading Hindu nationalist groups, has denied playing any role in the anti-Christian attacks. Indian government leaders have warned the extremist groups to stay peaceful during the pope’s visit, and they have promised extraordinary security for John Paul, who will celebrate an outdoor Mass in New Delhi for as many as 70,000 Catholics.

Finessing his visit to India may pose a special challenge for the pope. John Paul has worked harder than any other modern pontiff to promote understanding among different faiths, but officials at the Vatican say privately that the church’s missionary activity sometimes strains his message.

In the days leading up to the pope’s visit, Catholic leaders in India downplayed the influence of the Hindu nationalist groups. They said they expect that the pope’s visit will enhance religious harmony while reassuring India’s Catholics. But they gave short shrift to the demands for a papal apology.

“Apologize for what?” asked Archbishop Alan de Lastic in New Delhi. “You can’t force anyone to change religions. Conversion is something that happens in the mind and in the heart. It’s a purely personal act.”

Historically, Christianity has attracted Indians seeking to escape Hinduism’s rigidly hierarchical caste system. Others have been drawn by its hospitals and schools, which often serve the poor.

Catholic leaders in New Delhi say that although they don’t track the number of conversions nationwide, there are relatively few. And while they say they don’t know how many foreign missionaries are working in India, they insist that their numbers are also small--limited by a long-standing refusal by the Indian government to allow foreign missionaries to enter the country.

The only foreign-born Catholic missionaries left in India, church officials say, are foreigners who have lived in India since the 1960s--people now in their 60s and 70s.

Church leaders point out that the church’s leadership is overwhelmingly Indian: All 140 of the country’s Catholic bishops, for instance, were born here.

“We are all Indians,” said John Dayal, president of the All India Catholic Union. “My ancestors have been Catholic for hundreds of years.”

Legend has it that St. Thomas the Apostle brought Christianity here in A.D. 52, but some scholars say it was probably brought later, by Middle Eastern traders, in the 4th century.

Many nationalist groups insist that Hinduism is the religion of India and that Catholicism is a foreign faith. They accuse Christian missionaries not only of using trickery and force to convert Hindus but also of aiding separatist guerrillas in the country’s northeast.

“The hidden agenda . . . is to penetrate into new areas in India where the influence of Christianity has not spread so far,” said Dharmanarayan Sharma, national secretary of the World Hindu Forum.

While support for Hindu nationalists among the Indian population remains unclear, the recent string of attacks on Christians coincided with the victory last year of a coalition government dominated by the avowedly Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.

Several top BJP leaders, including Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, are members of the RSS. Vajpayee has condemned the attacks against Christians, but they have continued. One of the most notorious came in September, when a Catholic priest was killed by a group of unidentified men armed with bows and arrows and spears.

While the competing claims are difficult to sort out, the example of one popular Catholic preaching center suggests that many Hindus are converting to the Catholic faith on questionable promises, although hardly in numbers that threaten Hinduism’s overwhelming majority.

The Divine Retreat Center in the town of Chalakudy in Kerala state in the southwest attracts thousands of people from around India each week based on its reputation for performing miracle cures for the sick and disabled. “Believe and Be Healed,” the center’s literature says, and dozens of Christians and Hindus stand up at the end of each week to attest to their stunning recoveries.

“Jesus healed me,” said Kurumbakutty Vasu, who said she stood up on her own for the first time in three months after listening to a sermon by one of the center’s preachers. Vasu, a squat, gray-haired widow, said she has been going to Catholic services for eight years, since another of the Divine Retreat Center’s sermons cured her asthma.

“There was no life in my old gods,” Vasu said. “Now I believe in Jesus.”

But like many of the Hindus who attend sermons at the Divine Retreat Center, Vasu hasn’t converted to Catholicism. Vasu said she would like to be baptized but has resisted because she fears her son would cut off his financial support.

Many people attending sermons at the Divine Retreat Center said they saw no contradiction in believing in a Catholic God and remaining a Hindu. The Hindu religion accommodates hundreds of gods and a wide variety of beliefs. Many Hindus at the center who said they believe in Catholicism also said that they were under no pressure to change religions.

“I believe in Jesus, but I am still a Hindu and no one has asked me to convert,” Thankamma Sreedharem, who suffers from back pain, said after a sermon in which she wept and spoke in tongues.

“If you believe in Jesus Christ, you will be healed,” Sreedharem said. Father Mathew Naikomparambil, one of the preachers at the center, said he doesn’t need to forcibly convert anyone.

“When we preach that we have miracles and healings, and people come, they are dumbfounded,” Naikomparambil said. “And they cannot resist.”