Pope Tells Asian Bishops of Duty to Sole Savior

With a reminder that Jesus Christ was Asian, Pope John Paul II instructed his bishops on this least-Christianized continent Saturday to promote their religion with a firmer insistence that Christ is “the sole redeemer of the world.”

The Roman Catholic leader appealed with equal force to politicians and leaders of rival faiths to halt the discrimination and persecution that inhibit Catholic missionaries in many Asian countries from competing freely for souls.

“Let no one fear the church!” he told 300 bishops from across Asia who were gathered under electric fans in this capital’s sweltering Sacred Heart Cathedral. “Her one ambition is to continue Christ’s mission of service and love, so that the light of Christ may shine more brightly and the life that he gives may be more accessible to those who hear his call.”

John Paul’s speech and a written papal proclamation released Saturday gave a provocative answer to a simmering debate among Catholic leaders: Which is the best way to broaden the church’s appeal in the next millennium--by proclaiming Christ as the unique savior or merely by setting examples through good works?

Good works are important, the pope said, citing the late Mother Teresa’s missionary work among India’s poor. But “there can be no true evangelization without the explicit proclamation of Jesus as Lord,” he declared.

Some Asian bishops have challenged this emphasis as too dogmatic. They argue that exclusive language about salvation is offensive to Asia’s dominant religions--Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam--and that dialogue with leaders of those deeply rooted faiths should take precedence.

The debate has immediate resonance in India, where Christian missionaries who have stepped up conversions of poor tribal people in recent months are increasingly the target of violent attacks by Hindu fundamentalists.

Hindu activists with close ties to India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party are demanding that the pope recognize the salvation offered by their gods and order a halt to the conversions. In the days before his arrival late Friday for a three-day visit, they held rallies and burned the pontiff in effigy.

The government put 3,500 security forces in the streets to shield the stooped, ailing 79-year-old Polish pontiff from further demonstrations.

As John Paul laid a wreath Saturday at the memorial to Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi, police seized three men who were putting on black armbands several blocks away. “No conversions!” they shouted, as the police kicked and punched them and led them away.

The Asian continent, stretching from the Far East to Jesus’ birthplace in the Holy Land, is home to three-fourths of the world’s population, but fewer than 3% are Catholic. Catholics are a majority only in the Philippines; they endure government-imposed curbs on worship and missionary work in China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos and some Arab countries dominated by Islam.

John Paul said in his written proclamation that it is “indeed a mystery why the savior of the world, born in Asia, has until now remained largely unknown” to Asians.

The proclamation, titled “Ecclesia in Asia,” is an ambitious plan to change all that.

“The peoples of Asia need Jesus Christ and his Gospel,” the pope wrote. “Asia is thirsting for the living water that Jesus alone can give.

“Just as in the first millennium the cross was planted on the soil of Europe, and in the second on that of the Americas and Africa, we can pray that in the third Christian millennium a great harvest of faith will be reaped on this vast and vital continent,” he added.

The historical obstacles are formidable.

While praising early Catholic evangelizing in Asia as “heroic,” for example, John Paul failed to mention an atrocity for which the Hindu activists have demanded an apology--the killing of tens of thousands of Hindus who resisted conversion by Portuguese missionaries in 16th century India.

But the pope did acknowledge that belief in Christ as the world’s lone savior is a hard sell in Asia because many of its people identify the Gospel with the European colonizers who brought it.

He softened that message somewhat by declaring, as he has before, that it is possible for followers of other religions to be “saved by Christ” without being converted.

And he advised Catholics to introduce the Gospel gradually, adapting the teachings of Christ to local Asian customs and languages--but without compromises with conflicting beliefs.

This strategy of “acculturation” is popular among Asian bishops, and they campaigned at a regional synod in the Vatican last year to have control over such efforts. However, John Paul insisted Saturday that translations of the liturgy and veto power over innovative Asian forms of Catholic worship will remain in Vatican hands.

The papal proclamation also upheld the church’s opposition to abortion and “artificial population control programs,” voiced solidarity with Iraqis suffering because of the U.N. embargo, repeated John Paul’s desire to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and denounced the “continual race in Asia” to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

Three times in the document, the pope singled out the trials of Catholics in officially atheist China, which bans Christian worship outside “patriotic” churches set up under Communist Party control.

“Never allow hardship and sorrow to diminish your devotion to Christ and your commitment to your nation,” the pope told the millions of worshipers in China’s underground Catholic church.

Two auxiliary bishops from Hong Kong came here to receive the pope’s message. But the Chinese government rejected the Vatican’s proposal to hold the bishops’ gathering in Hong Kong and then refused to allow bishops from the mainland to leave the country so they could attend.

With the gathering moved to India, John Paul confronted far higher tensions between its 800 million Hindus and 23 million Christians than those that existed during his previous visit here, in 1986.

In an open letter to the pope, published Saturday in the Times of India, a prominent Hindu theologian, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, argued that, since Hindus do not claim to convert others, attempts by others to convert Hindus “are one-sided aggression.”

The pope did not respond directly, and Indian bishops, who deny using forceful or fraudulent inducements to win converts, did not press him to do so.

But papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls told reporters: “The biggest democracy in the world is faced with the problem of whether or not it recognizes religious freedom.”

India’s three top political leaders assured the pope in separate meetings Saturday that they support religious freedom, Navarro-Valls said. He quoted Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee as dismissing the Hindu fundamentalist movements, a bedrock of his party’s support, as “intolerant fringes.”

President Kocheril Raman Narayanan spoke favorably to the pope about his Catholic primary school education in the 1920s and ‘30s and said he hoped the papal visit would add luster to Diwali, today’s Hindu Festival of Lights.

John Paul, who suffers from symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and uses a cane, followed tradition by exchanging his shoes for rubber slippers to approach Gandhi’s black stone memorial. The slippers got stuck to the green outdoor carpet as he shuffled along, and the pope lost his balance for a moment, until an aide steadied him.

Before leaving, the pope wrote in the guest register an appeal for religious tolerance, quoting Gandhi himself: “A culture cannot survive if it attempts to be exclusive.”