Virgil
01-31-2009, 01:08 PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/29/another-india-exposed/
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Stairway to Heaven COLUMN
Julia Duin
The popular film "Slumdog Millionaire" may be the public face of India these days but one Catholic archbishop now in Washington is trying to educate listeners about another India.
That's rural Orissa, India's least-developed, poorest state not far from Calcutta, the home of Mother Teresa. Last summer, a priest was tortured and a nun gang-raped in Kandhmal, a cauldron of radical Hinduism and the site of an anti-Christian pogrom in August.
The depressing details of it all have been previously described by this writer: 70,000 homeless Christians, more than 5,000 homes destroyed, 3,000 people missing and/or hiding in the nearby jungles for the past five months, 87 people burned or hacked to death and the infrastructure of the Catholic Church destroyed.
Archbishop Raphael Cheenath, 75, of Cuttack/Bhubaneswar and the spiritual head of five Catholic dioceses in Orissa, says 50 percent of Orissa's 1 million Christians are Roman Catholics. French missionaries planted Catholicism there about 130 years ago.
Hundreds of their schools, churches and other institutions have been destroyed. Displaced people sitting in refugee camps are afraid to return to their villages.
"They believe they will be attacked again and again," he said Tuesday, just after his plane landed here. "Those who have gone back have been forced to become Hindus, and the police are not stopping this. They have been mere spectators in this affair."
Orissa has a law forbidding forced conversions but apparently this only applies to people who wish to leave the Hindu religion.
<snipped>
============
Stairway to Heaven COLUMN
Julia Duin
The popular film "Slumdog Millionaire" may be the public face of India these days but one Catholic archbishop now in Washington is trying to educate listeners about another India.
That's rural Orissa, India's least-developed, poorest state not far from Calcutta, the home of Mother Teresa. Last summer, a priest was tortured and a nun gang-raped in Kandhmal, a cauldron of radical Hinduism and the site of an anti-Christian pogrom in August.
The depressing details of it all have been previously described by this writer: 70,000 homeless Christians, more than 5,000 homes destroyed, 3,000 people missing and/or hiding in the nearby jungles for the past five months, 87 people burned or hacked to death and the infrastructure of the Catholic Church destroyed.
Archbishop Raphael Cheenath, 75, of Cuttack/Bhubaneswar and the spiritual head of five Catholic dioceses in Orissa, says 50 percent of Orissa's 1 million Christians are Roman Catholics. French missionaries planted Catholicism there about 130 years ago.
Hundreds of their schools, churches and other institutions have been destroyed. Displaced people sitting in refugee camps are afraid to return to their villages.
"They believe they will be attacked again and again," he said Tuesday, just after his plane landed here. "Those who have gone back have been forced to become Hindus, and the police are not stopping this. They have been mere spectators in this affair."
Orissa has a law forbidding forced conversions but apparently this only applies to people who wish to leave the Hindu religion.
<snipped>