Cardinal Alencherry's concern over people leaving Catholic Church in India

The question is apposite and needs some deep soul-searching. Are people scampering from Catholic Church in India? Cardinal George Alencherry, the head of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church in India, recently expressed concern over people leaving from Catholic Church in India.

  Addressing the 31st Plenary of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) in Palai, a Christian-dominated town in Kerala, South India, Cardinal Alencherry drew the attention of the bishops to the rising number of people who're disinterested in the Church or leaving the Church and embracing some other sects of believers. "This is a serious problem the Church in India should address. We need more people of committed faith and living witness. The priests, religious and the laity should be prepared for hardships and sufferings," the Cardinal said.

 Cardinal Alencherry's comments were released by Fr Joseph Chinnayyan, Deputy Secretary General and Spokesperson of CBCI in a press statement on February 7. With 185 bishops in attendance, Cardinal Oswald Gracias, Archbishop of Mumbai, called the Palai plenary the biggest so far in the history of the CBCI. India, which is the fourth largest bishops’ conference in the world, has 167 dioceses.

  (For our readers in other countries, the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church is one of the 22 Eastern (Oriental) Catholic Churches in full communion with Rome. It is the second largest Eastern Catholic Church after the Ukrainian Church with 4.6 million believers).

  The clergy is well aware of the mushrooming of different sects of believers in Kerala and many other states and the fact that majority of the people who flock to other sects originally belonged to the Catholic Church.

  Pope Francis has already answered Cardinal Alencherry's concerns. Take a look at Evangelii Gaudium, the apostolic exhortation of Pope Francis in which the Holy Father clearly wants a Church “living in the midst of the homes of her sons and daughters”. In other words, he says church should be in contact with the homes and the lives of its people, and does not become a useless structure out of touch with people or a “self-absorbed group made up of a chosen few”. This fact is forgotten in many places.

  According to Pope, if part of our baptized people lack a sense of belonging to the Church, this is also due to certain structures and the occasionally unwelcoming atmosphere of some of our parishes and communities, or to a bureaucratic way of dealing with problems, be they simple or complex, in the lives of our people. “In many places an administrative approach prevails over a pastoral approach, as does a concentration on administering the sacraments apart from other forms of evangelization,” the papal document says.

  He says spiritual worldliness lurks behind a fascination with social and political gain, or pride in their ability to manage practical affairs, or an obsession with programmes of self-help and self-realization. “It can also translate into a concern to be seen, into a social life full of appearances, meetings, dinners and receptions. It can also lead to a business mentality, caught up with management, statistics, plans and evaluations whose principal beneficiary is not God’s people but the Church as an institution,” he says.

  As Vatican says, there is a growing attraction to various forms of a “spirituality of well-being” divorced from any community life, or to a “theology of prosperity” detached from responsibility for our brothers and sisters, or to depersonalized experiences which are nothing more than another form of self-centredness. This happens frequently nowadays, as believers seek to hide or keep apart from others, or quietly flit from one place to another or from one task to another, without creating deep and stable bonds, or in other words, a personal and committed relationship with God.

 What’s the solution? Archbishop Salvatore Pennachio, the Apostolic Nuncio to India, who addressed the CBCI session, said an ecclesial renewal cannot be deferred and that all renewal must lead the church to the recognition of her missionary vocation. He underlined the relevance of renewal of the Church as a sure pathway towards greater fidelity to Christ and to the gospel.