Photo: CNS Renewal must be a priority for the Church in India, the country’s bishops have said.
In a statement following their biennial assembly, the bishops noted the Church’s “excessive preoccupation with institutionalisation, insufficient zeal and fear of proclaiming Christ as the unique saviour”.
They also acknowledged a “growing indifference to and lack of commitment to the Christian vocation”, lamenting increased divorce and abortion rates as indicative of a moral decline among Christians.
“Within the Church, we feel the need to renew ourselves, including the bishops,” Cardinal Baselios Cleemis Thottunkal, Archbishop of the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church and president of the assembly, said at a news conference.
Church leaders, he said, “need to adopt styles of simplicity, not as administrators or corporate executives, but of a more pastoral nature so that the people could feel the presence of the God of mercy”.
Asian Church must be one ‘of the poor”
The former head of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences has echoed Pope Francis and challenged Asia’s Church leaders to evangelise by being a Church of the poor.
The Philippines’ Cardinal Orlando Quevedo of Cotabato told an audience at Manila University that Jesus “strikes at the natural upward mobility of humankind … and goes down to the downtrodden, walks among them, lives with them, takes up their burdens, calls them his friends.
“This predilection for the poor, we now call his preferential option for the poor,” he continued, stressing, “This is how we see Jesus with an Asian face.”
The most effective mode of evangelisation in Asia, he said, would entail sharing Jesus’ story through dialogue between different cultures and faiths and with the poor. Afterward he said in an interview that Africa and Asia, where the world’s poorest live, are where Catholicism has been steadily increasing.
photo: CNS