The Catholic Church in India lost one of its ‘truly remarkable shepherds’ this week with the death of 81-year-old Archbishop Emeritus Raphael Cheenath of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar, who died August 14. As the senior metropolitan archbishop in the region, gave leadership to the Church in Odisha when the anti-Christian wave swept the eastern Indian state. His funeral was held on Wednesday.
Raphael Cheenath (29 December 1934 – 14 August 2016) was the archbishop of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar, India. He was ordained as a priest of the Society of the Divine Word on 21 September 1963 and appointed bishop of Sambalpur, India on 28 February 1974. He was appointed as archbishop of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar on 1 July 1985 and retired on 11 February 2011. Cheenath died on 14 August 2016 at Holy Spirit Hospital in Bombay (Mumbai).
The Kandhamal district of his archdiocese was the setting for the most violent anti-Christian pogrom of the early 21st century in 2008, when mobs of Hindu radicals set upon Christian villages.During the violence some 60,000 had to flee to the forests to save their lives when the fanatics attacked some 6,000 houses, burning down many of them. More than 100 people were killed, and many women, including Catholic nuns, were gang raped.
The sort of savagery reported during the ‘riots’ belonged the Middle Ages. One Baptist preacher was reportedly buried in a pit for three days, then dug up and his intestines were ripped out – his attackers wore them around their necks as a kind of a macabre war trophy.
The victims were almost entirely Dalits and Tribals, so the motive for the communal attacks was compounded by issues of class and race.
Arbishop Cheenath, a Verbite priest by formation, was profoundly affected by the experience. He had been the bishop for almost 25 years, so he knew the people, the places, and he deeply felt the pain of their losses.
Cheenath became a champion of the oppressed in India. He was unsparing in his critique of the radical Hindutva groups that orchestrated the violence.
“They survive by lies,” he once told an interviewer. “If you want to know the real story, their model is Nazism and Fascism is their philosophy, so they can survive only by lies.” Until that changes, he predicted, “there won’t be much peace” for Christians in the country. “There will be constant harassment,” he said.
Cheenath was candid about what he saw as the failures of the Indian Church’s response to the tragedy.
“There are many issues which need to be tended to, and for that the church is not attentive,” he said. “I think it forgot about it too, and the church should continue the fight. The people in Kandhamal cannot fight, so the whole Church as such should come forward, take up issues that might endanger the future and mission of the Church, and fight them continuously. This, I don’t see we’re doing.”
When the forces behind the violence, he asked, “can tell so many lies beautifully, why can’t we tell the truth?”
The Archbishop had been ‘deeply evangelized’ by the victims of Kandhamal.
“They lived in the forest and they lost everything, except the few things they could carry with them. The rest all stolen or burned. There was hardly anyone left in the church,” he said.
“So when I went to meet them in the street, market place, refugee camps, I was worried about what to tell this people, how to console them. And they were consoling me. They told me, we lost everything, our house, our people, our clothes, but we won’t give up our faith.”
“They’re telling me that they’re not giving up,” he said. “And they will not give up.”
Cheenath’s ardent hope was that the martyrs of Kandhamal would one day be beatified and eventually canonized, and that the pope himself would come to India to do it.
Archbishop Cheenath “died a winner” since the Supreme Court of India Aug. 2 2016 granted his petition for enhanced relief to the victims of the violence against the Christian community of Kandhamal. He was a priest for 53 years and a bishop for 42 years.
Archbishop’s death is loss for Kandhamal Martyrs added by editor1 on
View all posts by editor1 →