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Date – 25-10-2011
His Holiness Pope Benedict
XVI
The Vatican
I am looking
forward to joining you in the Vatican and Assisi on the pilgrimage that you
have scheduled. I leave for
Rome tomorrow.
I am writing to you now as I
have just received the message issued by the Pontifical Council for
Interreligious Dialogue to the Hindus on the occasion of Diwali. I am
writing to you as a friend—in particular of the Christians in India.
Whenever they have been targeted by fanatics of other religions, including
Hindus, I have been in the forefront of taking up their cause.
Such efforts of well-wishers
like me can be set at naught by one of the themes that can be read into your
message. The communication that you have sent rightly places emphasis on
religious freedom. After enumerating several constituents of this, it
states, ‘ . . . it includes the freedom to change one’s religion.’
This enunciation needs to be
qualified. Otherwise, it will lend itself to the inference that, while the
message talks of freedom to believe in any religion and to practice it,
under the guise of advocating that noble ideal, what it does is to advance a
mandate for conversion.
This is bound to ignite
strong reactions in a country like India. We have suffered a great deal at
the hands of persons and organizations who have insisted that the only way
people can be saved is for them to give up their own faiths and adopt the
faith that is being proffered to them by missionaries and mullahs.
The reaction is all the more
certain as the allusion will be read as the continuation of the Pope John
Paul II’s Ecclesia in Asia and his address to the Cardinals and
Bishops that had assembled during his visit to India in November 1999. ‘Just
as in the first
millennium the Cross was
planted on the soil of Europe,” the Pope had declared, ‘and in the second
that of the Americas and Africa, we can pray that in the third Christian
millennium a great harvest of faith will be reaped in this vast and vital
continent.’ The synod is ‘an ardent affirmation of faith in Jesus Christ
the Saviour, and it remains a call to conversion . . .’ we were told.
As if endorsing the call of the assembled functionaries of the Church, he
declared fervently that ‘the heart of the Church in
Asia will be restless until
the whole of Asia finds its rest in the peace of Christ, the Risen Lord.’
The extension that the
communication has made—of freedom to believe to mean freedom for
missionaries to convert—is at complete variance with the theme that you have
enunciated for the pilgrimage. You have set it out as a journey towards
peace and truth. And your core message is that one’s commitment to peace and
truth is all that is required.
Moreover, the extension
flies in the face of what our Supreme Court has held. It has held that the
freedom to profess does not include the freedom to convert.
And that for good reasons:
●
Missionaries—and not just of the Church—have used the privations of the poor
to inveigle them into abandoning their own religions: as you know so well
from your close acquaintance with the history of the Church, they have not
just not stopped at using the extreme distress of our people during famines
and the like to ‘harvest their souls’, they have actively used such
tragedies.
●
They have
beguiled poor and ignorant people by pasting the most egregious falsehoods
on to our gods and goddesses.
●
Missionaries
have beguiled them by promises of miracles and the like. Far from the
promised miracles having come about, even the social equality within the
Church that was promised to members of lower castes in India, to take just
one example, has not come their way. Volumes upon volumes have been written
by the converted to this effect.
●
Ever so often,
those engineering the conversions have used the very coercion that your
message so strongly condemns.
●
Conversions by
such means have thrown individuals into confusion. They have alienated them
from the very communities that have sustained them. And, where the
conversions have ensnared large numbers, they have alienated these from the
larger community of which they are a part.
●
This has
ignited violence against groups and against individual missionaries also.
Such outcomes cannot but
disrupt the harmony that all of us are committed to promote.
I am with you in holding
that every individual should be free to explore other religions. That
exploration has to be free. It has to be by the individual herself or
himself. It has to be an informed search.
It must not be induced by
enticement. It must not be propelled by compulsion. It must not be
engineered by falsehoods and calumny. Nor by false promises. And certainly
not by coercion—including in the latter, coercion of the subtlest kind as in
frightening persons by hectoring them that ‘an unbaptised soul will be
condemned to eternal hell-fire.’
Such conversions cannot but
ignite strong reaction. They cannot but intensify tensions in our societies.
They will surely lead to violent outbursts. In a word, they will lead
precisely to the outcomes that this pilgrimage wishes so earnestly to
foreclose.
I, therefore, request that,
in contrast to the advocacy of conversion that can be inferred from your
message, we ask for a moratorium on collective conversions, on conversions
brought about by force or enticement. In particular, we should advocate a
moratorium on converting persons who are not yet mature to weigh options,
including the option not to align with any particular denominational
religion—after all, how can an infant or an unlettered tribal exercise an
informed choice?
Such a moratorium will give
peoples of different faiths time to catch their breath, and to reflect. It
will also give time to our various organizations and personnel to cleanse
their own conduct.
During this time, of course,
individuals will be totally free to practice their own religion, and, if
their inner search takes them to another faith, to embrace it.
I hope we will have a full
opportunity to discuss this matter at the conclave.
With best regards,
(Swami Agnivesh)
President
E-mail - agnivesh70@gmail.com
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