Inter-faith Dialogue: Vatican in sheep's clothing

by Radha Rajan
11th June, 2009
VIGIL Public Opinion Forum

Modified weapon of mass destruction

The Vatican wolf is at our doors again playing grandmother and perhaps hoping that the Hindu religious leadership with whom it wants ‘dialogue’ and the de-Hinduised political leadership which permitted its entry into the nation will play naive Red Riding Hood. Among the several individual Hindu religious leaders who will be meeting the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for inter-faith dialogue in Mumbai on the 12th and 13th of June 2009, will be the senior Mathathipathi of the Kanchi matham, monks of the Ramakrishna Mission, Sri Sri Ravishankar and one Swami Chidanand Saraswati from Divine Life Society, Uttaranchal.

Hindu nationalists know and understand the political objectives of the Church and Islam; the outcome of the meeting on the 12th and 13th of June notwithstanding, we firmly dismiss the very idea of inter-faith dialogue because, by the Vatican’s own admission, dialogue is only Church ploy to seek accommodation in non-Christian, non-Islamic nations and societies to carry out its only mission – to Christianize the world. Hindu nationalists will be compelled to publicly reject any joint declaration, or resolutions adopted at these dialogue meetings if they in any manner compromise the interests of Hindu dharma on Hindu bhumi. Knowing what they do, Hindu nationalists therefore consider the very presence of Hindu religious leaders at such dialogues with the enemies of dharma to be an affront to the dignity of our sanyasis and to the honour of all dharmis.

The Christian church and the Muslim mosque are not sacred places like the Hindu temple. These are places for the faithful to congregate for prayer and politics while our temples are abodes of the divine; the Divine, in supreme compassion for the bhakta, consents to reside in the structure raised by the bhakta. Hindu temples are therefore the sacred and divine core of Hindu society and all activities of society are governed by the consciousness that the divine is residing in our midst. The village and village temples were therefore self-governing autonomous units linked by a common worldview defined by dharma, karma and the purusharthas to the larger pradesa, desa and rajya.

The Church however is both the small ‘c’hurch building in the locality where the Christian faithful gather and also the big ‘C’hurch which is the entire edifice of the religion called Christianity; and this includes its headquarters in the Vatican and the Catholic Hierarchy – the Pope, Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops, Pastors, Monks, Nuns and Priests. The Vatican is a State, its purpose is political and militarist and its Religious Hierarchy constitutes the government (Cardinals), the diplomats (Cardinals), the bureaucracy (Archbishops and Bishops) and the local municipal councilor (Monks, Nuns, Pastors and Priests). All of them are also collectively the Army of Christ driven by the mission to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth. Christian theology is therefore also replete also with militarist jargon.

The Anglican Church and the Protestant Churches outside the UK also have their own Capitals and well-organized centralized, hierarchical edifices like the Vatican. And they are all expansionists by nature and have the same single-pointed objective of christianising the world. To the Hindus and other targeted victims of the Church therefore, there is no redeeming distinction among the denominations; Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, New Life, Adventist or Jehovah’s Witnesses, they are all the same.

The Church is a self-perpetuating creature; it has to keep reiterating its raison d’etre or its mission for existence periodically for sheer survival; and these statements of intent and objectives have come at more frequent intervals in the last five decades, signaling the challenges to the survival not only of the Christian religion but also its expansionist edifice. The Second Vatican Council declaration Ad Gentes, Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris Missio and Cardinal Ratzinger-authored ((the incumbent Pope before he became the Pope) Dominus Jesus, all reiterate the agenda and the mission of the Catholic Church.

We are concerned in the main with the Catholic Church for two reasons: one, the intended inter-faith dialogue in Mumbai is a Catholic-Hindu dialogue; and two, the Catholic Church or the Vatican has written and documented statements on its website of its intent and its mission which prove its guilt. We have it on the best authority that this dialogue was sought by the Vatican and also that the Vatican has taken the position that the escalating disharmony between Hindus and Christians in India has been caused by some of the new denominational churches with their brash conversion methodology. In essence, the Vatican has absolved itself of ‘offensive and unethical’ religious conversion. It is our responsibility to prove that the Vatican is lying through its teeth in the hope that it can still get away behind the veil of Hindu ignorance/tolerance and its own notorious secretive modus operandi.

We will refer to only two important documents to expose the Vatican for the fascist state that it is – the mission statement Ad Gentes from the Second Vatican Council and ‘Challenges Today to Mission “Ad Gentes” – Meeting of the Superiors General of Societies of Apostolic Life, Maryknoll, NY, USA, 1st May, 2000’. Fascism is not a word to be used lightly or loosely; political fascism derived from a monotheism which is only religious fascism. While the original Ad Gentes stated the mission of the Catholic Church in the brevity of a couplet, the statement of the Superiors General states the same in epic format.

“The pilgrim Church is missionary by her very nature, since it is from the mission of the Son and the mission of the Holy Spirit that she draws her origin, in accordance with the decree of God the Father”

“Then, when He had by His death and His resurrection completed once for all in Himself the mysteries of our salvation and the renewal of all things, the Lord, having now received all power in heaven and on earth (cf. Matt. 28 18), before He was taken up into heaven (cf. Acts 1:11), founded His Church as the sacrament of salvation and sent His Apostles into all the world just as He Himself had been sent by His Father (cf. John 20:21), commanding them: "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Matt. 28:19 ff.). "Go into the whole world, preach the Gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized shall be saved; but he who does not believe, shall be condemned" (Mark 16:15ff.).” (Ad Gentes, Second Vatican Council)

Fascism is inherent in Christ’s proclamation that it is not enough to believe, but the faithful have to be baptized (self-perpetuating church) and also that while he who believes and is baptized will be ‘saved’, those who do not believe and who reject the church will be condemned. This fascist exhortation rooted in the intolerant Christian God the Father and in the intolerant Son, Jesus Christ created the fascist Church which caused genocide of entire non-Christian nations, civilizations, peoples, faiths and religions. It is this Catholic Church which is seeking to sweep its bloody past history away from sight and is seeking dialogue with Hindu religious leaders in the backdrop of angry Hindu reaction to frenzied religious conversion undertaken by the Church across India.

“Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris missio, subtitled "On the Permanent Validity of the Church’s Missionary Mandate", was an eloquent appeal to renew missionary fervor within the Church.

The very need for an encyclical such as Redemptoris missio was indicative that a problem existed. There had been an acute questioning of the purpose of mission immediately after the Council even by missionaries themselves. The crisis of the 1960’s and 1970’s was not just a theological one; the decolonization and new statehood of many mission lands had led to calls -- especially in Africa -- of a "moratorium" on mission.

The second shift has to do with the forms of evangelization. Most important here is the introduction of dialogue alongside proclamation. Redemptoris missio tries to address the relation between dialogue and proclamation; the Vatican document Dialogue and Proclamation, issued jointly by the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples and the Pontifical Council on Inter-religious Dialogue just a few months after Redemptoris missio, tries to go even further. Mission had been rather clearly understood as proclamation of the Gospel to those who had not heard it. The importance given to dialogue by Nostra aetate at the Vatican Council raised a new set of issues. By according respect to other religious traditions, and by promoting dialogue with them rather than an apologetic to prove their errors, how to relate the aims of proclamation and dialogue to each other becomes problematic. While both Church documents and theological publications have tried to explicate and clarify the relationship between them, the confusion continues. If dialogue (or at least certain kinds of dialogue with certain aims of respect of the other) is an end in itself, then what happens to proclamation as traditionally understood, and a fortiori to mission ad gentes? (Statement of the Superiors General in NY, USA, 2000)

Now let us take these documents apart to clearly see what the Vatican stands for and what our Hindu religious leaders have to confront when they sit across the table with these diabolic agents of destruction of other religions.

Ad Gentes says the Church is missionary be nature. This means the Church’s whole purpose of existence is only its mission to take the Gospel to those who have not heard it. In brief, Christianize the world.

The core of the Christian faith is that it ‘saves’ all humans who believe and who are baptized, This is a two-in-one proposition – ensures the relevance of the persona of Jesus Christ and also ensures the continuity of the Church edifice. This is salvation or the salvific nature of the Christian religion and the Church. Like Allah and the Prophet Mohammed who cannot be separated as two entities by the Muslim faithful, belief in Christ as the Son of God and the Church are two in-severable entities. They go together and sustain each other.

The mission of the Catholic Church to Christianize the world, in the beginning, was effected by weapons that suited the fascist agenda in a world disarmed and subjugated by White Christian colonialism – genocide, war, forcible conversion, separation of children from parents in non-Christian colonized nations when the children were brought up as Christians. Second World War and the ugly truths of Christian roots of Nazism, fascism and colonization made such ruthless methods increasingly untenable and so the Second Vatican Council crafted its modified weapon – inter-faith dialogue. Now, the Church will not ram the Christian faith down the throats of non-believers by hectoring to them about ‘satan worship, false gods and barbaric, pagan superstitions’ but will approach them respectfully for dialogue and tell them politely that the Catholic Church is the sole repository of truth, Jesus Christ is the only Lord and the Church the only way to salvation. The agenda remains the same – Christianize the world but the words, on the surface will be polite but the execution of the mission will be just as ruthless and as determined.

Inter-faith dialogue is the weapon of the Catholic Church crafted in the Second Vatican Council for easy penetration not of societies but penetration of Hindu and Buddhist religious leaders through access during these dialogues. The Pontifical Council on Inter-religious Dialogue is in Mumbai now to meet with our religious leaders. Hindu religious leaders must understand that inter-religious dialogue by the Church is cancer, like Sufism in Islam – intended to disarm the gullible with sweet talk. Our leaders must prove equal to the task.

Know your enemy

The Second Vatican Council exhorted the faithful, clergy and laity alike to reach out to non-Christian peoples to engage them in dialogue. This Council made the startling submission that the Catholic Church acknowledged that while all religions had some elements of truth in them, only the Christian faith had all the truth and that the Catholic Church alone was the repository of that truth. The Catholic Church states that the essence of the Christian faith is its salvific quality – the power to ‘save’. It accepts that all religions may have some salvific capacity in them but only the Christian faith is wholly salvific.

Hindus who promote inter-faith dialogue must know what they are getting into when they sit across the table with an intolerant, fascist religion. They must know the enemy before them for what it is, as it is, in its own words. Hindus go to the table with absolutely no knowledge of the nature of the enemy and go to these meetings with no prior planning and equipped with little besides their smug tolerance and pacifism. At the end of all such ‘dialogues’ Hindus have either failed to assert their position or ended up signing documents and resolutions most insulting to Hindus. These inter-faith dialogues, because Hindus did not care to know the enemy, have always ended favorably for the Church. This of course is not to say that these resolutions and declarations are in any way binding upon Hindu society which knows exactly how to deal with jihad and the evangelising missionaries. The problem is with idiot Hindus who think there is an intellectual and pacifist way to deal with issues of survival.

Non-resident Hindus and Hindu PIOs living in Europe and America, and globe-trotting gurus and sanyasis with growing numbers of foreign bhaktas and foreign funds have been guilty of drawing Hindus at home and high Hindu religious organizations into the vortex of inter-religious or inter-faith dialogue with foreigners. Growing NRI Hindu and non-Indian Hindu influence on a section of Hindu religious leaders and formerly Hindu political leaders has made these leaders look more and more at overseas Hindus and their interests to the detriment of Hindu interests in the country. It must be emphasized that in all these dialogues Hindu religious leaders have belonged to non-traditional, new cult, or neo-vedantin sects. The Mumbai inter-faith dialogue for the first time will have the high-voltage presence of the senior pontiff of the Kanchi matham while all other Hindu sanyasis at this meet come from the non-traditional stream.

This point deserves close attention for only one reason. Religious leaders of traditional mathams are rooted in centuries-old tradition and are the living symbols of a timeless heritage with the extraordinary responsibility not only to preserve that heritage but to hand it down to the next generation. This is a mind-boggling and breath-taking responsibility. Mathathipathis, Adeenams and Mandaleshwars do not act as individuals driven by personal beliefs or fleeting interests and are therefore very unlikely to give in to any demand from the Church and even more unlikely to make any concession harmful to Hindu dharma or dharmi. And that is why at all these dialogues we find only Hindu religious leaders from non-traditional streams engaged in a dialogue with the Church, in the Church’s own territory or in territory loyal to the Church. Hindu religious leaders knowingly and willingly start with this disadvantage. One does not meet the enemy on his territory unless one is Srikrishna.

The intense discussion of the Superiors General in New York in 2000 points to an existential dilemma among a section of the Catholic Hierarchy – if religious conversion or ‘taking the gospel to those who have not heard it yet’ is the Church’s whole and only mission, then what is the purpose of inter-faith dialogue and what is the relationship between Proclamation and Dialogue? Good question; and it has been answered unambiguously by Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger. Pope John Paul II declared on Indian soil in November 1999 that he intended to plant the Cross in Asia in the third millennium; what he did not say explicitly was that ‘Dialogue’ was all bunkum and that Dialogue and Proclamation were the classic good cop-bad cop ploy by the Church. Cardinal Ratzinger declared in Dominus Jesus that Christ was the path and the destination; what he did not say explicitly was that the soporific, all religions have some elements of truth in them and all religions have some salvific power in them was bunkum too.

When Hindus sit down to ‘dialogue’ with the enemy, they must keep the following in mind –

The Church, as it is understood and as it is in reality, is the White Church. The coloured drops in the Hierarchy of the Church are only permitted colour and flavour.

The White Church is racist and has expanded across what were once non-White continents only by brute force.

The White race’s religion, trade, history, politics and science all share the same characteristics – exploitative, avaricious, intolerant, brutal and destructive whose only objective is to wield absolute control over all things in Creation

The White Church began by first controlling the Sovereign (King) and then expanded its horizons by controlling/converting peoples, then nations and then continents

The Catholic Church was assisted in its mission to convert the world to Christianity by Sovereigns and freebooters alike, by armies and traders alike, by the clergy and laity alike

The Church’s expansionist path in the beginning took the “trade-routes and highways” of the Roman Empire and then took the trade-routes and highways of expanding, colonizing Spanish and Portuguese Empires and then the trade-routes and highways of British, French and Dutch Empires

The White Catholic Church, White Christian Empires and White agents of Trade have not just worked in tandem but have walked hand in hand to the mutual benefit, growth and entrenchment of all three

A Christian King, politician, shop-keeper, smuggler or academic, serves his religion first and always

This much is White Christianity’s distant and recent history. This should be kept in mind of all those who think the Church is the padri in popular Hindi and vernacular films and who maintain in public discourse and private conversations that the only mission of the Church is to provide education, healthcare and beatific smiles for those in distress. Those desirous of indulging in religious diplomacy (or so they think) by sitting across table with the White Church must also keep in mind what the White Church has said in New York in May 2000.

For better understanding of what follows, it must be borne in mind that Christianity and Islam have NO native land because they are both only derivatives of the parent religion – Judaism. Therefore they do not subscribe to concepts like matrubhumi, and pitrubhumi (not fatherland but land of our pitrus or ancestors). They also reject Hindu nationalist assertion that the Hindu nation, religion, culture and dharma, while it is universal and may exist anywhere in the world with no conflict, tension or disharmony with other ways of life and worldview because of its very nature, Hindu nation, religion, culture and dharma was born on a specific territory and the sense of nation, nationhood and nationalism is only territorial even when the nationalism is narrowly construed as being only religious, only cultural, only civilisational or only dharmic.

Hindu nationalists assert that the Hindu nation is all these. This is the territory of Bharata, Hindusthana, India and it is a nation or territory with well-defined borders even from historic times. This is the territory of sanatana dharma. Sanatana dharma may be universal but it is not amorphous that predatory religions can deny the territorial content of Hindu nationhood so that this territory too may be Christianized.

Our religious leaders and non-sanyasi vacuous ‘scholars’ who advocate inter-faith dialogue with the Church as some defining gesture of Hindu tolerance must keep all this in mind to understand what the White Church is saying about its mission, its new goals and new opportunities and the methods that these opportunities provide. The White Church has always converted every social, economic, political trend in the world to its benefit and advantage. In the following excerpts from the statement of the Superiors General in New York in May 200, which is of critical importance to understand the Church, the White Church has a name for the two fascist, expansionist, and genocidal Abrahamic faiths – Islam and Christianity; the name is ‘great translocal religions’. The name is pregnant with all kinds of possible interpretations. Non-Christian, non-Islamic faiths and religions which have existed for millennia before these two religions are simply “local, oral traditions”. Not religions mind you, not civilizations, not worldviews, and above all, not universal; just simply “local, oral traditions”. This is what it is saying now -

• “One thing that globalization is changing (we will return to others in the final part of this presentation) is the meaning of territory and the nation-state. Because the information and capital flow made possible by communications technology, boundaries of the nation-state, which have been a staple of political economy since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, have ever decreased significance. With the flow and migration of peoples, as well as the incursion of global cultural forces on local communities, "culture" as territory has ever decreasing significance. While neither nation-state nor cultural territory will completely disappear (as was the fear in earlier stages of discussion of globalization), its significance is greatly diminished. What does this mean for a mission that defines itself as ad gentes, if the world is no longer so neatly divided into cultural and ethnic groups? Missionary institutes ad gentes have tried to redefine ad gentes as ad extra (that is, simply going out from where one is), or more recently, as ad altera (that is, to those who are made "other").

• The first is that the converts who join the great translocal religious traditions (such as Christianity or Islam) come largely from local, oral traditions. Indeed, history would seem to indicate that people in local, oral traditions (sometimes called indigenous religions) shift rather readily to join a translocal tradition such as Christianity, Buddhism, or Islam. But once having done so, they are unlikely to move from one translocal tradition to another. Only those who have not yet been fully integrated into the translocal tradition or those who have been alienated from it are likely to change their affiliation. If that is indeed the case, then mission ad gentes will end for Christianity (and Islam) when the final indigenous peoples have been reached.”

Hindus generally being idiot Hindus, let us break this astounding presumption into small parts. Hindus and tribal communities “readily” convert to Islam or Christianity and these Christian and Muslim converts do not abandon the religion to which they have converted to re-convert to Islam or Christianity. That is, when a Hindu converts to becoming a Christian, then that same converted Hindu Christian will not convert again to becoming Hindu Muslim convert; not unless the Hindu who converted to the Church has not been integrated fully with the Christian community. Read this, understand this and beware. This is full of significance for the way the Church in India operates to pressure Indian polity for concessions for so-called dalit and BC Christians. Ditto with how the Muslims pressure Indian polity to keep the Muslim flock contented in the pen. And that is why the Sachar Committee report assumes significance for Hindu nationaists.

• “The story of empire and mission has been told often, by opponents and defenders of mission alike. It is not my intention to recount that history here once again. Rather, I would like to focus on one aspect of that history: namely, that the expansionist designs of Europe provided the infrastructure for an organized and concerted mission ad gentes. Empire not only provided a necessary infrastructure for transportation, protection, and even fiscal support for missionaries, but no doubt figured into the thinking of how mission itself was to be organized, both on the home front and in the distant lands. Individual efforts of missionaries can be traced through history. But the mobilization of religious institutes -- and later the founding of institutes specifically for that purpose -- followed the pathways and even assumed the military rhetoric of the empire-builders.

Now, the Church admits to how it has always played both sides of the game in any conflict to the advantage of its expansionist designs. Do Hindus who engage in inter-faith dialogue at the behest of the White Church have the sense to know the enemy with whom they are “engaged” from its own words, from its own description?

• “In saying this, I do not wish to reduce organized mission ad gentes to a byproduct of empire. That would be simplistic and inaccurate. Missionaries often became the opponents of empire, siding with local people against their colonizers. Missionaries preserved local culture through writing down indigenous oral languages even as empire was crippling or destroying it. What I am trying to do here is trying to indicate some factors arising from this convergence of empire and mission ad gentes which may be instructive for our own time.

• The convergence of mission ad gentes and empire created a powerful way of thinking wherein the notion of mission ad gentes became bound up with territory. One sees this as early as the founding of the Propaganda Fide in Rome in the seventeenth century and as late as the establishment of the "jus commissionis" in the twentieth century. Rather than models (of religious conversion) wherein going ad gentes meant going to the sovereign (the King) to effect his conversion, mission was seen as Christianizing a territory. The convergence of empire and mission provided models of mission which were derived from the empire and colonizing process.

• Most prominent throughout the period of European empire was the civilizing model, which meant bringing European education, technical training, and health care ad gentes. Put in late twentieth century terms, models of human promotion go hand in hand with mission. Today we would think more in terms of social justice or the defense of human rights. In both the earlier and more recent models, what evangelization is becomes extended in terms of an infrastructure which supports mission.

• Two characteristics of globalization today which are of significance here are its homogenizing power, whereby it interlinks the world and communicates the same message throughout this network; and its fragmenting power, which in local settings disrupts social arrangements, creates resistance, and heightens the sense of the particular and the local. How does this aspect of globalization interconnect with mission ad gentes?

• In responding to the interlinkage through communication as a form of homogenization, missionary institutes and the Church itself should utilize its resources as a transnational and non-governmental organization to bring people together in the solidarity of the human family, and form networks of support and advocacy. Missionary institutes should show by how they live and operate that transnational organizations need not be oppressive, but can bring together human and material resources for the betterment of life for humankind. They should use their resources to reach the gentes, who are now scattered throughout the world, as a result of migration and refugee status, those gentes who drift into our huge cities and lose their identities in the process. We need to think through as missionaries and missiologists how the homogenizing factors in the world today are shaping our thinking and our relationships.

• Globalization also fragments the world. Here it seems to me that the mission ad gentes is called to address the consequences of that fragmentation, where people reshape and construct new identities to resist the encroachments of globalization, where refugees and displaced persons have to rebuild lives and heal memories. The work of mission here is a work of reconciliation; that is, restoring human dignity and healing a broken society. It is about telling the truth, seeking justice, and creating a new moral vision. Indeed, it seems to me that reconciliation may well be the metaphor for mission as we enter the twenty-first century.”

The Superiors General, the White Catholic Church has nothing to hide because there are in effect, no real challenges to their agenda, which they have articulated with an openness that is insulting but which is a commentary on Hindu powerlessness to deal with this agenda. The Church is backed and supported thoroughly by the US and the EU. The US and the EU will first create, trigger and nurture conflicts around the world (and these are always countries and regions where the Church has not been successful so far) and once the people have been devastated by prolonged conflict, then the Church will step in to administer the healing touch!

US and European aid agencies and funding agencies – USAID, DFID, Red Cross, World Vision, these are the foot-soldiers of the White Church. Human rights, religious freedom, freedom of conscience, social justice, justice with peace are the new weapons of war in this war-by-other-means. Truth and Reconciliation is the new Church Opening Gambit in this great chess game between the Church and its victims; and we the idiot Hindus mindlessly parrot the slogans the White Church has coined for entrapment, and which have been legitimised by the supporting White Christian nations as the new liberal universal political ideology for the world. The globe-trotting Sri Sri Ravishankar is one of the “spiritual” (not religious, by his own admission) leaders who will be sitting across the table today and he conducted with much media fanfare his own variation of the (in)famous “truth and reconciliation” circus with the dalits in India.

Swami Chidananda Saraswati, another loose-cannon from something called ‘Divine Life Society, Uttaranchal’ who will also be present at the table today, was also present in Advani’s house last year with the Archbishops of Orissa and Delhi, and penned his name to the declaration called infamously, the Delhi Declaration, which the BJP proudly mentioned in its election manifesto. The Delhi Declaration stated that Swami Chidananda Saraswati would re-build the churches burned down by angry tribal communities after Christian terrorists gunned down the venerable Swami Laxmananda Saraswati. This Chidananda Saraswati signed the Delhi Declaration which also stated that he deplored not only “unethical religious conversion’ but also “unethical re-conversion”. He deserves nothing but the strongest condemnation not only for his pathetic understanding of religious conversion but also for his poor understanding of the critical necessity for re-conversion on Hindu bhumi to the parent religion.

The presence of the revered mathathipathi of the Kanchi matham is the only saving grace in this whole disgraceful event. Hindu nationalists and Hindu bhaktas are hoping passionately that the Pujya Kanchi seer will tell the White Church on its face that until the Church declares that it will no longer undertake or countenance religious conversion in India, this will be the last inter-faith dialogue with the Church on Hindu bhumi.

Radha Rajan,
12th June, 2009