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Sowing not reaping: a Catholic journey

The Pope has come and gone. It was an insipid visit, devoid of the electricity his recent tours of other nations, notably Castro's Cuba and his native Poland, had generated.

In Delhi, John Paul II appeared at the lectern and the altar, pale and trembling, a shadow of the feisty self that millions of Indians had glimpsed on his earlier visit to this country 13 years ago. The scarcely audible speech and the mummified gestures belied a giant of the contemporary world whose unswerving moral resolve had helped rent the Iron Curtain.

His low spirits can be attributed to the inevitable maladies that are attendant on advancing age. It is not improbable to claim that it could also be an echo of Karol Wojtyla's having, in many ways, become a prisoner of his own past. His decades-old obsession with the anti-Communist crusade and its subsequent success has made the pendulum swing to the other end.

Redoubtable church sources attest to the Pope's having developed a profound loathing for the spiritual vacuum and social Darwinism that mark the free-market economies of the West. In his eyes the solidarity that binds communities in the less advanced countries of the so-called Third World hold out more hope for a Christian resurgence in the third millennium than the unbridled individuality and hedonism of the West. As church writer Richard Rodriguez succinctly puts it, the Pope 'expects the West to be saved by the East.' No wonder then that the Catholic Pontiff has called for a harvest of faith in Asia, especially India.

Admittedly, many Indians -- moderate and intelligent people with no sympathy for the fringe elements of the Hindu right -- impute dangerous designs to this call. Their fears are not unfounded. For one, the Catholic church is a very powerful and highly centralised organisation and by definition is bound to have vested interests, ulterior to that of religion. Secondly, the Catholic church is immensely rich and its funds are mainly in the form of United States dollars and German deutsch marks. This in turn has a twin consequence: the funders get to have a major say in what purpose the money is put to. More importantly, lucre itself, because there is such an abundance of it, becomes the main instrument of religious activity (inducement, in other words).

Beyond all this there is another objection to the harvest of faith the Pope has called for. It is implicit in the very metaphor he has chosen. Harvest, of course, is a metaphor that is strewn all over the Christian scriptures -- both the Old Testament and the gospels. But in the context of India, permeated as it is with religiosity, does this metaphor convey a legitimate Christian role?

It is worth recalling that the newly enlightened Guru Nanak prior to accosting the holy men of Amristar, humbly sent them a glass of water with a rose daintily floating on it. That symbolised his approach. Anything else would have led to his being summarily dismissed as a parvenu, a contractor, to use a modern idiom, who has the gumption and is stupid enough to try and sell coal to Newcastle.

The metaphor of harvest is more redolent of the contractor than Guru Nanak. And it is uncomfortably associated with the scythe. A tool, but equally a weapon.

The Christian mission in India would warrant a softer and more constructive metaphor -- sowing rather than harvesting. Thus instead of aggressively adding to the number of converts the church in India should try and practice value addition. Because of their current defensiveness -- partly due to extraneous factors, partly due to their own shortsightedness -- Christians in India do not really appreciate how much impact they have had, and continue to have, on the larger community around them. This impact goes beyond the formally acknowledged one -- their influence on the health and educational spheres.

Take a case of two neighbours quarrelling and you can be sure that if there is a Christian around he will intervene and try to resolve it. Similarly, where there is illness or sorrow you can again count on any Christian who happens to be nearby to rush in with unsolicited succour. The community as a whole is characterised by its natural exuberance and optimism, a determination to be happy despite all the odds and a respect for the dignity of labour. All these might be small things but in a shared community they thoroughly endear their propagators to the others and make them worthy of genuine emulation.

The Christian community should build on this role --- as a vital corrective to Indian society, a sort of moral gadfly. It will entail their remaining a minority, even outsiders to some extent, but they will be thereby fulfilling their Christian and Catholic role all the more profoundly.

It will obviously require of them to go beyond what was envisaged by the Second Vatican Council or even Pope John Paul II's Redemptoris Missio that deals with the Christian approach to other religions and communities. The Missio, for all its liberalism and concessions, is still grounded in Christian exclusiveness: 'Dialogue shall be conducted and implemented with the conviction that the church is the ordinary means of salvation and that she alone possesses the fullness of the means of salvation.'

Indian theologians like Raymundo Pannikar, Fathers Jacques Dubuis and Father Anthony de Mello are pathbreakers towards a Christian theology of religious pluralism (the title also of Dubuis's recent controversial book). It's a sad commentary on the Catholicism of the Roman church that the last two are now under investigation (last year Sri Lankan theologian Tissa Balasuriya was similarly investigated and excommunicated for a year) by the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, Vatican's present-day inquisition of church intellectuals.

As Jesus says, 'the wheat and the tares must grow together.' The church in India must accept the tutelage of the Holy See even as it bears it own specific witness. The latter task will mean renouncing the temptation of becoming a powerful and wealthy organisation, where church officials deck themselves in lace and ermine collars and gold ornaments and consort with the rich and the powerful. It will mean building a church that will be a catalyst, a community of communities, one that doesn't loom over or obstruct but lives and thrives on a tradition that incorporates a sense of symbol and mystery.

It will be a poor church, a servant church. But it will also guard against being subsumed by Indian society as yet another caste, of preventing the 'self-emptying of Christ from becoming a negation of his uniqueness and divinity, of [his] becoming one of the many avatars of the deity [in India].'

Sowing not reaping should be the defining metaphor of the Catholic journey in India in the new millennium.

Anil Nair