By John Dayal

(UCA News) — The prophetic Monsignor, Benny D’Aguiar, wrote in The Examiner, India’s oldest newspaper which he edited, of Pope Paul VI’s visit to Mumbai in 1964 to attend the International Eucharistic Congress: “There has never been anything like it within living memory, and there will never be anything like it for decades to come. Long after the children who made their first Holy Communion that day have grown to maturity and many of the priests who were ordained that evening will have come to the evening of their days, the memory of the day the Holy Father came to India will be recounted, not without the tears that can only result from a strongly felt experience.”

Breathless prose, perhaps, but Father Benny, who became a dear friend in his stay in New Delhi, had captured what seeing the Holy Father with one’s own eyes would mean to a very devout Catholic flock in India.

This is perhaps what the devout Catholics of Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and Papua New Guinea would have felt in recent days as they welcomed Pope Francis in their midst, filling stadiums for Mass, and other reception areas for just a sight of the “jolly old man,” a sort of a beardless “Papa Santa Claus,” as it were.

Pope John Paul II came in 1986 on his first visit to the land of the Buddha, Mahavira, and the gods of the Hindu Pantheon. And for the secular citizen, equally the land of Mahatma Gandhi and Babasaheb Ambedkar, who is all but worshipped by the Dalits or Scheduled Castes who were once deemed “untouchable,” and who constitute a huge 15 percent of the nation’s population.

Catholics in India are, by a rule of thumb, computed at about 50 percent to 55 percent of the total number of Christians of all denominations in the country. India’s Christians are a mere 2.3 percent of the national population.

Over the last five decadal Census operations, this percentage has not changed, giving a lie to the political charge of forcible and fraudulent conversions to Christianity. This is an allegation that has sired a dozen anti-conversion laws, and much physical violence on hapless pastors, priests and nuns in the last decade. It alas also gives the lie to boasts by evangelisers of all denominations of netting many fish.

The national fraction of faithful believers seems puny, but not when seen in absolute numbers of the massive population of India.

India in 1964 was second to China, as the most populous country in the world with 489,059,309 people. This would mean........

© Eurasia Review