Authentic ‘encounter’ at heart of archdiocese’s first delegation to India

Despite the Center for Mission’s best efforts to prepare us, none of us knew quite what to expect as our plane cleared India’s Malabar coast and prepared for landing in Kochi, Kerala’s largest city. Our flights took us from Minneapolis to Chicago and then to a long, nighttime layover in Abu Dhabi before continuing on to Kochi.

From our windows, we could see standing water and other evidence of the devastation of the fall floods, something we had followed with interest in the news. There were palm trees, red roofs and squares of lush cropland, a welcome sight in late January. Once through customs — a bit tricky, as they thought some of us were missionaries, and several of India’s states have anti-proselytization laws — we were met by two priests of the Diocese of Vijayapuram, Father Jose Navez Puthenparambil and Father Paul Denny Ramachamkudy, holding roses and welcoming us to India.

Father Jose, 67, was a key reason we were there, getting on a small bus in Kochi and taking a two-hour drive away from the coast to Kottayam, the diocese’s see city. After studying at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, and then Fordham University in New York, he spent three years ministering at Epiphany in Coon Rapids, two Twin Cities hospitals and the Lino Lakes Correctional Facility. Now his diocese’s chancellor, he returns to Minnesota annually for financial appeals on behalf of his diocese, one of the mission territories supported by the Pontifical Mission Societies. In the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, funds for the Pontifical Mission Societies are collected by the Center for Mission.

On the trip to Kottayam, we wound through cities and countryside, amazed by the chaos of people and traffic and the vibrancy of it all — the sights, the smells, the sounds. Right away we noticed the profusion of Catholic shrines: St. Jude, St. Sebastian and others met us at bends in the road or in front of churches, statues prominently encased behind glass with flowers and architectural flourishes. Meanwhile, storefronts became their own litany: St. George’s Bakery, St. Thomas Kids Garden, St. Joseph’s Motor Driving School. Even vehicles had saints’ names or other religious decals.

In our group from the archdiocese were a married couple, both pharmacists, and six other women, including a canon lawyer, a retired teacher and a 30-something entrepreneur who makes natural-ingredient soaps. Most of us had traveled abroad before, but not to India. For one of us, it was the first time outside of the United States.

Kottayam has an estimated population of 357,000, somewhere between the populations of Minnesota’s two largest cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. Our home base was the “bishop’s house,” a complex with a priest residence, chancery offices, guest rooms and college seminary. We ate most of our meals there with Bishop Sebastian Thekethecheril, who has led the diocese since 2006, and the priests who serve, his chancery staff.

They sat down with us on our first full day there to give us the lay of the land: Kerala has the highest Christian population of any Indian state, but it’s still only 20 percent of the population. Of the Christians, 61% are Catholic. And, of the Catholics, most belong to Eastern Catholic rites, the Syro-Malabar Church and the Syro-Malankara Church, both of which are based in Kerala. Overall, Catholics make up just 2.5% of the Indian population. The Diocese of Vijayapuram struggles with many of the same problems faced by the Church in the United States: declining numbers of practicing young adults, infringement on religious freedom, and widespread poverty and other pressing social justice concerns among the flock. But there were a lot of reasons to be hopeful about the Church’s future in India, as we would see.

That afternoon, we drove four hours northeast from Kottayam for two days and nights in Munnar, a “hill station” for escaping hot summer weather, surrounded by the rolling hills of verdant tea plantations. We also spent two days and a night in Vandiperiyar, also in the High Ranges, or mountains, but south of Munnar.

As we drove, tea plants were as ubiquitous as Midwestern cornfields, but the land was anything but flat. Praying a rosary on the way home one afternoon, I found myself, while reciting the Fatima Prayer’s “save us from the fires of hell,” mentally adding, “and the High Ranges” as we zigzagged down mountain switchbacks, dodging cars whose drivers ill-timed their chance to pass. A Mary statue glued to the dashboard held firm.

It was near Vandiperiyar that we met the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny, distinct in their beige saris, and we attended a blessing of the roadside shrine to Mary. Silver streamers fluttered down over the crowd of a couple hundred people as Bishop Sebastian stood in the newly constructed grotto and blessed it with holy water. Then, one by one, people came up to venerate the statue of Mary and the Christ Child, some kissing it, others leaving flower necklaces around Mary’s neck.

That night, we split into two groups to attend prayer meetings hosted by the parish’s Basic Christian Communities, or BCCs. The families, members of the “St. Mary’s Family Unit,” gather regularly to read the Gospel, pray and sing, and share their intentions and needs with one another. We crowded with about 15 families into a very small and humble, windowless row house. Like the other homes we visited, it had a living room shrine dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. After the formal prayers ended, three young children stood up to recite from memory the entirety of Psalm 91 — which begins, “You who dwell in the shelter of the Most High and abide in the shade of the Almighty” — which they learned at their Catholic school.

We visited three BCCs in three different cities, and the diocese is energized by their success. Father Jose was instrumental in their formation; in the 1980s, when he was a young priest serving a parish in Munnar, he began organizing families to meet, pray and care for each other’s needs, adopting a model that has also taken root in Latin America. The diocese later instituted it in all of its parishes, and now it has been formally implemented in all Latin Catholic dioceses in Kerala. They’re “the lifestyle of the Church in Kerala,” Bishop Sebastian said.

A year later

When Lucy Johnson reflects on her time in India, snapshots run through her mind: A church, a mosque and a Hindu temple on the same corner in a small town. A gigantic replica of Michelangelo’s Pietà on a mountaintop in the middle of a city. Thousands of people — Christians, Muslims and Hindus — packed into a Tuesday morning Mass at a Kottayam shrine dedicated to St. Anthony.

“I did not expect to see Catholicism practiced so much in the open, yet shared with Hindus and Muslims,” she said, a year after the trip.

Johnson and her husband, Jeff, are parishioners of St. Francis de Sales in St. Paul, and both were on the trip. Lucy still marvels at that Tuesday morning shrine experience, where thick crowds sang with music so loud it vibrated through the building, and Father Sebastian Poovathumkal, who coordinates worship at the shrine, prayed in tongues, or a prayer language, during eucharistic adoration. Indians remove their shoes before entering homes and churches, and at the shrine, piles of shoes littered the area outside the worship space. Although we typically followed the custom, we were advised to keep ours on in this instance, since we weren’t likely to find them again.

An estimated 36,000 arrive weekly — some staying for the whole day, to pray in adoration, attend Mass, hear compelling preaching, go to confession or receive spiritual counsel. Many of them aren’t even Catholic or Christian; some are Muslim or Hindu, but they’re drawn to the teachings of Christ and his Church, the diocese’s priests explained. For cultural and legal reasons, the Hindus and Muslims are not likely to convert, but some have a vibrant faith in Jesus, read the Bible and express devotion to the saints.

During the trip, Lucy asked a group of priests about a statistic that amazed her: an estimated 90 percent of Indian Catholics attend Mass. “What’s your secret?”

The BCCs, explained one priest. Each BCC includes 15-25 families, and they’re intentionally kept small so they’re manageable. “Familiarity with the family does wonders,” he said of keeping the family in the Church and connected to the community. “We know them by name.”

While the clergy we met spoke English, most of the lay people we met through the BCCs did not, so we communicated with gestures, iPhone photos and the translation of our accompanying priests. But some things needed no translation. At one meeting, a woman shared how she and her husband experienced infertility, but they prayed, and God gave them a child. Then, an elderly woman explained that her brother, a longtime companion, had died, and now she felt she had no one. She wept.

We shared, too: some fears, some sorrows, some hopes. And in that encounter and so many others, we discovered the essence of the immersion mission trip: connection. We found it in the couple we met at a shrine who were there to give thanks for the birth of their daughter; the priest whose parishioner was found dead in the mud after a flood-related landslide; the innkeeper couple who invited us into their home for morning tea, which turned into an impromptu time of prayer.

Our encounters sparked questions about the nature of India, its history, religious expressions and cultural norms. India is inherently a religious country, Father Jose said on one of those trips. Several world religions have origins in India, and that allows for “a religious spirit” there, he explained. “People are very much into spiritual layers. Even though there is secularism here, still it is mostly religious.”

Recognizing that God made every person in his image guides Catholics’ interactions with adherents of other faith traditions, he said. “According to the thinking of Christianity, it’s about seeing God in everything: seeing all as the creation of God, and all the people as children of God.”

He insisted that while the Church has the full revelation of truth, Catholics cannot put God in a box, reducible to points of debate. “People try to make God an object of discussion or dispute, and they want to prove that their God, their thinking is right,” he said. “I would say that (approach) is not about the real God; it’s about themselves. They become too self-centered, thinking I am the greatest, my thinking is the right one, and if you don’t think as I’m thinking, then you are wrong. That attitude is not correct. It’s about allowing God to be God.”

Communion of saints

Father Jose was indefatigable throughout our trip’s extensive traveling, early and late nights, generously answering our range of questions, from Keralan cuisine and yoga to more serious issues such as religious synchronism, class conflict, women’s roles and sex abuse. On the bus rides, he asked us our stories, shared his own, inspired group prayers and impromptu theology lessons, led songs and rosaries, shared snacks, and laughed and laughed. He so frequently exclaimed “praise the Lord!” that we couldn’t help but exclaim it, too. He explained Keralan customs, including the unique “head bobble” — a side-to-side nod of the head — that means yes, or maybe or any number of things, and how to eat rice with our hands, making a scoop out of the three middle fingers of our right hand.

With him, the practical was never separate from the spiritual. Father Jose shared stories of miracles and took us to several shrines, including the Franciscan-run Shrine of Our Lady of Good Health, which is connected to claims of apparitions of the Virgin Mary and healing for infertility. We also stopped by a roadside cross believed to have alleviated the suffering of local people when it was erected in its spot a century ago. It was covered with written prayer requests, rolled tightly and secured with string. It continues to draw up to 600 people for First Friday Novenas.

With the crowds dedicated to devotions, it was clear Indians believed miracles were possible. At a church near Arnackal, a couple heard Father Jose was there, and they brought their disabled son Augustine to receive the priest’s prayers.

We also visited a shrine at the tomb of St. Alphonsa, a Franciscan nun who died in 1946 and was the first canonized saint of the Syro-Malabar Church, but we expected to see more devotion overall to Indian-born saints — or even St. Thomas the Apostle, believed to have evangelized in India after the Resurrection; or the 16th-century Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier; Mother Teresa. Instead, most statues were of western saints, such as St. Jude, St. George or St. Anthony of Padua. St. Therese of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun, was popular, too: The diocese has strong ties to the Carmelite order — the first two bishops were Spanish Carmelite priests — and the diocesan priests feel they inherited the order’s spirituality, said Father Sebastian, the priest who oversees St. Anthony’s Shrine and is rector of the diocese’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of Mary.

In conversations with the priests, appreciation of the universal Church is palpable. The European saints “are our forefathers,” Father Sebastian said, emotion causing his voice to catch. “ They are not like foreigners. … They’ve touched our lives. They made us who we are.”

Reflecting months after we returned, several members of the delegation remarked that the trip deepened their appreciation for the Church’s universality, too.

Marta Pereira, the delegation’s leader, described the trip as a gift she is still slowly unwrapping. Likewise, Amy Tadlock, a judge in the archdiocese’s tribunal, said she is still sorting through the experience.

“I believe in lifelong opportunities for growth and transformation. One way those things happen is if you do and experience things you’ve never done before,” she said. “So for me part of the trip was having this unique opportunity, knowing that I would come away with a different worldview, a different understanding of Catholicism. … I know my perspective, my worldview has changed, (but) I don’t know if I can articulate it quite yet.”

On our delegation’s last day in India, we met with the members of the curia to reflect on the experience. “I feel like I’m on holy ground,” Lucy told the priests. “We came on a mission trip, and it became a pilgrimage.”