Sr. Meena Raped by Hindus while Police Watched

Asia News (www.asianews.it/)

The courageous Sr. Meena Barwa speaks out on the brutal rape that she suffered at the hands of radical Hindus last August.”I was raped and now I don’t want to be victimized by the Orissa police.”
NEW DELHI (AsiaNews) – Here is the complete statement by Sr. Meena Barwa:

“On 24th August, around 4:30 pm, hearing the shouting of a large crowd, at the gate of Divyajyoti Pastoral Centre, I ran out through the back door and escaped to the forest along with others. We saw our house going up in flames. Around 8:30 pm we came out of the forest and went to the house of a Hindu gentleman who gave us shelter.

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On 25th August, around 1:30 pm, the mob entered the room where I was staying in that house, one of them stopped me on my face, caught my hair and pulled me out of the house. Two of them were holding my neck to cut off my head with axe. Others told them to take me out to the road; I saw Fr. Chellan also being taken out and being beaten. The mob consisting of 40-50 men was armed with lathis, axes, spades, crowbars, iron-rods, sickles etc.They took both of us to the main road. Then they led us to the burnt down Janavikas building saying that they were going to throw us into the smouldering fire.

When we reached the Janavikas building, they threw me to the verandah on the way to the dining room which was full of ashes and broken glass pieces. One of them tore my blouse and others my undergarments. Father Chellan protested and they beat him and pulled him out from there. They pulled out my saree and one of the stepped on my right hand and another on my left hand and then a third person raped me on the verandah mentioned above. When it was over, I managed to get up and put my petticoat and saree. Then another young man caught me and took me to a room near the staircase. He opened his pants and was attempting to rape me when they reached there. I hid myself under the staircase. The crowd was shouting “where is that sister, come let us rape her, at least 100 people should rape.”

They found me under the staircase and took me out to the road. There I saw Fr. Chellan was kneeling down and the crowd was beating him. They were searching for a rope to tie us both of us together to burn us in fire. Someone suggested to make us parade naked. They made us walk on the road till Nuagoan market which was half a kilometer from there. They made to fold our hands and walk. I was with petticoat and saree as they had already torn away my blouse and undergarments. They tried to strip even there and I resisted and they went on beating me with hands on my cheeks and head and with sticks on my back several times.

When I reached the market the market place about a dozen of OSAP policemen were there. I went to them asking to protect me and I sat in between two policemen but they did not move. One from the crowd again pulled out from there and they wanted to lock us in their temple mandap. The crowd led me and Fr. Chellan to the Nuagaon block building saying that they will hand us over to BDO. From there along with the block officer the mob took us to police outpost Nuagaon, other policemen remained far.
The mob said that they will come back after eating and one of them who attacked me remained back in the police outpost. Policemen then came to police outpost. They were talking very friendly with the man who had attacked me and stayed back. In police outpost we remained until the inspector in charge of Balliguda with his police team came and took us to Balliguda. They were afraid to take us straight to the police station and they kept us sometimes in jeep. In the garage, from there, they brought us to the station. The inspector in charge and other government officers took me privately and asked whatever happened to me. I narrated everything in detail to the police, how I was attacked, raped, taken away from policemen paraded half naked and how the policemen did not help me when I asked for help while weeping bitterly. I saw the inspector writing down. The inspector asked me “are you interested in filing FIR? Do you know what will be the consequence?” At about 10:00 pm I was taken for medical check-up accompanied by a lady police officer to Balliguda Hospital. They were afraid to keep us in police station, saying the mob may attack police station. So the police took us to the IB (Inspection Bungalow) where CRP men were camping.

On 26th August around 9:00 am, we were taken to Balliguda police station. When I was writing the FIR, the IIC asked me to hurry up and not to write in detail. When I started writing about the police, the IIC told me “this is not the way to write FIR, make it short”. So I re-wrote it for the third time in one and half page. I filed the FIR but I was not given a copy of it.At around 4:00 pm the inspector in charge of Balliguda police station along with some other government officers put us in the OSRTC bus to Bhubaneswar along with other stranded passengers. Police were there till Rangamati where all passengers had their supper. After that I did not see the police. We got down near Nayagarh and traveled in a private vehicle and reached Bhubaneswar around 2:00 am on 27th August.
State Police failed to stop the crimes, failed to protect me from the attackers, they were friendly with the attackers. They tried their best that I did best that I did not register an FIR, not make complaints against police, police did not take down my statement as I narrated in detail and they abandoned me half of the way. I was raped and now I don’t want to be victimized by the Orissa police. I want CBI enquiry.

God bless India, God bless you all.”

Vatican’s New Guidelines for Seminarians a Good Start

Psychological testing has been used as far back as the 1960s in some seminaries. The new guidelines are meant to help church leaders “weed out candidates with psychopathic disturbances,” as well as “confused and not yet well-defined” sexual identities.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Inside Catholic) – Today the Vatican issued new guidelines for the screening of seminarians. They are in response to the call for more strident criteria in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse scandal.

Psychological testing has been used as far back as the 1960s in some seminaries. The new guidelines are meant to help church leaders “weed out candidates with psychopathic disturbances,” as well as “confused and not yet well-defined” sexual identities.

Pre-screening is necessary, but not enough for a healthy priesthood. Parish priesthood is one of the most difficult and lonely lives on the planet — especially in some areas. (Full disclosure: One of my brothers is a parish priest.)

I’d like to see bishops consider restructuring things in their dioceses to foster greater fraternity among priests and lay leaders. Priests need relationships as much as anyone, and they need consistent familial-like community to provide support and feedback, hold them accountable, and call them to holiness.

Pope Benedict XVI’s writing: Salt of the earth

Life can sometimes make our Christian faith feel like a burden, as Jenny Ang says. But through Pope Benedict’s writings, she has found that it is faith is what makes life filled with joy in the first place.

 

Dear readers,

We are called by God to lead a life worthy of being a Christian but along the way, we often find ourselves falling again and again.

It is no doubt a deep comfort to feel God’s love and forgiveness when we confess our waywardness and strive to change, but this constant struggle can take its toil. The heart of the matter is: faith can sometimes feel like a burden strapped on our back along this arduous journey of life. How then is one able to find joy in our faith?

On that question, this brings me to a book length interview titled, Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium, given by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) to Peter Seewald, a secular German journalist.  The book was first published in 1996.

The Pope answers that, “I would put it the other way around: faith gives joy. When God is not there, the world becomes desolate, and everything becomes boring, and everything is completely unsatisfactory. It’s easy to see today how a world empty of God is also increasingly consuming itself, how it has become a wholly joyless world.  The great joy comes from the fact that there is this great love, and that is the essential message of faith.”

He goes on to explain, “To that extent it can be said that the basic element of Christianity is joy.  Joy not in the sense of cheap fun, which can conceal desperation in the background…. Rather, it is joy in the proper sense.  A joy that exists together with a difficult life and also makes this life liveable.”

He reminds us that, “The history of Jesus Christ begins, according to the Gospel, with the angel saying to Mary, “Rejoice!” On the night of nativity the angels say again: We proclaim to you a great joy.  And Jesus says, “I proclaim to you the good news.” So the heart of the matter is always expressed in these terms: I proclaim to you a great joy, God is here, you are beloved, and this stands firm forever.”

The Pope’s answer to this question of joy is very moving. It opens up a window for us to look at God with pure joy, instead of seeing him as a heavy yoke.

In the book, the Pope squarely faces a barrage of other incisive questions that took him through his own personal biography, the problems of the Catholic Church and the Church in the new millennium including Christian unity.

He addresses questions on moral controversies such as contraception, abortion and euthanasia unflinchingly in truth.

He also discusses the “canon of criticisms” such as celibacy, women’s ordination and the remarriage of divorced persons and points out that there is a fixation in the Church on these issues.  They are “serious problems” but “there is too little attention to the fact that 80 percent of the people of this world are non-Christians who are waiting for the gospel, or for whom, at any rate, the gospel is also intended, and we shouldn’t be constantly agonizing over our own questions but should be pondering how we as Christians can express today in this world what we believe and thereby say something to these people.”

In addition, to the call from liberals that the Church should change and move with the times on these issues, the Pope recalls the view of another theologian, Johann Baptist Metz, who says that it was a good thing that the experiment was made in Lutheran Christianity for “it shows that being a Christian today does not stand or fall on these questions. That the resolution of these matters doesn’t make the gospel more attractive or being a Christian any easier. It does not even achieve the agreement that will better hold the Church together.”  He believes that “we should finally be clear on this point, that the Church is not suffering on account of these questions.”

To the question whether the approach of society wanting to examine the Church, the history of the Church and the doctrine of the Church in terms of a certain plausibility, the Pope illuminates that it is not wrong when one tries to find a certain reasonability in the faith since it can be understood and could be made evident to people.  However, “if one conceives the term plausibility so narrowly that one accept only those things about Christianity that suit our way of living at a certain time, then, of course, we make Christianity too cheap and at that very moment are no longer worth anything.”

It is also apparent from the book that truth is the central concept of the Pope’s thought and the quest for truth is a constant of his life. He says that “it became clear to me how important it is that we don’t lose the concept of truth, in spite of the menaces and perils it doubtless carries with it.  It has to remain the central category.  As a demand on us that doesn’t give us rights but requires, on the contrary, our humility and our obedience and can lead us to the common path.”

In this sense, we can understand why when the Pope says, “The words of the Bible and of the Church Fathers rang in my ears, those sharp condemnations of shepherds who are like mute dogs; in order to avoid conflicts, they let the poison spread.  Peace is not the first civic duty, and a bishop whose only concern is not to have problems and to gloss over as many conflicts as possible is an image I find repulsive.”

Throughout the book, I find the Pope’s answers to be pastoral, insightful, learned, forthright and above all, coming from a heart of deep faith grounded in truth.  In my view, he sees the crises facing the Church as primarily stemming from a crisis of faith. His clarion call to return to our true faith by living it convincingly and to pass on that faith is particularly poignant.

What ultimately comes through in the book is the Pope’s unwavering conviction that Jesus is Lord and in God’s promise that he will never abandon his Church, come what may.  This is reason enough to rejoice.