Catholic Ashrams Sannyasins or Swindlers SITA RAM GOEL Voice of India, New Delhi Contents Preface SECTION I THE ASHRAM MOVEMENT IN THE CHRISTIAN MISSION 1. New Labels for Old Merchandise 2. Indigenisation: A Predatory Enterprise 3. The Patron Saint of Indigenisation 4. Mission's Volte-Face vis-a-vis Hindu Culture 5. The Ashram Movement in the Mission 6. The Trinity from Tannirpalli 7. An Imperialist Hangover SECTION II MISSION STRAEGY EXPOSED BY HINDUISM TODAY 8. Catholic Ashrams : Adopting and Adapting Hindu Dharma 9. The J.R. Ewing Syndrome 10. Interview with Father Bruno Barnhardt : Emmaculate Heart Hermitage 11. Returning to the Hindu Fold: A Primer APPENDIX 1 : Malaysia Hindus Protest Christian "Sadhu" APPENDIX 2 : Missionary's Dirty Tricks SECTION III THE DIALOGUES 12. The First Dialogue 13. The Second Dialogue 14. The Third Dialogue SECTION IV THE MISSIONARY MIND 15. Bede Griffiths Drops the Mask APPENDIX 1 : Different Paths Meeting in God APPENDIX 2 : "Liberal" Christianity APPENDIX 3 : The Great Command and a Cosmic Auditing SECTION V : APPENDICES THE ORGANISATIONAL WEAPON I. Christian Ashrams in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka II. A Glimpse of Mission Finance III. Thy Kingdom is the Third World IV. Christianity Mainly for Export: God's Legionaries V. Proselytisation as it is Practised Bibliography Preface It was early in 1987 that Hinduism Today1 sent to me reprints of four articles that had been published in its issue of November/ December, 1986.2 Based on extensive research, the articles told the story of some Catholic missionaries establishing "ashrams" in different parts of India and doing many other things in order to look like Hindu sannyasins. They also pointed out some glaring contradictions between Hindu spiritual perceptions on the one hand and the basic Christian beliefs on the other. One of the articles quoted from Vatican sources to show how Church proclamations disagreed with the professions of Christian "sannyasins". Another asked the Christians as to how they would look at a Muslim missionary appearing in their midst in the dress of a Christian priest and adopting Christian rituals in a Church-like mosque, but teaching the Quran instead of the Bible.3 I wrote to Hinduism Today that Voice of India would like to publish the articles in the form of a booklet for the education of Hindus, many of whom had been hoodwinked by this form of mission strategy. The permission was readily granted. While these articles were getting printed, a friend in Madras informed me that a dialogue on the subject of Christian ashrams had developed through correspondence between Swami Devananda Saraswati and Father Bede Griffiths. He sent to me an article and some letters to the editor which had appeared in the Indian Express of Madras in March and April 1987, and triggered the dialogue. The article, An Apostle of Peace, was the summary of a talk which Dr. Robert Wayne Teasdale, a Catholic theologian from Canada, had delivered in Madras on March 12, 1987. Fr. Bede Griffiths had been presented by him as "Britain's appropriate gift to India".4 The letters to the editor were reactions from readers of the Indian Express. I wrote to Swami Devananda and obtained from him copies of the letters exchanged. He also supplied a letter from Dr. Teasdale that had appeared in the Indian Express of June 1, 1987 and was a defence of Teasdale's earlier presentation. I found the material illuminating and immediately relevant to the subject I was planning to present for public discussion. Swami Devananda had no objection to Voice of India publishing the correspondence provided Fr. Bede Griffiths also gave his permission. He wrote to Fr. Bede who agreed readily and with grace. Swami Devananda then sent us copies of the last letters exchanged in October, 1987. As I developed the Preface to the first edition and surveyed the mission strategies in the history of Christianity in this country, I realized that I was dealing with not only Catholic Ashrams but, in fact, with a whole movement known as the Christian Ashram Movement in the Christian Mission. Various Protestant missions were also practising the same fraud. But it was too late to change the title of the book because its main body had been already printed. I have retained the old title in this edition also because it has become well-known under this name not only in this country but also abroad, particularly in circles that control the Christian missions in this country. But I have made the subtitle more apt. In this second edition, while all the old material has been retained, a lot more has been added. The earlier Preface has been expanded and rearranged into chapters with suitable headings. It now forms Section I of the book. In Section II which carries the earlier articles from Hinduism Today, two more articles from the same monthly have been added as appendices. In the earlier edition, there was only one dialogue, that between Swami Devananda and Fr. Bede. Now there are three dialogues, two more having been put together by Swami Devananda and brought to my attention. The dialogues form Section III of the present edition. Another valuable addition is Section IV which comprises letters exchanged between Fr. Bede and Shri Ram Swarup in early 1990. Three articles written by Ram Swarup in different papers and referred to by him in his letters to Fr. Bede have been reproduced as appendices to this section. Section V of this edition is more or less the same as Section III of the old one except for some changes in the numbering of the appendices and addition of a new appendix. The information which this section had carried earlier about Robert De Nobili has been transferred to the appropriate chapter under Section I. The other new features in the present edition are Bibliography and Index. II The first edition of Catholic Ashrams drew two sharp but opposite reactions from Hindu and Christian quarters. Hindu readers by and large reacted favourably and welcomed the Hindu view of Christian missions. Some readers whom I had known for years and who had thought that Christian missions had undergone a change of character, were unpleasantly surprised. The only Hindu with whom I failed to carry weight was a noted Gandhian who refused to concede that there was anything wrong in what the Christian mission were doing. So unlike Mahatma Gandhi, I thought. I have found that for the Gandhians, by and large, Muslims and Christians are always in the right, and Hindus always in the wrong. I wonder if anyone of them has ever cared to read the Mahatma's works, and know that, no matter what his strategy of serving Hinduism happened to be at any time, his commitment to Hinduism was uncompromising. On the other hand, my Christian friends whom I had known for many years, expressed pain and resentment at what I had written, particularly about Swami Abhishiktananda who had met me in 19?8 and known me rather well for years till he died in 1973. In our very first meeting I had told him in so many words that Jesus came nowhere near even the most minor Hindu saint, and that the missionary attempts to foist him on Hindus with the help of Western wealth, was nothing short of wickedness. He had never mentioned Jesus again, and our discussions had centred on Hindu philosophy of which he knew quite a bit, at least better than I did at that time. I had never suspected that he himself was a missionary and a part of the apparatus. It was only when I read his writings that I learnt the truth. I happened to be Treasurer of the Abhishiktananda Society in Delhi at the time the first edition of this book appeared. I told my Christian friends that we were in the midst of a dialogue, and that personal relations should not obscure ideological differences. But I have failed to impress them. Our relations are now correct but cold. Having been a student of Christian doctrine and history, I should have known that the post-Vatican II talk about tolerance and dialogue was intended to be a one-way affair. A friend (not Koenraad Elst) has sent to me the relevant pages from a book written by a Christian lady and published from Leuven in Belgium. She has been rather kind to me. "While there has been," she says, "much sympathy and support from both the Hindu and Christian communities in India, Catholic ashrams have also confronted opposition. In Catholic Ashrams, Sita Ram Goel, a member of a fundamentalist movement within Hinduism which seeks to return to the pure Vedic religion, severely attacks and ridicules the phenomenon of Catholic ashrams… As long as Christians are not prepared to question their own fundamentals of faith, more precisely the belief in the uniqueness of Christ, Hindus, according to Goel, will remain suspicious of Catholic motives for starting ashrams."5 I do not know what she means by "return of the pure Vedic religion". I know of no such movement in India at present. At any rate, I should like her to guide me to the movement to which I am supposed to subscribe. But she has represented me quite correctly when she says that I consider the Christian dogma of Jesus Christ being the only saviour as a devilish doctrine which Hindus will never accept. Readers of the two sentences I have quoted from her book can judge for themselves as to who is a fundamentalist. In any case, I should like to point out to this Christian enthusiast that fundamentalism is as foreign to Hinduism as honesty is to Christian missions. Coming to Jesus Christ, I had written an essay on what the Christological research in the modem West has done to this mischievous myth. The essay was intended to be a Preface to this edition of the Catholic Ashrams. But owing to the wealth of detail which was needed to tell the full story of the Jesus of History yielding place to the Jesus of Fiction and finally leaving the fast dwindling number of believing Christians with the Christ of Faith (blind belief), the essay became too long and did not look suitable as a mere Preface. I have had to make the essay a separate book, Jesus Christ: An Artifice for Aggression, which is being published simultaneously with this edition of the Catholic Ashrams. Readers may regard the two books as companion volumes. I end by mentioning a happy coincidence. When I sat down to write the Preface to the first edition of Catholic Ashrams, I ran into a lot of source material which enabled me eventually to write History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1989), which, in turn, brought Koenraad Elst to me in December, 1989. This time, as I sat down to write the Preface to this edition, I ran into another lot of material which has enabled me to write Jesus Christ: An Artifice for Aggression. I look forward to my next book on Christianity which I hope will enable me to write yet another. SITA RAM GOEL Vasantotsava New Delhi 27 March 1994 Footnotes: 1 This periodical is published by the Saiva Siddhanta Church which has its international headquarters in Hawaii, USA. Starting as a quarterly, The New Saivite World, on January 5, 1979 it became a bimonthly in September 1985 and a monthly from July 1987 onwards. 2 December 1986/January 1987 issue of the Indian Ocean Edition published from Port Louis, Mauritius. Recently an Indian edition has started coming out from New Delhi. 3 Christian reaction to the main article in Hinduism Today came out in the September 1987 issue of Religion And Society, published from Bangalore. It is one of the six most important Christian journals in India. The editor dismisses as "conservative" those Hindus who suspect Christian ashrams as a new strategy for conversion. "While this attack is nonsense or worse," he concludes, "it does show clearly how Hindus of a kind, probably on the increase, view some Christian ashrams." Obviously, the other kind of Hindus the editor has in mind are either "progressives" who welcome everything hostile to Hinduism or those simple people who know nothing about the missionary apparatus and machinations and who, therefore, never ask any questions. 4 Dr. Teasdale's Towards A Christian Vedanta: The Encounter of Hinduism and Christianity according to Bede Griffiths has been published from Bangalore in 1987. 5 Catherine Cornille, The Guru in Indian Catholicism: Ambiguity or Opportunity of Inculturation, Louvain, 1990, pp.192-93. SECTION I THE ASHRAM MOVEMENT IN THE CHRISTIAN MISSION CHAPTER 1 New Labels for Old Merchandise The emergence of Catholic ashrams in several parts of the country is not an isolated development. These institutions are links in a chain which is known as the "Ashram Movement", and which different denominations of Christianity are promoting in concert. The Protestants and the Syrian Orthodox have evolved similar establishments. Taken together, these institutions are known as Christian ashrams. Several books and many articles have already been devoted to the subject by noted Christian writers. The Ashram Movement, in turn, is part of another and larger plan which is known as Indigenisation or Inculturation and which has several other planks. The plan has already produced a mass of literature1 and is being continuously reviewed in colloquies, conferences, seminars, and spiritual workshops on the local, provincial, regional, national, and international levels. High-powered committees and councils and special cells have been set up for supervising its elaboration and implementation. What strikes one most as one wades through the literature of Indigenisation is the sense of failure from which Christianity is suffering in this country. Or, what seems more likely, this literature is being produced with the express purpose of creating that impression. The gains made so far by an imperialist enterprise are being concealed under a sob-story. Whatever the truth, we find that the mission strategists are trying hard to understand and explain why Christianity has not made the strides it should have made by virtue of its own merits and the opportunities that came its way. Christianity, claim the mission strategists, possesses and proclaims the only true prescription for spiritual salvation. It has been present in India, they say, almost since the commencement of the Christian era. During the last four hundred years, it has been promoted in all possible ways by a succession of colonial powers - the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and the British. The secular dispensation which has obtained in this country since the dawn of independence has provided untrammeled freedom to the functioning as well as the multiplication of the Christian mission. Many Christian countries in the West have maintained for many years an unceasing flow of finance and personnel for the spread of the gospel. The costs of the enterprise over the years, in terms of money and manpower, are mind-boggling. Yet Christianity has failed to reap a rich harvest among the Hindu heathens. "It is a remarkable fact," writes Fr. Bede, "that the Church has been present in India for over fifteen hundred years2 and has had for the most part everything in its favour, and yet in all this time hardly two in a hundred of the people has been converted to the christian faith. The position is, indeed, worse even than this figure would suggest, as the vast majority of Christians are concentrated in a very few small areas and in the greater part of India the mass of people remains today untouched except in a very general way by the christian faith. It is necessary to go even further than this and to say that for the immense majority of the Indian people Christianity still appears as a foreign religion imported from the West and the soul of India remains obstinately attached to its ancient religion. It is not simply a matter of ignorance. This may have been true in the past, but in recent times there has been a remarkable revival of Hinduism, which is more or less consciously opposed to Christianity, and the educated Hindu regards his religion as definitely superior to Christianity."3 The state of things described by Fr. Bede would have caused no concern to a normal human mind. There is nothing obstinate about Hindus remaining attached to their ancient religion which has given them a large number of saints, sages and spiritual giants, and enriched them with an incomparable wealth of art, architecture, music and literature. There is nothing wrong with Hindus who find their own religion more satisfying than an alien faith brought in by imperialist invaders. Moreover, Christianity has yet to prove that it has something better to offer in terms of spiritual seeking, or vision, or attainment. But the missionary mind, unfortunately, has never been a normal human mind. It has always suffered from the hallucination that it has a monopoly on truth and that it has a divine command to strive for the salvation of every soul. That alone can explain why the mission in India, instead of dismantling itself, is making determined efforts to regroup and return for yet another assault on Hinduism. Coming to the causes of Christian failure in India, one searches in vain for a single line in the voluminous literature of Indigenisation which tries to examine the character of Christian doctrine vis-à-vis what the Hindus expect from a religion. In fact, the doctrine is never mentioned in this context. It is assumed that the doctrine has been and remains perfect and flawless. What is wrong, we are told, is the way it has been presented to Hindus. "These facts," continues Fr. Bede after mourning the failure of the mission, "which can scarcely be questioned, suggest that there has been something wrong with the way in which the gospel has been presented in India (and the same remark would apply to all the Far East) and especially in the relation which has been established between Christianity and Hinduism. We shall review at a later stage the relationship which Fr. Bede envisages as correct between his religion and that of the Hindus. The literature of Indigenisation has a lot to say on the subject. What we must find out first is the mistake which, according to Fr. Bede, the mission has made in presenting the gospel. "When we consider the number of conversions to Christianity over the last four hundred years," observes Fr. Bede, "we must admit that the Christian mission has largely failed. As soon as we ask why, I think we find the answer quite clear before us: the Church has always presented herself to the eastern world in the forms of an alien culture. A culture is the way people naturally express themselves; it embraces their language, music, art, even their gestures, their ways of thought and feeling and imagination. It is their whole world. In every case the Church has come to eastern people in an alien form."4 It may be noted that Fr. Bede has excluded religion from his definition of culture which he regards as a people's "whole world". This is not an oversight as we shall see. It is deliberate and calculated design. What is the way out? It is obvious, say the mission strategists. Christianity has to drop its alien attire and get clothed in Hindu cultural forms. In short, Christianity has to be presented as an indigenous faith. Christian theology has to be conveyed through categories of Hindu philosophy; Christian worship has to be conducted in the manner and with the materials of Hindu pûjâ; Christian sacraments have to sound like Hindu saMskâras; Christian Churches have to copy the architecture of Hindu temples; Christian hymns have to be set to Hindu music; Christian themes and personalities have to be presented in styles of Hindu painting; Christian missionaries have to dress and live like Hindu sannyâsins; Christian mission stations have to look like Hindu ashramas. And so on, the literature of Indigenisation goes into all aspects of Christian thought, organisation and activity and tries to discover how far and in what way they can be disguised in Hindu forms. The fulfilment will be when converts to Christianity proclaim with complete confidence that they are Hindu Christians. The only alien way which does not seem to call for Indigenisation is the finance of the mission. There is, of course, an occasional speculation whether the mission can do without foreign finance. Off and on, some romantics raise the protest that Christianity can never pass as an indigenous religion so long as it does not learn to live on indigenous resources, but the point is never permitted to be pressed home. The realists know that the mission will collapse like nine-pins if the flow of foreign finance stops for even a short time or is reduced in scale. The theme is brought up once in a while in order to maintain the pretence that the mission is not unmindful of Hindu misgivings on this score. The controversy always ends in a compromise, namely, that "the foreign support should be maintained just for the purpose of getting rid of it".5 In other words, Hindus should become Christians if they wish to see the mission freed from foreign support! In the end one finds it difficult to withhold the comment that the literature of Indigenisation reads less like the deliberations of divines than like the proceedings of conferences on marketing and management convened by multinational corporations. The corporation in this case is old and experienced. It commands colossal resources in terms of money and manpower and prestige. It is also conversant with and employs the latest methods of salesmanship. But the problem is that its stock-in-trade is stale and finds few buyers in Hindu society. At the same time, the corporation is congenitally incapable of producing anything new and more satisfying. The solution to the problem, as the Board of Management sees it, is to invent spurious labels which can hoodwink Hindus into believing that a brand new product is being brought to them. That is what the Christian theologians, historians, sociologists, artists and musicians are working at today. It makes no difference that they pull long faces, look solemn, and invoke the Holy Spirit whenever they come together in conference, or deliver pep talks, or pen pompous phrases. The business remains as sordid as ever. It is true that there are still left among them some simple souls who believe sincerely that there is no mansion outside the Church save hell; but, by and large, they know what they are doing and that they are doing it because their own jobs and positions and privileges are at stake. Footnotes: 1 U. Meyer lists as many as 196 articles published in 8 major Christian journals from 1938 to 1965 (Indian Church History Review, December, 1967, pp. 114-120). Books and reports of committees and conferences, etc. which constitute a sizable segment of this literature, are not included in this list. The literature has tended to become more and more prolific in years subsequent to 1965. 2 Mercifully, Fr. Bede does not repeat the currently fashionable Christian story that Christianity was brought to India in 52 A.D. by St. Thomas. He opts for sober history which records that the first Christians came to Malabar in the second half of the fifth century. 3 Bede Griffiths, Christ in India, Bangalore, 1986, p. 55. 4 Ibid., P. 179 5 U. Meyer, op. cit., p. 102 CHAPTER 2 Indigenisation: A Predatory Enterprise The precedent cited most frequently by the literature of Indigenisation is that which was set by the Greek Fathers when they used Greek cultural forms for conveying Christianity to the pagans in the Roman Empire. Fr. Bede recommends this precedent to the mission in India. "The Church," he says, "has a perfect model of how it should proceed today in the way it proceeded in the early centuries. Christianity came out of Palestine as a Jewish sect. Yet within a few centuries this Jewish sect had taken all the forms of thought and expression of the Greco-Roman world. A Christian theology developed in Greek modes of thought, as did a Christian liturgy in Greek language and in Greek modes of expression; a calender also developed according to Greek and Roman traditions. Surely all that is a wonderful example meant for our instruction of how the Church can present herself to an alien world, receiving forms into herself while retaining her own Catholic message."1 Another expert on Indigenisation is more explicit about what the Church had done in the Greco-Roman world. "As we reflect on the process," writes R.H.S. Boyd, "by which Christianity in the earlier centuries became acclimatised in the Greek world, and by which it made use of certain categories of Greek thought, we are struck by the double face of its acceptance of 'secularised' Greek philosophy and philosophical terminology, and its complete rejection of Greek religion and mythology. Greek religion was gradually secularised. Philosophy was separated from what had been a religio-philosophic unity. The religious content - which had already been deeply influenced by secularisation right from the time of Aristophanes and Euripides - developed into a cultural, literary, artistic entity 'incapsulated' and isolated, except in the Orphic and mystery traditions, from that living, existential faith which transforms men's lives."2 There is no evidence that Greek culture had become secularised before some of its forms were taken over by the Church. The history of that period stands thoroughly documented by renowned scholars. The record leaves no doubt that it was the Church which forcibly secularised Greek culture by closing pagan schools, destroying pagan temples, and prohibiting pagan rites. In fact, the doings of the Church in the Greco- Roman world is one of the darkest chapters in human history. Force and fraud are the