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'Inculturation': A Crisis in Indian Catholicism
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14527 |
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CULTURE
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3 / 1988 |
2,804 Words |
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Dinesh D'Souza
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While the American church ponders abortion, women's roles in the church, economic inequities, and nuclear conflagration, Catholics in the Third World are absorbed in an entirely different set of problems and conflicts. This was evident at the Synod of Rome late last year, when the American bishops pressed the general body of clergy for approval of altar girls. Third World bishops were incredulous and derisive; the measure failed miserably.
Asian and African bishops felt they had enough potent issues to debate without getting into what they regarded as American trivialities. Of these issues, surely the most complex and intimidating is what Third World clerics call "inculturation"--the question of how to fuse Roman Catholicism with predominantly pagan cultures eager to forget their colonized past.
India is a locus of the inculturation controversy. Since the establishment of a Catholic hierarchy of India by the papal bull Humane Salutis in 1886, the Indian church has endured as a kind of hybrid, borrowing Portuguese and English elements and fusing them with local culture. My own name may serve as a synecdoche: The first part is Indian, and means "Sun God" in its Sanskrit derivation; the last name is Portuguese, derived from an ancestor who probably adopted the Christian name of the missionary who baptized him.
Indian Catholics comprise 1.5 percent of the nation's 700 million people. They value their identity as both Indians and Catholics. Since India's independence from British rule in 1947, Catholics have functioned as an enterprising minority, mainly concerned with uplifting their communities and retaining their traditions, far removed from the racial and religious strife that has dominated the country for the last four decades.
But in recent years, due to significant political and theological developments, the Indian church--most conspicuously its hierarchy and theologians--has been suffering an identity crisis. There is a feeling that Christianity has reached a "nodal point," a point of saturation, and nothing short of a radical overhaul will save it.
The purpose of the inculturation effort
Father D.S. Amalorpavdass, head of the Religion Department at Mysore University and one of the country's most influential theologians, says that: "The situation in India can be rightly styled as revolutionary, if not explosive." For the past fifteen years, with the blessing of the Indian Catholic bishops, Fr. Amalorpavdass has trained priests and laity to seek what he calls an "authentic Indian spirituality."
Theologians such as Amalorpavdass, Raymond Panikkar, and Paul Puthanangady have convinced most of the Indian hierarchy that Christianity in India has inherited an undesirable Western aroma from foreign missionaries and colonialists. "The church in India must recognize her genuine identity," Indian bishops insisted during the 1974 World Synod in Rome.
What does the inculturation effort--the effort to discover a unique Indian Christianity--mean? Partly it involves a drive to purge the Mass of such occidental elements as lighting candles, using chalice and paten, praying in Greco-Roman terms, and celebrating the feasts of European saints.
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