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June 2006 saw a hectic flurry of activity demanding a ban on the film "The Da Vinci Code" by various church groups in India -- prominent among them the Catholic Church. Although the Indian Censor Board cleared the film for release, seven Indian states banned it.
In the West, the Catholic Church did not demand such bans. Rather, it confronted producers of "The Da Vinci Code," as well as those of a Discovery Channel documentary on the film, with academic research and encouraged scholarly debate on controversial points raised by the film.
So what is happening?
The problem goes beyond the mere banning of films and forcing the cancellation of television documentaries. The problem is one of marketing. The Catholic Church in India is in what it calls the "planting stage." And what it seeks is, as put forth by His Holiness Pope John Paul II during his last Indian visit, "the harvest of souls."
In this the Roman Catholic Church is not alone. A host of even more fundamentalist evangelical organizations are in the fray, as revealed in an investigative report posted by the independent online newspaper Tehelka. This includes such organizations as the International Mission Board, Southern Baptist Convention, Christian Aid, World Vision, Seventh Day Adventist Church and multi-billion-dollar enterprises run by evangelists like Pat Robertson, Billy Graham and Roger Houtsma.
Huge money is being pumped into India for church planting and harvesting of souls. So anything that the Catholic Church and the evangelical movement see as a hindrance to their aggressive marketing, they want out of the way. The Church commands a solid vote bank also. Hence Indian politicians, who have developed in the name of secularism what a renowned historian called "perverted political parlance," are only too eager to oblige the Church. The worst results of such an inquisitional stand taken by the Church include worsening inter-community relations and destruction of some of the most beautiful developments of Christian theology rooted in Indian culture.
Take for example the case of Antony de Mello -- Jesuit priest, psychotherapist, meditation master and master story teller all rolled into one. His book "Sadhana -- A Way to God," published in 1979, was praised by the Catholic Theological Society of America as "perhaps the best book available in English for Christians on how to pray, meditate and contemplate." Twenty years down the line the Church would announce in its Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that the work of de Mello contained positions that "are incompatible with the Catholic faith and can cause grave harm." Why? Because the spiritual approach of Antony de Mello makes the aggressive marketing of the Christ impossible. Barely a week after India's Independence Day in August, 1999, when the Church made its condemning comments on India's most loved Jesuit priest, there were no open protests or demonstrations -- unlike the open and sometimes violent demonstrations we witnessed against the film and the documentary. Murmurs and a few letters to theological journals summed up all protests.
Circa 200 CE one of the prominent leaders of the nascent Roman Catholic Church, Hippolytus, wrote an exhaustive "Refutation of All Heresies," mainly aimed at the Gnostic "heretics." He noted Indian wisdom as the source of Gnostic heresy. Since then we know that Gnosticism was suppressed ruthlessly by the Church. It was with the dawn of enlightenment that free discussion of the alternative Jesus narratives became possible in Europe. But indeed it is a tragic irony that, after nearly 2000 years, India has again become the ground where Gnostic "heresy" is suppressed while power games are played out in the name of Jesus.
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(S. Aravindan Neelakandan is a freelance writer and author of the Tamil-language "God and 40 Hz." He works with an ecological NGO called Vivekananda Kendra -- Natural Resources Development Project in Nagercoil, India. ©Copyright S. Aravindan Neelakandan)
