In the name of a strange religious diplomacy called inter-faith dialogue, Swami Jayendra Saraswati, Shankaracharya of Kanchi Kamakoti Matham, will today meet Cardinal Jean-Louis Pierre Tauran, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, and other religious leaders, in Mumbai. The catholic delegation will include native Catholics like Cardinal Oswald Gracias, president of the Catholic Bishop’s Conference of India and Bishop Thomas Dabre of Pune.

The meeting, at the initiative of the Catholic Church, allegedly aims to spread understanding among different religious groups, but actually intends to arraign India’s native Hindu majority for so-called attacks on minorities (read Christians). It highlights problems (sic) of Christians in Kandhamal, Orissa, but omits to mention the brutal gunning down of octogenarian Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati and four disciple-monks on Janmasthami day, 2008, with AK-47 rifles. 

Seen in this perspective, the meeting may be viewed as a precursor to the forthcoming visit of the US Commission for International Religious Freedom, which the Sonia Gandhi-led UPA scandalously permitted to enter India to examine the status of religious freedom in Gujarat and Orissa – states where poor native peoples are constantly being pressurised to change their faith by groups with access to huge funds and menacing weaponry. For the Christian West, freedom of religion means only the freedom to convert non-Christians to Christianity; and never the freedom to practice the faith of one’s birth, if that faith is non-Christian.

More recently, Swami Ramcharan Das of Puri, Orissa, was hacked to death outside his ashram. Clearly this privilege of being dispatched to the other world for the offence of the valiant defence of Hindu dharma has been reserved for sannyasis alone.

Jews exempted

Given the gritty determination with which all denominations of the church, from the Catholics to the Protestants to the newer charismatic cults, pursue conversions in the non-monotheistic world, with money and all kinds of dubious allurements and muscular pressures, it comes as a shock to learn that the Vatican has chickened out of evangelism among the Jews.

This is all the more surprising when one notes that Christians boldly peddle the Bible in Muslim countries or areas where they feel either dominant or secure – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, even our Kashmir Valley! Islam’s menacing jihadi visage is apparently no deterrent in this regard, no doubt because of the comforting presence of American guns in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the political subservience of the regimes in all countries. Faith and Empire, Faith and Trade, have ever gone hand in hand – so it is even today.

Yet on 12 May 2009, the Jerusalem Post reported – “Vatican to stop missionizing Jews” (by Abe Selig). During his historic journey to Jerusalem last month, Pope Benedict XVI met the chief Sephardic and Ashkenazi rabbis at Heichal Shlomo and agreed that the Catholic Church would cease all missionary activity among Jews.

Christian friends say this abject surrender of the Church’s mission to evangelise the world before the Jewish community with which the Church has been in fratricidal conflict since its inception two millennia ago, is the culmination of the Second Vatican Council – a little-understood but immensely significant meeting which entrenched the Jewish Bible (Old Testament) as the fountainhead of Christian theology. This completely undermined Christian resistance to Jewish religious supremacy.
 

Many Catholics believe the Second Vatican Council was the consequence of covert Jewish arm-twisting in the aftermath of Hilter’s holocaust, in which the papacy was implicated by Jews. 

For non-Christians, the 1962-65 ecumenical council known as Vatican II was a menacing call to resume the conversion agenda with gusto to reaffirm the supremacy of the old colonial powers in the new era. But unknown to non-monotheists, it was also an abject surrender before the Jews, the first children of the common patriarch, Abraham. [We shall be dealing with these subjects in subsequent days].

The ecumenical council absolved Judaism of the historical allegation of having killed Jesus. And now, in May 2009, Pope Benedict XVI (a German constantly maligned for having joined Hilter’s Youth as a young teenager during the War – an allegation he strenuously denies) has agreed that the Vatican will not convert Jews to Christianity.

Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona Metzger (suspended for investigations into allegations of financial impropriety and sexual abuse of minor boys) hailed this theological surrender by the Pope as an “historic agreement” and “for us, an immensely important message.”
[http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1242029505111&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull]

What does it mean?

1] By accepting the Old Testament as the cornerstone of the Christian Church, and the Jewish god, Yahweh/Jehovah, as the common Father in whose name the earth is to be conquered and enjoyed (note the doctrinal-intellectual origins of colonialism), the Vatican surrendered its claim to be the sole recipient of the Truth / Light in unbroken apostolic succession.

2] At Vatican II, the Catholic Church accepted that the Truth/Light, for whatever it is worth to believers, was given first to the Jews by Abraham and Moses, and still vests with them.

3] The Truth/Light offered by Jesus does not supersede the Truth of the Old Testament (the repercussions this may have on the Islamic claim that Mohammad is the seal of a prophetic tradition beginning with Abraham remains to be seen. What is clear is that the Jewish Avram, Christian Abraham and Muslim Ibrahim – despite being one and the same - failed to evolve the compatibility of the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh).

4] This makes the Catholic Church a mere sect of the True Faith (Judaism).

5] The Catholic Church is right to the extent that it accepts the Old Testament (Jewish Bible) and false to the extent that it accepts the New Testament.

6] The Vatican doctrine of Papal Infallibility lies in tatters, because the (monotheistic world’s) Truth is with the Jews and not with the Catholic Church and its Apostles.

Does this help Hindus? 

Yes. The Vatican’s traditional denunciation of moral relativism, the acceptance of moral worth in other religions, and its propagation of Christian theology as the ONLY True Doctrine for the entire world, has retreated in the face of Jewish obduracy.

No doubt, the international Jewish financial clout (read stranglehold) has something to do with this development, but it demonstrates what a determined leadership can achieve for its people. Sri Lanka’s Buddhist Mahasangha is currently asserting itself against all Christian denominations in the island in the same spirit, and is bound to achieve its goals.

A chorus of Hindu voices proclaiming Christianity as the Religion of Colonial Powers, and freedom of religion a mask for the political subversion of native faiths, could put all Christian forces on the defensive. Conversion is nothing but cultural rape and religious annihilation.

Hindus should demand that the United Nations (another western stooge) declare missionary activity a crime against humanity.

Hindus must shun the mythology that western colonial countries have abandoned religion and become secular; Christianity is a political religion and it remains a political tool to penetrate and subjugate former colonies and semi-colonies. Secularism is a mask of the Christian god, a snare to bamboozle non-monotheistic traditions to discard the protective covering (kavach) of their natal faith and traditions.

Love?

As the erudite Cardinal Jean-Louis Pierre Tauran, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, has come to India, we must not neglect to ask the holy father what exactly the Bible means when it says ‘love thy neighbour as thyself.’

Given Christianity’s bloody and continuing history of murderous engagement with native communities in every land where it has made itself a neighbour, what exactly can Hindus expect by way of Christian ‘love’?

The writer is Editor, www.vijayvaani.com