Thiruvananthapuram, 02 August(HS) : Baselios Cleemis, Major Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church, has dared the Government of India to meddle with the Church’s right to evangelize and proselytize the people in the country.

“There is no question of us stopping the evangelization drive. If somebody feels that we can be threatened by arresting some priests and nuns who are into converting people to Christianity, they are mistaken,” said Cleemis while reacting to the arrest of two Catholic nuns at Chhattisgarh.

The Kerala-born nuns, who work as evangelists in Chhattisgarh were taken into police custody while they were trafficking two girls to Agra with the promise of employing them as nuns.

When the Government Railway Police at Durg Railway Station suspected the dubious movements of the nuns and the two girls, they questioned them but the nuns could not give proper answer to the queries and this culminated in their arrest.

The “secular” political parties in Kerala who saw red in the arrest of the nuns went overboard and launched an agitation with the support of the mainstream media.

The Church, which had offered the BJP in the run up to the 2024 Lok Sabha election that the party could get three candidates elected from the State if the Government could hike rubber prices to Rs 350 per quintal made a U-turn and declared that the BJP is not to be trusted.

It was Joseph Pamplani, Archbishop of Thalassery and chief patron of the Catholic Farmers’ Congress who declared that the Church would help the BJP win three Lok Sabha seats from Kerala.

Cleemis is well known for his hatred towards Hindus and he does not miss even a single chance to launch diatribe against the BJP and the RSS.

“The minorities are nit safe under the Narendra Modi-led Government at the Centre,” Cleemis has said many times during the last decade.

The Church in the country can never survive without the right to evangelize and they vehemently oppose the legislations against religious conversion by force or coercion.

A major section of the BJP in Kerala is opposed to the party aligning with the Church. Though the BJP was the only political outfit that stood behind the bishops of Pala, Thrissur and Thalassery who demanded action against Love Jihad and Narcotics Jihad perpetrated by the Islamic outfits, it has not made any impact among the Christian community in the state.

“I agree that many Christians have joined the BJP after 2014. But that was not because of their love for BJP or Sangh Parivar. They want to get maximum favors from the Hindutva Party,” said a top BJP leader based in New Delhi told HS.

Hindusthan Samachar / Manohar Yadavatti