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Chapter Twenty-three

None of our brown sahibs and learned secular scribes are interested in this discourse. They are bored by it, or embarrassed, and if they have bothered to read it they will have decided that we are a rabid communalist who hates Christians. They have been fed on the milksops of a sentimental christology in their convent schools and Jesuit colleges and it has made them impotent. They are not able to measure Christian cult theory and practice against the rigorous standards set by their own Dharma. They are also on the defensive, having been persuaded by their Jesuit masters that criticising Christianity and exposing its untruths is the same as attacking Christians.73 They have not converted to the One True Faith and never will without an inducement, but they are already convinced little popes who cannot help but admire the big pope. He has what they want or already share in just a little bit – absolute power.

Christianity, and especially Roman Catholic Christianity, has very little to do with religious faith. It is and has always been a system of imperialist politics and financial racketeering practiced under the guise of religion.74 Its first victims are poor Christians who lead lives of subsistence and misery under the grinding heel of an imperious and repressive Church.75 Its second victims are social reformers and scientists, independent scholars, philosophers and seekers of truth who dare to venture beyond the narrow confines of Christian doctrine. We are going to give the last word in this essay of quotations to one such philosopher, the Rev. Dr. Lourenco C. Torcato, a Catholic priest from Goa who founded the Research Institute of Education and Philosophy and Religion at Bombay. Dr. Torcato died in 1993 under official Church interdict and in extreme poverty because the Archbishop of Bombay had stopped his pension when he, for reasons of conscience, had refused to convert a Hindu to Christianity. As a serious thinker he was too much enamoured of Marxist theory, but he was nonetheless a sincere and outspoken proponent of India's Vedic heritage who never got tired of saying, "Unfortunately, some of our Indian leaders and people wrongly value the so-called high standard of schools and colleges run by sectarian organisations, not realizing the disastrous effects of replacing true Indian culture with western ways."

In 1970 Dr. Torcato published his book, Education: Its History and Philosophy, which caused an uproar in official Catholic circles and was immediately banned in Catholic colleges. In it he writes, "The religious organisations which control education in India openly discuss the motives and ideals of their religion-controlled educational institutions....76 The Catholic leaders do not hesitate to say publicly the reasons which motivated the opening of their educational establishments. The reasons are based on their dogmatic religious beliefs which they openly teach in all their educational establishments, howsoever crude their religious instruction may be. Besides, the religion-based educational organisations are meant also to be the chief means of most important contact with the finest elements of Hindu society and other societies as well. The Catholic leaders maintain that the main object of their schools, colleges and other educational institutions is the education of Catholic youth, and for this purpose they try to bestow greater care on the spiritual training based on dogmatic teaching of Roman Catholicism.

"By means of Solidalities, Newman Clubs, Catholic University Students' Federation and Training Camps and such other extracurricular activities, the heads of these institutions make every effort to strengthen their religious beliefs and to deepen their spiritual life. This means in other words, the salvation of their own souls and indirectly the conversion of non-Catholic souls, for they are excluded from Heaven. Every effort possible should be made not ex officio but when the opportunity arises to show to fellow students the great sacramental efficacy of the door to salvation which in the theological language is called the sacrament of Baptism....

"This what is said about the educational establishments administered by Roman Catholics holds good mutatis mutandis of all other Christian sects and also of Muslims and other proselytizing religious organisations. They believe that they are commanded by their prophets and by the voice from above to save the souls of others whom they call infidels. This being the case, our main concern is to find out whether the right to impart education to Indians should be vested in the National Ministry of Education or in the religious and communal organisations. We know that they are bold to spread the errors and superstitions taking full advantage of the articles of the Constitution which empowers them to establish educational institutions and thus go ahead with their religious fairy tales and communal viruses to the great detriment of the most vital interests of the Indian Nation as a whole."

Indeed, the bold spreading of errors and superstitions about St. Thomas and early Christianity in India is everywhere from tourist guide books and official gazettes to school text books and, of course, Christian publications and websites. The sad irony of this tsunami of historical falsehoods which was once limited to the popular pro-Christian secular The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple media, is that this book has become the source book for the references Indian Christians and secular academics and journalists use to create their fictitious and communal St. Thomas stories. The result is that every Hindu boy and girl in Madras believes that a Mylapore king and his Brahmin priest murdered St. Thomas on Big Mount. They cannot help but believe it because that is what they are taught "on good authority" either by the teachers in their convent schools or by clever and deceitful articles in the morning's New Indian Express or Deccan Chronicle. That Mylapore did not have a known king in 68 or 72 CE except for Lord Shiva himself, and that no reputed Christian historian of the last two hundred years including Pope Benedict XVI would support this charge of "deicide" in Madras, has no meaning to school children brought up on Wikipedia's ever-changing fables and the Encyclopaedia Britannica's carefully crafted lies.

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73. H.G. Wells, in Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church, writes, “[The Jesuits'] work had to be propaganda; teaching and the insinuation by every possible means of the authority and policy of the Church.... Unfortunately for the world the Jesuits have never been able to keep clear of politics. It was against their written professions, if these are to be taken seriously, but it was manifestly among their inevitable temptations. They had their share, direct and indirect, in embroiling states, concocting conspiracies and kindling wars.... We need not expand this indictment further. Almost every country in Europe except England had at one time or another been provoked to expel the Jesuits, and ... their obdurate persistence in evil-doing continues to this day.”

74. For example, when the Portuguese were attempting to evangelize India "to instruct the inhabitants in the Catholic Faith and good morals" as decreed by the Pope - the Pope himself was taxing lepers and prostitutes in Rome, ten percent of their incomes, and was doing this on the authority of Catholicism's greatest theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas. For references see David Yallop's In God's Name, Nino Lo Bello's The Vatican Empire, M. Murray O'Hair's Let's Prey and Avro Manhattan's The Vatican Billions, The Dollar and the Vatican, Vatican Imperialism in the Twentieth Century, The Vatican in World Politics, The Vatican in Asia, and Catholic Imperialism and World Freedom. Avro Manhattan is a former BBC political commentator.

75. Mother Teresa used to tell her international donor audiences, from whom she collected millions of tax-free dollars for her missionary enterprise, that what India really needed was Jesus. We observe that the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Rwanda, Brazil, the Philippines – to name a few – all have Jesus, and have had him for some time, but that he does not seem to have done any of them any moral, spiritual, or material good.

76. Malachi Martin, in The Jesuits, writes, "The subcontinent of India, in the eyes of Vatican planners, has a primordial importance as the one country in Asia where the Church can make huge headway. The Roman Catholic Church has poured vast resources into India. Religious orders run 115 colleges with 135,000 students, 1,200 high schools with over 500,000 pupils, 242 technical schools with over 400,000 students. It is estimated that 60 percent of all students in India attend Roman Catholic schools and colleges. In those seats of learning, 50 percent of the teachers are non-Christian. Jesuits are involved on the local, state, and national level." Raymond James Paul, in A Catholic's Believe It or Not, writes, "More than 7,000 educational institutions have been established by the Catholic Church in India." The real figure is much higher as these books were published in 1987 and 1963 respectively. They do not include non-Catholic educational institutions which have proliferated in recent years with the rapid spread of evangelical Protestant churches in India. A truer picture of the Christian landscape in India can be got from the 1992 report of the World Council of Churches, which says, "Indian churches put together are the biggest single land owner in India."