The Madras High Court, in April 2024 appointed retired Justices R Balasubramanian and V Bharathidasan as administrators of the Church of South India (CSI). The High Court has given the administrators powers to handle the church’s finances and told them to conduct elections to the Synod.
The court intervened after a section of the laity alleged corruption charges against former Synod Moderator bishop Dharmaraj Rasalam. The High Court has allowed the administrators to appoint members to respective diocesan councils at “the earliest possible opportunity.” The court-appointed administrators took charge on April 18 2024 and banned the treasurer from executing financial transactions.
This embarrassing development confronts every Christian with some of the most formidable questions – why have the priests botched up Christianity? How can the congregations sympathise with the priests? Is this painful and ghastly spectacle the outcome of Christianity? In the Church of North India (CNI) the ex-Moderator is behind bars on similar corruption charges.
Every Christian is embarrassed beyond words because the corruption in question is in those holy seats which hitherto people looked up to with awe as the seats of virtue and goodness. Corruption is decadence therefore Christianity is decadent. All the values upon which a majority of the Christians in India built their highest hopes are now decadent values.
These are the travails that Christianity is facing in India at present. Nothing is more troublesome to Christianity than its priests: an honest priest is as rare as a blue diamond. The problem with these troublesome priests is integrity – integrity in a priest is a forgotten concept judging from what we can see is happening in the CSI and the CNI and many suspect, in the Diocese of North East India (DoNEI) as well.
It is as if they believe there is no such term as integrity in their so-called “calling” and that if anything slightly connected to it exists, it is the antonym, because it is apparent from their actions that that is what the bedrock of their faith is built upon these days. A fragile faith is what makes up for that famous term used in the Bible against the priests of those days…hypocrisy. Faith is useful to them only so far as it is effective in convincing others and themselves as well; that hypocrisy practiced consciously and instinctively is innocent.
The better one is in using hypocrisy innocently and gently the greater is his saintliness in public, in government service in church committees, etc – at least that is how they appear. Under the cover of the holiest names, “Ali Baba and his holy” men are exercising the most decadent values in the history of Christianity. At this point I cannot absolve myself without giving an account of the treachery I perceive in these holy men – we are born in sin they say. And with this belief in mind, we let them rule over us.
At the very onset, I must emphasise, that I am not alluding to those priests who strive with head and heart to uphold their integrity, and there are a few of them here in the Shillong Pastorate, and I refrain from mentioning their names lest I cause them no little embarrassment…in fact it would be best that I make a clear statement now, “I am only alluding to the kind of priests that the Courts have been compelled to deal with in the CSI, and in the CNI.”
I greatly suspect that hypocrisy, like a plant, has found the perfect soil and air and moisture and light in the Indian sub-continent. It finds the culture and the great enthusiasm in Indian people ideal for its sustenance and growth. Not what the holy man is but what he signifies in the eyes of the common man gives him his ephemeral, holy value.
Consider the case of a youth who gets confirmed in haste in which even when the priest swears or promises by the “Book” there is no solid commitment of any kind to that “Book” on the part of the priest, and years later when this young man’s mind is opened to the reason of being confirmed, and he becomes aware of the lack of conscience in the manner in which the priests conduct themselves, and he is asked what he thinks of the order of confirmation, and of what the right relations between man and God is, he answers, “I should have much to say if I were not what I have become…but I have been confirmed in the presence of family, kith and kin, and godfather and friends, and congregation and now all questions on the matter are closed to me.”
It is natural that with education and experience people invariably introspect into the how and why of things surrounding morality, and the conduct of priests always comes to the fore at such times. And to the questioning mind, the priest is like a middleman between him and God, and we know that the middlemen almost always adulterate the food which they supply. For their work as middlemen, they want a high fee. Accordingly, we should always look on the priest as a middle man, a necessary evil.
Perhaps the prevailing distress in Christianity in India today has its main cause in the fact that too many priests wish to live well by being a priest, in other words desiring far more for what they do. They do not represent a development towards a better stronger or higher type of person in the sense in which Christianity supposes.
And, whether they know it or not, this is how a priest appears to the common man. An honest inductee at confirmation does not see the eccentric and sick nature in a priest. It remains concealed from his own eyes and he looks up to the priest as his shepherd. The priest may not be a good person and even less an exceptionally wise person, but to the layman he signifies something that exceeds the average measure of human goodness and wisdom.
It stands to reason in a fresh inductee that faith in the priest means faith in the divine and the miraculous, and that if any miracle were to be displayed it would naturally find its source in him and him alone, and that if one was to find deliverance on the day of judgement, he, the priest needed to stand in the defence of their integrity and honour. All this belief that the congregation has in their priest naturally has its impact on the entire priestly clan who gradually develop that incomprehensible figure, so much so that people may be bold enough to question the existence of God, but they will think twice before questioning the integrity of their priest.
Question – how does the priest have the image of a holy man on us? Answer – it just comes naturally, finding its origin from one generation to the next. It is strange how we willingly accept that the state of the priest’s soul is purer than ours, not because he said so but because it has been passed down by someone before him and those before them – and to us by our parents. This has led the people from one age to the next to draw a sharp line between oneself and the priest, as if he were something utterly incomparable and strangely superior, having gained from some unknown source, that extraordinary power with which he dominates the imagination of his flock – of his congregation.
“Thou shalt not steal” is an honest commandment, plain and simple, but the holy men understand it differently; they take care to steal without a guilty conscience, without being ashamed at having done it. They become experts at tolerating themselves after having stolen something. Stealing is so common in Christianity, (St. Paul admits it in II Corinthians 8: 11) and I specify Christianity, because it is a commandment that it should not be done; there is no such commandment in the scriptures of the other non-Judaic religions, though they may emphasise on the need to be righteous.
It is actions such as this by the priests that have delivered a stunning blow to the priestly class, even to the extent that many people have abandoned belief in them to explain their immorality with the all too familiar justification, “I stole from man to give to God.” To the few that still cling onto the old commandment, their only goal is to find others with whom they can share their beliefs – where they can still live by their beliefs because in the company of hypocritical believers there is no sanctuary for them. There is forgiveness, or so the hypocrites would have us believe, that comes from strength in numbers.
In seeing the old churches and cathedrals of the CNI, especially when we cast our gaze on the structure and overall landscape that the All-Saints Cathedral poses, which is more than a hundred years old now, all we can say is that this was built by another and a better community than any that have now taken over it, and plainly there was great sentiment at work on this site at that point in time, both on the part of the congregation and the priests.
Such lucky strokes of great success have always been possible, and will always be possible. We (congregation members) must resurrect that sentiment. In this task, more than ever we need the leadership of honest upright priests who pass down the old righteous traditions in the way they preach, in the way they live and in their demeanour in everyday life. The question everyone is asking these days is, “with the present-day priests (one has filed a case against the Congregation) does the All-Saints Cathedral congregation have the tenacity that will maintain and pass on those godly values from here forward or will it go the way of the CSI?”
