Catholics in the state of Goa (India) have been worried since their prime minister has just announced that he wants to erase any trace of the Portuguese past in the region. An imprint that goes hand in hand with Catholicism is where the tomb of Saint Francis Xavier, India’s modern messenger, is located.
If Goa remains one of the states of India where the Catholic minority is most represented – 20% of the population – it is really thanks to the church’s evangelization work under the auspices of Portugal that ruled the region from 1510 to 1961. It is probably for this reason that he is still the Archbishop of Goa He bears the title Patriarch of the East Indies.
For four centuries, the Church has managed to impose itself on the Hindu majority by inspiring respect, allowing Catholics to live in peace threatened by the nationalist rhetoric of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that dominates Goa.
The prime minister of the region did not hesitate to declare, in early June 2023, that “the time has come to erase all signs of the Portuguese presence in order to start again.”
For John Lobo, the Catholic historian, the remarks made by Pramod Sawant should not be taken lightly: “It literally means that we must destroy all the architectural achievements we inherited from the Portuguese, and then the churches.”
This wouldn’t be surprising: earlier in the year, in Daman, a former Portuguese trading post, Hindu nationalists had expressed their desire to demolish a 16th-century church, a remnant of the area’s proselytization, in order to build a football stadium instead. …
In Goa, fortunately, the living conditions of Christians differ from those of the faithful of Manipur who face violent persecution, and yet hostility is beginning to be felt: “We have begun to give aid, something new, to incidents between Hindus and Catholics; and India is now said to be for Hindus.” Just,” John Lobo explains.
For the historian, it is necessary to denounce the lies of Pramod Sawant: “The prime minister fabricated a political narrative in order to get the Hindu population to vote for him, claiming that the Portuguese, like all colonists, were harmful. But this is not true: in other parts of India, the English treated Hindus as citizens second-class, but not in the Portuguese colonies where everyone could obtain Portuguese citizenship with attendant rights… »
Portugal, for its part, is wary of the Catholics’ situation, but rather cautious: “The Portuguese CEO is not doing enough to help us, it’s disappointing,” laments John Lobo.
A disappointment that can be explained by the fact that India under the leadership of Narendra Modi becomes, in 2022, the fifth largest economic power in the world, and perhaps it is not over yet: finance has its reasons that the heart does not know …
