The Eraser: The dangers of wiping out the Portuguese

 

A Hindu burial/ Sati? from the Codex Casanatense

The Chief Minister, Pramod Sawant, has gathered enough ridicule for his statement that he wishes to rid Goa of all signs of Portuguese rule, but not enough. Indeed, he actually needs to be prosecuted for attempting to vitiate the state of law and order (or what remains of it) in otherwise peaceful Goa.

Sawant argued that all signs of Portuguese rule must be erased because they destroyed temples. This statement should be reason enough for any right-thinking political party or citizens’ group to file a police complaint against him. There are multiple reasons why a complaint should be filed, and registered. First, because Sawant’s statement is in fact a ‘dog-whistle’. Referring to ultrasonic dog whistles which are audible only to dogs and not human ears, the term implies the use of coded or suggestive language in political messaging to mobilize support from a particular group without provoking opposition, or attracting prosecution. What Sawant is doing, and the statement about Portuguese erasure is not his first such statement, is to ratchet up the rhetoric against Catholics in the state, who are seen as the living embodiment of Portuguese culture in the state. The intention to target Catholics through these statements is not hard to perceive: Sawant repeatedly raises the cry of temples being destroyed in Goa, while promising to rebuild the same temples, knowing that, in popular imagination, many churches are assumed to have been built over destroyed temples – an impossibility that I will demonstrate in other discussions in the future. Sawant’s strategy is not dissimilar to the famous experiment of slowly raising the temperature of the water in which a frog swims, until the frog has been boiled to death.

Another reason for filing, and registering, a complaint against Sawant, is that this statement, and other similar statements, are in fact crimes against the Constitution which establishes a secular republic. By making destruction of temples (that too in the past) the reason for current actions that will eventually prejudice contemporary citizens, what he is doing is openly proclaiming the priority of Hinduism over all other faiths and ideologies in the country, and working to establish the RSS’s Hindu Rashtra. To be sure, he is not the only one making a reference to Hinduism as the basis for legal or state action. The recent claim that the finding of a statue of a goddess is evidence of her desire to be established in a village is another example of how some strand of Hindu beliefs is being presented as basis for legal action. To be sure, Sawant’s statements, given his occupying the weighty office of the Chief Minister of the state, in fact embolden the elements that makes such legally untenable claims.

Sawant’s desire to erase signs of the Portuguese is also a manifestation of the nature of the Hindu Rashtra he, and the powers he serves, seek to establish; a society based on the laws of Manu. The laws of Manu, as we well know, do not recognise the fundamental equality of all persons. On the contrary, this code recognises distinctions between humans, and prescribes a legal treatment which is grossly unequal.

In fact, the arrival and the establishment of the power of the Portuguese Crown in the regions that came to be known as Goa was welcomed by many of the groups that did not, hitherto, receive egalitarian treatment. Many of the first converts to Christianity were lower caste groups, and also widows from upper caste groups. The lower caste groups saw the arrival of the Portuguese, and in their religion which recognised the dignity of each individual, as a godsend. Upper-caste widows who would ordinarily have been potential victims of dispossession also saw in the arrival of the Portuguese an opportunity to save themselves, and their orphaned children, from a live of penury.

Of course, upper-caste widows had more to fear than dispossession. Given that widows were routinely subject to the practice of Sati, where they were burned with the corpse of their husband, the Portuguese government’s banning of the inhuman practice was cause for celebration. It was only after Christian sensibilities took firm root in British India that the practice of Sati was eventually banned and the cruelty of it recognised by the upper-caste activists as they assembled a reformed Hindu religion in the nineteenth century from a variety of practices in the subcontinent. One imagines that while erasing the traces of Portuguese rule Sawant would also like a return to the practice of Sati? One more reason to file a criminal complaint. He should at the very least be called in for questioning.

The arrival of the Portuguese in Goa, and with them the European missionaries, in fact contributed wealth not just to Goa, but to the entire subcontinent. The varieties of fruits and vegetables that we enjoy today, in fact, the foods that constitute the staple of food in the subcontinent (what is otherwise known as Indian food) are all the result of introductions via the Portuguese. Would the Chief Minister also induce famine in the state as well as the country in his ostensible pursuit of Hindu Rashtra?

The Chief Minister is also wrong on fact. While some officials of the Portuguese crown did destroy shrines, the fact is that a number of temples were voluntarily dismembered by their very owners, the gãocars of the villages. These members then used the same resources to support the Catholic cult that they now subscribed to. This would not have been unusual for them, given that just about a century before the Portuguese crown established itself, some of the groups that claimed brahmin status had switched from the Smarta sampradaya to the Vaishnava sampradaya. This switch caused a huge amount of upset and violence, conflicts that were not yet resolved when the Portuguese crown established itself in the sixteenth century, and were being referred to the Portuguese crown even in the seventeenth century!

The Chief Minister also needs to remember, as Adv. Radharao Gracias recently reminded us, that temples in the pre-Portuguese period, and subsequently, were, and still are not public establishments. No, they belonged to the gãocars who established them to worship their tutelary deities. The rest of the village were not citizens either, most of the residents in different grades of bondage and servitude to these gãocars. Remember that these temples operated under the code of Manu. The idea of equal citizenship is an idea unnatural to the subcontinent, introduced through European entities such as the Portuguese and the British. As such, when rebuilding temples, not only is it to these gãocars that the Chief Minister must turn, but we must also inquire what is to be the relationship between the gãocars and the rest of the village population. Does the Chief Minister intend to re-institute the bonds of servitude between the gãocars and the other villagers?

(A version of this blog was first published in the O Heraldo on 14 June 2023)

The Great Lifesaver: Homily for the Solemnity of the Most Precious Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ

It feels that in various ways my homilies over the past few weeks have been building up towards this feast of the Eucharist which the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches is the source and summit of Christian life. That is to say that Christian spirituality, or Christian life, flows from the Eucharist (which is its source) and that Christian actions should be directed towards it (the summit).

To give you a sense of this building up to this feast, let us look at the words from the first reading today:

Do not forget the LORD, your God,

who brought you out of the land of Egypt,

that place of slavery;

who guided you through the vast and terrible desert

with its saraph serpents and scorpions,

its parched and waterless ground;

who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock

and fed you in the desert with manna,

a food unknown to your fathers.

He “brought forth water for you from the flinty rock”. Some weeks ago, on the third Sunday of Lent, we had read about the episode at Horeb, when through the power of God, Moses struck the “flinty rock” and drew life-giving water from it. That rock, I taught, was a foreshadowing of Christ, who in time would give him own body to be struck, so that life-giving water may flow from it, through the world, and into our bodies. I had also taught, that the rock could also be read as our stony hearts, which through the consumption of the Most Precious Body and Blood of our Lord, are converted into hearts of flesh so that we may love God, and the world, as the Son of God loved us.

Through these weeks I have also repeatedly stressed that our bodily actions need to demonstrate to our fickle minds that the hosts we receive at communion are in fact the Most Precious Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. This is the most precious thing in the world that we receive, and we need to ask ourselves if when we receive it we are doing so with the dignity that the Eucharist deserves.

Speaking of bodily actions, I have often emphasized my belief in the superiority of receiving communion on the tongue, and ideally kneeling. There is another reason I stress this form of receipt, and it is not because of what it does to the recipient, but what it does to the minister of the Eucharist. Speaking for myself, I often find myself moved when offering communion on the tongue. It engenders in me the feeling of being a parent feeding a child. This is an intense love, and if reception on the tongue allows the minister to experience this love, then the recipient is affording the minister this great grace. Once again speaking for myself, I find that it is the sense of responsibility to, and love for, the faithful that gives me the strength to maintain my vows, and I am sure this would be the case for other priests as well.

But enough about the past, let us attend directly to the words of the Gospel today, where Our Lord speaks to us, as much as he spoke to the people to whom the words were first addressed:

Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,
you do not have life within you.…For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.

My flesh is true food. What does this mean?

Before I go into this meaning, there is something else that needs to be articulated first, which is also a part of this true-ness. What we receive in communion is not simply a sign, or a reminder of the Last Supper. It is in fact the Body and Blood of Our Lord. Think about this for a minute.

It may not look like flesh and blood, but this is what Transubstantiation means, that the “accidents”, i.e., the physical features, of the bread and wine remain, so what we put into our mouths looks like baked wheat and wine, but the substance, its essence, has been changed, from the properties of wheat and wine, to the Body and Blood of Our Lord. As the lyrics of the hymn Tantum Ergo reminds us: “Praestet fides supplementum, Sensuum defectui” “Senses cannot grasp this marvel. Faith must serve to compensate.” It is because we have to rely on faith, and senses, or our mind, cannot grasp this marvel, that we ought to treat this Blessed Sacrament with reverence, even when we cannot understand. Do this long enough, and one day the great significance of the Precious Body and Blood of Christ will reveal itself to us.

Let us return then to the question of True food. To understand the meaning of True Food I believe we need to return to the understanding of death and life in the gospel. The evangelical understanding of death is not physical death, but spiritual death. This is the real death. And so, the food we receive through the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Our Lord is true food because it is the food that offers real or true nourishment, that is to say, nourishment of the spirit and “whoever eats this bread will live forever.”

But how is it then, you may ask me, that we continue to sin and thereby prevent our entry into heaven? Good question. As I have pointed out, however, is that such is the graciousness of our God is that in addition to the greatness of the gift of His life, He also offers us free will. He does not bind us to a way we may not choose. He wishes all to be saved, but He will not oblige you.

However, such is His graciousness, that, as in the words of St. Paul in his second letter to Timothy (2:13-15),

If we are unfaithful,

he remains faithful,

for he cannot deny who he is.

His nature was to die for us, that we might be saved, and so He comes to us, in His Body and Blood again, and again, and again, every time a Mass is offered, and repentant sinners return to Him for redemption of their sins.

One last thing. So many of us often ask: “What is the point of going for Mass when you see these people who are so pious at Mass and then go out and say the most poisonous and vicious things?” The corollary to this question is the following “Also, look at so many good people who never go for Mass. If they are good without going for Mass, without communion, surely this is a sign that you do not need to go for Mass?”

I was stumped for a while by these questions, until one day I realised, can you imagine how much worse the first set of people might be if they did not come for Mass and did not receive the spiritual renewal that Our Lord offers in His Body and Blood? And have you considered how much better these nice people – who are not Catholic, or do not go for Mass – might be if they went to Mass and partook of the saving Body and Blood of our Lord?

Consider, in this context, dear brothers and sisters, the words of the great theologian St. Thomas Aquinas on the Blessed Sacrament:

No sacrament contributes more to our salvation than this; for it purges away our sins, increases our virtues, and nourishes our minds with an abundance of all the spiritual gifts.

And so, my dear brothers and sisters, on this great solemnity celebrating the Most Precious Body and Blood of Our Lord let us commit ourselves to make use of the great lifesaver that we are offered every day, committing to regular confession, mass, and communion for this is the way out of the desert in which we live. Alleluia!

(A version of this homily was preached at the parish church of St. Thomas the Apostle, Aldona on 11 June 2023.)

In the embrace of the Trinity: Homily for the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity 2023

 

The Most Holy Trinity, Karel Škréta (1610 - 1674) church of Svatého Tomáše, Prague.

My dear brothers and sisters, Happy feast of the Holy Trinity!

The readings of this great feast inform us quite clearly that the nature of God was revealed to us.

And this is where we need to pause and reflect. A revelation is about being permitted to know something that we did not already know, could not possibly know, or cannot, or must not, know. This understanding of what revelation is allows us to appreciate certain facts.

The first, is that the revelation permits us to know something that we could not possibly know; i.e. we now know something, i.e. that nature of God, that relying purely on our senses and intellect we could not possibly know. Revelation reveals to us the limits of the human intellect. This, revelation, should be a lesson for those of us who take too much pride in our intellect, or rely solely on our intellect to establish our relationship with God. Those of you who are clever will realise I am making a reference to the same body-mind problem that I have been referring to over the past few Sundays. Man is not simply mind, he is body too, and we need to recognise the limits of the human mind and of pure, abstract, reason.

From the appreciation of revelation that gives us access to something we cannot, or must not, know we appreciate the nature of the gift, or the grace of God, who reveals to us His nature. We would have been lost in darkness, lost in idolatry, and worshiping false gods if we did not have His revelation about His nature.

And what is His nature? The first insight we are given is available in the first reading, in the encounter between Moses and God, where God reveals to Moses the nature of the divine. And it is this, He is:

a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity.

Like the prophets before him, and indeed after him, Moses is quick to seize the moment and plead for mankind, when he says:

"If I find favor with you, O Lord, do come along in our company. This is indeed a stiff-necked people; yet pardon our wickedness and sins, and receive us as your own."

And how does God respond to this request? He does come along in our company, first with the Israelites in the pillar of fire, then in the Ark of the Covenant, then more substantially as the Son, and subsequently as the Holy Spirit. We remain, however, a stiff-necked people, unwilling to bow and genuflect before Him, filled with wickedness and sin, and yet, He continues to receive us as His own.

What proof do we have that he received us as His own? We receive the answer in the Gospel for the day:

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him might not perish
but might have eternal life.

That we might have eternal life. God’s response to Moses’ request is not simply to be with us here on earth, but to draw us to Himself and live with Him eternally.

I would like to take a little detour at this point and introduce you to the term perichoresis. This tiny, technical, theological, term refers to the inner life of the Holy Trinity, to the relationship of love that binds the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is a tight love this perichoresis, and yet it is not tight enough that it will not admit us, weak and sinful as we are, into its love. We are invited to participate in God’s love.

We are constantly told that God is love. Indeed, so often has it been repeated, that it has become a commonplace idea, that even non-Christians, whose deities are not necessarily loving, believe that God is love. But how do we know this as a fact? Because it was revealed to us.

God, revealed His nature to Moses as concepts, and then He revealed the extent of His love by giving us His only Son, who took on human flesh, so that we, despite our sinful natures, may be saved. As the gospel teaches us today:

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,
but that the world might be saved through him.

And how was the world saved through Him? It was through His taking on human flesh, and His giving us His flesh, that we can be admitted into this divine love and relationship of the Most Holy Trinity. Inspired by the Spirit, our natures changed by ingesting His body, we can now act differently from what our fallen nature constantly urges us to do – that is, to sin.

And so, brothers and sisters, I make the words of the apostle Saint Paul my own, as I urge you:

Rejoice!
Mend your ways, encourage one another,
agree with one another, live in peace,
and the God of love and peace will be with you.
Greet one another with a holy kiss.
All the holy ones greet you.

We are blessed my dear brothers and sisters to have been given an insight into the nature of God. A God who is love, who is triune, yet so in love are the three persons of God that they are One. We are blessed to have been invited to participate in this love, and we reject this love only at the great cost of not being able to live forever in their tight loving embrace. And we are blessed, because through the Eucharist, the gift of the spirit, the prayers of the saints, we are enabled to participate in this love.

Let us give glory then, to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit;
to God who is, who was, and who is to come.