Skip to main content

Why Franco Mulakkal should be a saint



Franco Mulakkal is the bishop of the Jalandhar diocese of the Catholic Church. He has been accused of raping quite many nuns. Many nuns chose to leave their religious calling because they didn’t want to live the duplicitous life that their ‘good shepherd’ wanted them to live. It is too obvious that this bishop is nothing less than a rapist. But it is necessary to protect him and eventually declare him a saint.

Why?

I have been following the comments on many Whatsapp groups which I belong to by the necessity of wanting to belong somewhere. Yeah, we all want to belong. Imagine the millions of believers whose sense of belonging is threatened by the sins of a villain like Franco Mulakkal.

It’s terrible, if you can understand that threat. I am not a believer and hence not shaken in any way. But I’m concerned about the people who mean a lot to me and whose lives are shaken by Mulakkal’s sins.

It’s not possible, they tell me. The Fathers are holy. These simple, humble, loyal believers refuse to accept the naked truth that the priests and other religious leaders are as fallible as they are. They want role models. They want saints. They want meaning in life.

The Church is the meaning of life for a lot of believers. Our Father in Heaven and the Holy Mary by his side are the succour and sustenance for the faithful. Their priests are the mediators here on this miserable earth. Life is unbearable without the Father up there and the Reverend Father down here.

What the Church should do immediately is to get the best lawyers who will get Mulakkal acquitted of all his crimes. Sooner than later, the Church should start the process of Mulakkal’s canonisation. He should be another Sahanadasan, like that Reverend Father Benedict who killed a woman whom he was using for sexual gratification for years. No religion should have villains. Religions should only have saints. The faithful require that for keeping their lives going.

Just imagine the entire edifice of your life collapsing because you suddenly discover that all that you’ve been believing so far was utterly wrong. I was faced with that situation once. So I know what that means. I don’t want more people to face a similar situation. Let good things happen to people. That’s my wish. Hence the Catholic Church should start the canonisation process of Saint Mulakkal immediately.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...