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

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

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...

A Government that Spies on Citizens

Illustration by Copilot Designer India has officially decided to keep an eagle eye on its citizens. Modi government has asked all smartphone manufacturers to preinstall a government app, Sanchar Saathi , on every phone in such a way that no citizen can ever uninstall it. The firms have been also ordered to install the app on existing phones too using software-update technology. The stated objective is to strengthen cybersecurity and protect users from fraud. The question is why any government should go out of its way to impose “security” on its citizens. For over a month now, I have been receiving a message every single day from the Government of India’s Telecom Department to install the app on my phone. I wanted to block the sender, but there is no such option. Even that message is an imposition. I don’t trust any government that imposes benefits on me. “ Beneficent beasts of prey ,” Robert Frost would call such governments. When Modi government imposes security on me, I ha...

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...

Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Search This Blog