Religious conversion-‘is God’s work

A befitting rebuttal to Sister Prema, the Superior General of Missionaries of Charity

Sr Prema further explained that, ‘Every human being has the right to believe. Each person is born with dignity. Religious conversion is God’s work’. The contradictions galore within the two sentences are glaring. If every person has the right to believe then where is the need to initiate that person to something new and strange and in something in which that person is not born in? Should one god be exorcised out of the person and another god be installed to uphold the dignity with which this person was born with? This is actually what conversion is all about. Why this rupturing of the person from what he/she was .So what Sr Prema really means is that every person has a right to be converted and hence the right of the person to believe is conditioned and restricted to only believing in the god in whom Sr Prema and her whole church believes in. This is what Sr Prema articulated when she so naively asserted that every person has a right to believe and every person is born with dignity. That this god is only 2000 years old and somehow seems to be always in the company of those who invade the land of others is another dimension which needs a longer treatise.

Sr Prema has unwittingly exposed the bluff of the Congress and the UPA leaders. We are told that conversion is not taking place. Conversion takes different forms-globally, it is disguised as a military coup, violence and very often a deception of service and development is the sheen given to this violent conversion. Yes conversion is violence wrought on a person-to deprive the person of his/her dignity which according to Sr Prema every person is born with-to tear the person off his affinity, his religious heritage and made him/her an alien is a psychological bleeding to death. Christianity and conversion are two sides of the same coin. Where ever Christianity went it was bloodshed-destruction, and a hidden agenda of political power, economic aggrandizement, and pauperization of the victims. In the words of the Kenyatta (the Kenyan freedom fighter) ‘when the missionaries came they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray,’ We closed our eyes, when we opened them, they had our lands and we had the Bible’. This is true not only in Africa but all over the globe. Those countries which broke away from the stranglehold of Vatican became progressive-like Canada, Australia, England but those colonized by the catholic powers like Spain, Portugal Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, Italy are mired in military rule and church tyranny. Christianity today likes to be seen as a peace loving, compassionate religion of brotherhood. But far from it-the religion was born in blood and grew in bloodshed. Economic and political powers are its hidden agenda covered with service organizations, education institutions etc.