(The Herald did not publish this article last June. When the assistant editor was queried, he said the editor would get in touch with me to discuss the reasons why. As I expected, he did not contact me)
I suppose if you live next door to a church you can’t avoid the priests staying there even if your enthusiasm for religion is now non-existent. Over the past decade, though, my interactions with the men in white have been mainly over issues to do with the village market, which is outside my door, and which the church proudly claims to own. As may be expected, these encounters can be rather fraught, but on the whole, most priests posted in the village have been easy-going and friendly. One venerable vicar, in fact, was so amazingly catholic and indulgent, he even solemnised my marriage despite knowing I was not a churchgoer! But that was all of thirty-five or so years ago. The world has moved on quite a bit since then. The local priests seem to have gotten younger, less friendly, and more attentive to the worldly immediate than to the great utopian prize beyond this life. This seems like a big loss to me, because to be other-worldly, as well as sociable, ought to flow naturally from the two first principles of their faith: a belief in a God, and loving your neighbour as much as yourself. If you have lost these fundamental guidelines, brother, then you’ve lost your way, and perhaps, even your soul! As much as the situation around me, it was also developments elsewhere in Goa that were particularly disturbing. There were the land deals the churchmen were engaging in which made one wonder if the moneychangers had taken over completely. Selling the land from right under the feet of your fellow-believers seems like a particularly dirty trick to play, as in Vanxim island some twelve years ago. The Archbishop later admitted that what the Church had done in Vanxim was “morally wrong but legally correct”! But that didn’t stop it doing something similar in Vasco last year, leaving no less than 55 families high and dry when it sold out to a developer. Most of the dishoused were Christian. I know we live in increasingly secular and corporatized times and one cannot expect even priests to remain unaffected by the winds blowing all that money around. The Good Shepherd must, therefore, make way for the hard-as-nails CEO doing whatever it takes, and let the Devil take the hindmost! Around the same time as the people in Vanxim were struggling to protect their homes, in my village of Chandor we were grappling with the twin issues of granite mining destroying a local hill and a public toilet being foisted into the heart of the fish market. The priests had initially intended to locate the latter convenience in its logical place, in a secluded, hygienic corner a few feet across the road, but shifted the site to the heart of the tintto and right in front of nearby residents’ doors (including mine) to prevent any inconvenience to themselves. So much for the second greatest commandment of the Catholic faith, “Love thy neighbour as thyself!” It isn’t surprising that there was an uproar over this abominable plan, and, in response, the gram sabha of the village appointed a three-member committee to study the matter. The committee (of which I was a member) endorsed the site across the road and proposed two other alternative sites as well. The villagers also drew up a people’s plan they called Chandor Ganv Vhodd Zaum to attempt to arrest the further degradation of their village and ensure its sane and sustainable development. (The justly-celebrated plan, the first by a Goan village ever, would go on to inspire the village component of the state-wide Goa People’s Plan a few years later!). The church responded, not by engaging with the aggrieved villagers or by exploring the alternatives they proposed, but by building toilets for the school and the parish kitchen in the same location but, in a display of such malice as to boggle the mind, by omitting to build the public toilet there! The villagers, though, have not relented in their campaign. Meetings have been held with successive vicars and the villagers’ opposition to any further sullying of the tintto continually reiterated. Ministers and MLAs too have been kept informed of the situation, not to mention the Archbishop himself. And, in a rare display of good neighbourliness, the two villages of Guirdolim and Chandor, through their respective panchayats in the previous term, even overcame decades of mutual mistrust to draw up a plan for a Sulabh toilet in the location The fact is, there is enough room in the secluded corner for a facility that can blend with the surroundings and, more importantly, do absolutely no harm to anyone in the vicinity. But this has cut no ice with the custodians of the church, who continue to disregard their social responsibility to the local community, despite earning a handsome income from the market. In fact, recently, in an astonishingly mean-spirited defiance of villagers’ sentiments, the fabrica placed stones along the boundary to wall up and completely block the area from the public! I am not a religious person, preferring the tag of human being over other markers, but I think the aggrieved laity in Goa needs to take stock. It certainly isn’t a happy situation when, as in Chandor over the past decade and more, the community’s so-called spiritual leaders sully your living spaces, litigate with you, sow discord within your community and even compel you to boycott church services to protest the clergy’s undemocratic behaviour. How much more of the “morally wrong but legally correct” should any self-respecting human being tolerate, really? When the people you trust with your very soul trample on the basic decencies you take for granted, it seems unethical, maybe even unchristian, to stifle your conscience and look away.
