“The impediment in the progress of Christianity in India was the struggle between the catholic and Non-catholic missions for Supremacy in the field of proselytization. The entry of the Catholic Church in the field of the spred of Christianity in India began in the year 1541 with the arrival of Francis Xavier( mine :The founder of the Jesuit China mission was. 1506-1552 . a Spaniard who visited Japan and the East Indies. died on the offshore island of Shagchuan in 1552). He was the first missionary of the new society of Jesus formed to support the authority of pope. Before the Catholic church entered this field there existed in India particularly in the south a large Christian population which belonged to the Syrian Church. These Syrians Christians, long seated on the coast of Malabar, traced their paternity to the Apostle Thomas, who is said “went through Syria and Cilicia conforming the Churches”. They looked to Syria as their spiritual home. They aknowledged the supremacy of the of the patriarch of Babylon. Of Rome and the pope they new nothing. During the rise of the papacy, the Mohomedan power, which had overrun the intervening countries, had closed the gates of India against the nations of the west. This had saved the Syrian churches in India from the Roman Catholics church was the true form of Christianity or whether the Christianity of the Syrian church was the true form I am not concerned here. But the fact s remain that the Portuguese who represented the Catholic Church in India were scandalized at the appearance of the Syrian churches which they declared to be heathen temples scarcely disguised. The Syrian Christians shrank with dismay from the defiling touch of the Roman catholics of Portugal and proclaimed themselves Christian and not idolators. The other is that the Malabar Christians had never been subject to Roman supremacy and never subscribed to the Roman doctrine. The element of a conflict between the two Churches were thus present and the inquisition only gave an occasion for the conflagration. The inquisitors of Goa discovered that they were heretics and like a wolf on the fold, down came the delegates of the pope upon the Syrian churches .How great was the conflict is told by Mr. Kaye in his volume.(Christianity in India) The first Syrian prelate who was brought into antagonism with rome, expiated his want of courage and sincerity in the dungeons of the inquisition. The second shared the same fate. A third, whose sufferings are more worth of commiseration, died after much trial and tribulation in his diocese, denying the pope’s supremacy to the last. The churches were now without a Bishop, at a time when they more than ever needed prelatical countenance and support, for rome was about to put forth a mighty hand and and stretched –out arm. Don Alexis de Menezes was appointed archbishop of Goa. It was his mission less to make new converts than to reduce old ones to subjection: and he flung himself into the work of persecution with an amount of zeal and heroism that must have greatly endeared to take staff in to the own hand. Moving down to the south, with imposing military force, he summoned the Syrian churches to submit themselves to his authority. The churches were under an Archdeacon, who sensible od the danger that impended over them, determined to temporize, but at the same time to show that he was prepared to resist.
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 23:25:39 +0000
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