Hindu Unloads Against The Jesuits And Fr. Francis Xavier Clooney, S.J.

Fr. Francis Xavier Clooney, S.J.

The church has always moved in a planned manner. In 1539, the Society of Jesus was set up by St. Ignatius of Loyola to establish Catholicism all over the world, by any means. Hindu India suffered the Goa Inquisition (1560) under the auspices of St. Francis Xavier. The latter was a founding member of the Jesuit order and initiator of the Inquisition in 1545. Italian Jesuit priest Roberto de Nobili, the first Jesuit to come to India, arrived in Goa in 1605 and then settled down in Tamil Nadu in 1606. He claimed to be a scholar of Tamil and openly raged against Hindu paganism. In recent years, the Vatican has sent the high-ranking Cardinal Jean-Louis Pierre Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, to India to engage with various Hindu religious leaders and sectarian denominations. The idea, of course, is to find the chinks in the Hindu armour and pierce the Hindu resistance to conversions (see articles by Thamizhchelvan, links below). On the intellectual plane, contemporary Jesuits are attempting to woo the Hindu elite in India and those of western nationality, as part of a refinement of strategy. Their favourite method today is a process known as Inculturation (see Thamizhchelvan), which is really the innovation of Roberto de Nobili; it involves borrowing native cultural habits and practices and insinuating oneself into the local culture, with the ultimate aim of swallowing it whole at a future date. As an example, De Nobili would wear saffron robes instead of white and use Hindu words to describe Christian rituals, etc. But the cutting edge of missionary activity today is the Hindu-Christian dialogue. This is essentially just a variant of Interreligious Dialogue, but its purpose is inexplicable from the Hindu point of view. (The word Hindu is being used as a generic term for native-born faiths such as Jain and Sikh dharma). An important corollary of this exchange is the remarkably high standard of scholarship that Jesuits maintain in their own faith as also in rival traditions. This is precisely what makes the dialogue extremely unequal and unproductive for Hindus as the leaders who participate in the exchanges may have a mastery over their own religious texts, but completely lack an understanding of the Church as a political entity with a political agenda. Hence they are unable to proffer arguments regarding the illegitimacy of conversions and world dominion by a single faith. They are also innocent of the synergy between the Vatican-Protestant Churches and the Western Christian neo-colonial agenda unravelling in many parts of the globe today. Rev. Francis Xavier Clooney, currently professor at the Harvard Divinity School, is a highly accomplished Jesuit scholar of comparative religion; he has successfully disarmed a number of Hindus in India and America with his knowledge of Tamil and the bhakti tradition of Tamil Hindus. Of course, his priority is the conversion of pagan Hindus to Catholicism. To this end, he has steeped himself in the process of inculturation and drawn many intellectual Hindus into his interfaith orbit. Speaking to a small audience at the premises of an American university late last year, Dr. Clooney displayed considerable intellectual finesse, stating that in the past Swami Dayananda Saraswati and Swami Vivekananda had attempted a critical look at the West from a Hindu perspective, but post-colonial authors like Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel had politicized the Hindu Christian relationship. In other words, he skillfully denigrated authentic Hindu scholars who made resistance to Christian conversions the keynote of their scholarship! His (Hindu) audience did not demur. In essence, Dr Clooney was asserting the ‘right’ to validate or delegitimize Hindu scholars who critiqued the Church – he approved those who posed no threat and sought cooption into the West-dominated world order, and demonized those whose intellectual armour was more acute. By inference he claimed the right to undermine Hindu nationalism on Hindu bhumi and among Hindus who are now the citizens of western countries, mainly America. That this critical point went uncontested – perhaps was not even understood – by his co-panelists and audience underlines the writer’s contention that Hindus have no intellectual, political or strategic advantage to derive from inter-faith dialogue, and need not engage in it. Dr. Vijaya Rajiva, a political philosopher who has taught at a Canadian university, believes that there is no merit in dialogue that does not have the ultimate goal of vanquishing the opponent. The ancient Hindu intellectual / spiritual tool of purva paksha, for instance, involves a rigorous and unflinching critique the opponent, and was used by Adi Sankara to defeat, and not to accommodate, the enemy.

Link (here) to the pagan Hindoo blogsite Bharata Bharati