ICC Note: Church leaders in India have condemned a fake letter released on social media that claims to show Catholics colluded with the local government in Karnataka to forcefully convert Lingayats, a religious minority, to Catholicism. The letter, likely released by Hindu radicals, is an attempt to turn public opinion against both the ruling Indian Congress Party and the Christian community. This would, by design, swing political support for the Hindu nationalist BJP.

05/11/2018 India (Vatican News) – India’s Catholic bishops have condemned a malicious fake letter making the rounds on the social media, that is designed to defame the Catholic Church and arouse communal tension for political gain in the run-up to the crucial assembly election on Saturday in the southern state of Karnataka.

The fake letter claims that Indian Church officials in collusion with representatives of the Holy See in New Delhi, support demands made by Karnataka’s Lingayat community to be recognized as a separate minority religion in order to convert them.

In an official clarification dated May 9, Bishop Theodore Mascarenhas, the Secretary General of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) wrote, “The purportedly fake letter falsely attributed to Cardinal Oswald Gracias and as having been written by him to Archbishop Bernard Moras of Bangalore,” making “wild allegations about Church involvement in the Lingayat issue.”

The March 28 fake letter claims that on December 21, 2013 officials of the Apostolic Nunciature (Vatican embassy) in New Delhi held their first meeting with Karnataka’s ruling political leadership to convince them to grant Lingayats a minority religion status. The mail alleges that since then, subsequent meetings have taken place with the state government to convince them on the issue.

The fake mail with a slew of language errors and wrong designations to persons, also suggests nine strategic steps on how to go about what it called “harvest of souls”, or converting Lingayats to Catholicism and setting Lingayats against Hindus.  It claims much of this could be largely achieved through the European Union’s developmental schemes and funds channeled through the “Embassy of the Holy See”.

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