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The theme chosen for the biannual meeting by the Catholic Bishops of India in February 2012 is timely and challenging.

It is timely because there is a colossal vacuum of credible leadership in politics or civil society. It is challenging because the people of India have reached a tipping point of frustration and want a quantum change.

Can the Church leadership, along with people of other religions and even those with no religion, proclaim a credible message of hope and back it up with prophetic action?

The role of the Church is to be prophetic, at the cutting edge of history in the process of being created. It is a privileged participant ushering in God’s Kingdom within the tissue of human history.

Salvation history and human history are separate, but inextricably intertwined, continuously in process. Therefore, the role of the Church is not only to evangelize, or to proclaim the Kingdom of God to the people, but also to be evangelized, or to discover the Kingdom of God or God already at work among the people.

Traditionally, the Church has been involved in three areas for a better India: education through its mighty educational institutions; physical health through its huge health care network of institutions; and charity and development through its gigantic network of charitable institutions and development programs.

These three areas must be critically examined in terms of their contribution to the transformation of Indian society more in harmony with the Kingdom of God.

Are Catholic educational institutions a part of the solution or a part of the problem for a better India? Do they transmit the values of the status quo – upward mobility, ruthless competition, blind obedience, splendid isolation from the death-dealing struggles? Or can they become counter-cultural, communicating the values of social responsibility, disciplined creativity, enabling cooperation emanating from solidarity and social concern for the life-threatening struggles of the people of India?

Is the healthcare network of institutions delivering healthcare to the doorstep of people, rather than having them come to the healthcare institutions? Is the emphasis of this whole network biased towards curative health rather than preventive health?

Are charitable institutions and development programs working on a service model that maintains the status quo? Are they moving towards a more liberating model where the people are empowered as the agents of their own destiny? Fundamentally, are they content to deal with alleviating symptoms rather than confronting causes? Is the fundamental problem of Indian society poverty or injustice? Therefore, are we following only the Mother Teresa model or rather the Oscar Romero model or the human development model?

Archbishop Helder Camara once said this: “When I feed the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a Marxist.”

Are Church leaders filled with prophetic outrage and indignation when confronted with the deep divisions in the world between developed and underdeveloped nations and groups within nations such as India?

There are new areas where the Church must get involved. Firstly, commitment to political action, not party politics, on the most burning issues affecting human life today.

The whole Church, as the crystallization of the liberating religion of Jesus Christ, should be in the vanguard of all political people’s movements that strive to defend the sacredness and dignity of every human person irrespective of their religious affiliation.

At Medellin in 1968, the bishops saw genuine people’s movements for liberation through the faith-lens of the liberation movement of a group of runaway slaves from Egypt to the Promised Land, as God’s intervention of salvation history in human history.

The bishops at the national level and diocesan level should play a leadership role not always on the front lines, but by offering genuine support of, or at other times critical collaboration to, peoples’ movements. They can offer their time through solidarity actions, their talent by encouraging the laity that seeking justice is part of preaching the Gospel, and their treasure in terms of money and the use of Church premises.

Secondly, the Church's engagement in civil society is a new way of Being Church today. Though we have a representative democratic system in place, Indians are striving for a more participative democracy.

The role of civil society, visual media and other voluntary organizations are manifestations of this fact. As long as Indians believe in democracy, their focus needs to be on reforming rather than undermining its democratic institutions.

The Church should work with civil society as a humble ally, as one among equals. The nation is not simply a gathering of individuals. Groups and institutions interact among themselves and play a mediating role between the individual and the state. It is this social reality between the state and the individual that we call civil society.

At its origins, the Church was mainly a movement of the poor and the marginalized in the grip of the Spirit. This aspect of movement must be reclaimed by active participation with grassroots activists, people's movements (like NBA, Nandigram, Chengara, WSF, etc) and prophets of all faiths. The spirit of Jesus resides in the Church and calls it to accept others as partners, collaborators and fellow travelers in the journey to the Kingdom.

A third new area of action is becoming the “Church of the Poor.” With globalization actually marginalizing the poor, no significant change in society is possible without a massive participation of the poor as subjects of their own history. A network of basic human communities can create such a mass infrastructure that produces a revolution from below or a genuine people’s change in social and political consciousness.

The present operating model of the Church, called the Christendom model, is based on the Constantinian model that developed into the Holy Roman Empire. The Church of the Poor is the operating model more in harmony with the Kingdom of God that Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed.

The Church of the Poor in simple and concrete terms means:
• A Church that combines detachment from material possessions with a profound trust in the Lord
• A Church that defends and vindicates the rights of the poor despite alienation or persecution
• A Church where the poor are not only evangelized but become evangelizers themselves
• A Church where no one is so poor as to have nothing to give, and no one is so rich as to have nothing to receive

It is those who are bold enough to dream dreams, and to pay the price for them, that will inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.