Mar Gregorios meets the PopeRavi Ravindra
Departments of Physics and of Comparative Religion Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada The late Paulos Mar Gregorios who was the Metropolitan of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Delhi told me of an incident which illustrates this. Metropolitan Gregorios was a man of much substance: in addition to his religious qualifications he was a distinguished scholar. At one time he was the President of the Indian Philosophical Congress. He was also for some time the President of the World Council of [Christian] Churches. In this capacity he had an audience with the present Pope at the Vatican. Metropolitan Gregorios asked the Pope what he thought was the reason for such a small percentage of Indians having converted to Christianity although it had been in India for so long. The Pope said to him the reason was that the Indian mind was not developed enough to understand the subtlety of thought of St. Gregory of Nyssa or of St. Thomas Aquinas. Somewhat taken aback Metropolitan Gregorios asked the Pope if he had read Shankara or Nagarjuna. He was immediately shown out of the room where the audience was taking place. I found the incident merely amusing because I did not find this surprising at all, but he had been much saddened by it, for the issue was more personal for him. As he said, he realized for the first time and first hand that every Indian Christian is considered to be a second class Christian in the Vatican. This was even more galling for him because he belonged to a branch of Christianity as ancient as any. |