Nearly a hundred Christians slaughtered in mob violence in India in 2008 could soon be on the road to sainthood.
Cardinal Oswald Gracias, the most senior Roman Catholic cleric in the sub-continent, said he will personally ask Pope Francis to start to process to canonise the ‘martyrs of Kandhamal’ in the eastern Odisha province.
He has ordered Church authorities to collect evidence of atrocities against Christians who refused to abjure their faith at the point of death.
The martyrs include more than 90 Catholics butchered by Hindu nationalists during a seven-week pogrom against the Christian minority.
Protestants also died in witness to their faith but they will not be included among any future saints canonised by the Pope.
They include Parikhit Nayak, a Dalit Christian Protestant convert from Hinduism who was tortured to death in front of his wife, Kanak.
Some Hindus who had previously been his friends and neighbours burned him with acid, castrated him and finally disembowelled him, with some of them wearing his intestines around their necks as garlands.
Victims also include Rajesh Digal, a Pentecostal minister who was ordered by a Hindu mob to renounce his faith.
When he refused, he was beaten severely and was buried up to his neck for two days, with his tormentors urinating in his mouth as he begged for water. The mob eventually battered him to death with clubs, sticks and axes.
Rajni Majh, an orphan girl in the care of a Catholic priest, was raped by members of a mob before she was tied up and burned alive. A 28-year-old nun was also gang-raped by at least 10 men.
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