Catholic Encounter with Hindus in the Twentieth Century

The positive encounter with other religions encouraged by Nostra Aetate includes openness both to those intellectual and spiritual traditions, and to those social and ethical traditions, which might serve for the inculturation of Christian faith and practice. Christians should ‘while witnessing to their faith and way of life, acknowledge, preserve and encourage the spiritual and moral truths found among non-Christians, also their social life and culture’ (NA 2). 1 In the case of the Indian Catholic community, the need for the Church to become more fully an authentically Indian institution continues to be pressing in post-independence India, with the foreign and colonial origins of the Catholic Church still manifest in the dominant theological and liturgical styles of the Church.2 Deciding what kind of inculturation there should be into Hinduism has, however, proved a complicated and divisive matter in the 40 years since Vatican II. In 1981 the Indian church historian Mundadan, looking back over 25 years of Hindu-Catholic relations, noted a shift from an emphasis on intellectual and spiritual engagement to one on a social concern for the humanitarian realities and needs of current Indian society.3 The stress on social emancipation in