Indian priests accuse police of assault amid liturgy dispute

The decades-old row over Mass rubrics in Archdiocese of Ernakulam-Angamaly fueled street fights and multiple court cases

Updated: January 17, 2025 10:42 AM GMT

A group of priests from an embattled archdiocese in India’s southern Kerala state are demanding action be taken against police officers, who they say beat them during a recent protest.

The priests from Ernakulam-Angamaly archdiocese, which belongs to Eastern-rite Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, made the demand in a complaint lodged with the state’s human rights commission on Jan. 17.

Copies of the complaint were also delivered to Kerala’s chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, and opposition leader, V. D. Satheesan.

The priests said they filed a complaint with the local police station and sought intervention from top police officials in the state, but their plea was ignored.

“Our complaints against the accused police officers with their higher officials did not yield any result, therefore, 21 priests who faced police brutality personally presented their ordeal before the human rights commission in state capital Thiruvananthapuram,” Father Kuriakose Mundadan, the presbytery council secretary of the archdiocese told UCA News on Jan. 17.

According to their complaint, two senior police officers — P. Rajkumar and C. Jaykumar — entered the Archbishop’s House on Jan. 11 and ordered 21 protesting priests to leave the building after they had occupied it during a protest.

The priests said the officers then hurled abuse and threatened them with punitive action if they did not comply with the order. Things escalated when the priests refused to leave and demanded the officers produce an arrest warrant.

The officers then used batons to beat the priests, some of whom were dragged out of the Archbishop’s House by their legs, the complaint alleged, adding at least 12 priests were injured during the assault.

When the injured priests asked for medical help, Jaykumar told them to find the help on their own, the complaint said.

The priests, however, have not named any Church authority in the complaint.

“We are determined to continue with our legal action against the police officials,” the priest said.

The trouble began on Jan. 9 when 21 priests entered the Archbishop’s House through backdoors breaching the police security cordon and started protest in a bid to highlight their grievances over the rubrics of the Mass to the Synod of Bishops, the top decision-making body of the Church, after breakdown of dialogue between two rival groups.

Some 54 bishops among the total 65 attended the Jan. 6-11 Synod meeting.

The Synod, however, did not take any serious step to settle the issue instead appointed Archbishop Joseph Pamplany of Tellicherry Archdiocese as the Vicar Archbishop of the crisis-ridden Ernakulam-Angamaly Archdiocese replacing its apostolic administrator Bosco Puthur.

Bishop Emeritus Puthur was appointed administrator in December 2023 and tasked with settling the dispute. However, he was accused of escalating crisis with the priests and laypeople boycotting him and his curia following the breakdown of a peace deal reached in July 2024.

The archdiocese, the seat of the Church head Major Archbishop Raphael Thattil, has been in turmoil since August 2021 when the Synod ordered all its 35 dioceses to follow a uniform mode of Mass for greater unity.

The order further divided the Church with 12 dioceses opposing the rubrics of Mass in which the celebrant faces the altar during the Eucharistic prayer. They sought to continue with their traditional Mass in which the celebrant faces the congregation throughout the Mass.

Barring Ernakulam-Angamaly Archdiocese others complied with the Synod order in November 2021 and since then vast majority of priests, religious, and laypeople continued to protest the rubrics of the Mass that led to street fights, hunger strikes, closure of St. Mary’s Cathedral, and a series of court cases.

The archdiocese is home to close to 10 percent of Syro-Malabar Catholic Church’s estimated five million members in India and abroad.

The India-based Church is the second largest among 22 Oriental churches in communion with the Vatican.