{"id":3761,"date":"2003-12-04T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2003-12-04T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2003\/12\/04\/2003-12-04-pope-tells-catholics-to-give-equal-rights-to-catholic-dalits-in-india\/"},"modified":"2003-12-04T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2003-12-04T12:00:00","slug":"2003-12-04-pope-tells-catholics-to-give-equal-rights-to-catholic-dalits-in-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2003\/12\/04\/2003-12-04-pope-tells-catholics-to-give-equal-rights-to-catholic-dalits-in-india\/","title":{"rendered":"Pope Tells Catholics to Give Equal Rights to Catholic Dalits in India"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Religion News Service<\/P><P>NEW DELHI, INDIA, December 3, 2003: The report by Religion News Service says, in part, &#8220;John Paul told Roman Catholic bishops from India making their periodic visit to the Vatican to reject divisions based on caste. &#8216;At all times, you must continue to make certain that special attention is given to those belonging to the lowest castes, especially the Dalits,&#8217; he exhorted the bishops. Dalits are Hindus at the bottom of the Indian caste structure. &#8216;Customs that reinforce caste division should be sensitively reformed so they may become an expression of the solidarity of the whole Christian community,&#8217; John Paul said. <BR><br \/>\n<BR><br \/>\n&#8220;Said the Rev. Dr. Ipe Joseph, general secretary of National Council of Churches in India. &#8216;Many church leaders are not actively fighting this caste system.&#8217; The bishops conference has acknowledged caste-based practices are still found in the church. Of the 164 bishops in India, only seven are Dalits. In some regions segregation is still practiced in worship.<BR><br \/>\n<BR><br \/>\nHPI adds: Catholic Dalits continue to suffer the same discrimination after their conversion. There are separate churches for the Dalit Catholics and brahmin Catholics, as well as separate burial grounds.<BR><br \/>\n<\/P> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Religion News ServiceNEW DELHI, INDIA, December 3, 2003: The report by Religion News Service says, in part, &#8220;John Paul told,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}