Catholic center completes 25 years of 'Converting' people with leprosy to a healthy, dignified life

Indian Catholic ^ | November 30,2006 | Prakash Chand Dubey

[Alex Murphy]

RAXAUL, India (UCAN) -- A center for people with leprosy that a Catholic priest manages in eastern India chose to have its oldest worker preside at its silver jubilee celebration.

Joining Gourishankar Rout, 90, on the dais for the Nov. 24 program at Little Flower Leprosy Hospital and Rehabilitation Centre were a Catholic bishop, a Hindu priest and a Muslim cleric.

The center is in Raxaul, a town in Bihar state, 1,030 kilometers east of New Delhi. Father Christ Das, a priest of Bettiah diocese, started the center in 1981 with about 100 people suffering from leprosy, including Rout, a Hindu.

The highlight of the jubilee program was "the worship of man," a ritual Bishop Victor Henry Thakur of Bettiah performed with Muslim cleric Samsul Haq and Hindu priest Raj Kumar Pandey. They honored a 95-year-old crippled Muslim leprosy patient with a garland of marigold flowers, to the applause of the gathering of about 2,000 people.

The elderly patient, Mubarak Mian, has remained bedridden in the center's hospital for the past 10 years. For the ritual, the hospital staff bathed and dressed him, and brought him to the dais where he lay on an iron cot.

Father Das, who also garlanded Mian, told UCA News the inspiration for the ritual came from the biblical teaching to love God and neighbor. They "simply tried to translate that teaching into reality," he said.

The 68-year-old priest asserted that honoring Mian, rejected by family and society, is "the real worship" of God. Such gestures would help people understand that humans came first, and society and religion followed. "So, man should be the focus of all our activities," he said.

Mian later told UCA News that he toiled to bring up nine children who all chased him out of his house when he contracted leprosy. The honor he received at the jubilee program helped ease the anger and hatred he had nursed against his children, he said in a feeble voice.

"Actually I am feeling I am in janat (heaven) and the angels are taking care of me," he also said, adding that the experience has deepened his faith in Allah, who performs miracles. "Is this ceremony not a miracle?" he asked.

Father Das said Mian is among some 49,000 leprosy patients the center has treated for free over the past 25 years. It also has settled about 1,500 families of cured patients in 20 places in Bettiah and neighboring Muzaffarpur dioceses. The families live in concrete houses and earn their livelihood from skills they learned at the center, which also manages a high school in Raxaul for their children.

Staff told UCA News the silver jubilee celebration would continue until Dec. 8, with each settlement conducting separate programs. The center plans to provide every person in all the settlements with one sumptuous meal.

Addressing the opening function, Rout, who began working as a watchman at the center after he got cured, described its 25 years as "a saga of our march from begging to a dignified life." Before the center was opened, he and others begged for a living and lived in squalor on the outskirts of Raxaul.

Father Das converted their "shabby shanties" into houses with amenities so that they could "live a healthy and dignified life," Rout said, asserting that the center not only ended their misery but also taught them the dignity of labor. "Everyone has work. Every child studies," he said in a choked voice, with moist eyes.

Speaking at the occasion, Hindu priest Pandey said the program helped him realize that God's love is for all, and not "the monopoly of any religion." Hindu priests consider Muslims and Christians outcasts and avoid direct physical contact with them, he noted, saying he felt "immense joy" when he garlanded Mian and touched his forehead. "I felt I was adoring some god. I never had such an experience," he added.

Another feature in the program was distribution of the jubilee cake to 25 Christians, Hindus and Muslims. The large cake was cut into 25 pieces, one for each year of the center's service. Bishop Thakur, Pandey and Haq then distributed the pieces to people from religions other than their own.

Father Das said the 25 selected recipients also symbolized "the strong bonds of interfaith dialogue and solidarity" in the area. The celebration ended with a big feast the guests shared with the people at the center.

Rout later told UCA News that Father Das has never tried to convert patients to Christianity. "If he wanted, hundreds of the lepers' children could have become Christians," he said.

However, Father Das said he does "convert" the people with leprosy, who are considered "social, economic and spiritual muck," into healthy people by "baptizing them with cotton bandages, ointment and medicines." For him, that was what Jesus did. "If I am a true disciple of Lord Jesus, how can I refrain from his mission of conversion?"

[Alex Murphy]

The highlight of the jubilee program was "the worship of man," a ritual Bishop Victor Henry Thakur of Bettiah performed with Muslim cleric Samsul Haq and Hindu priest Raj Kumar Pandey....

....Rout [a 90 year old worker] later told UCA News that Father Das has never tried to convert patients to Christianity. "If he wanted, hundreds of the lepers' children could have become Christians," he said.