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Archbishop Thomas Menamparampil, SDB

It is exciting to live in challenging times. All you need to do is to learn to be equal to the challenges as they arise. Troubles come and go, but people remain on to link all their troubles together and transcend them, and move on to triumphs. Wise people learn from their own hard experience and prepare to face harder days. Wiser people learn from the experiences of others, and ward off troubles even before they come. Still others learn from neither, and keep inviting troubles wherever they go. Possibly, we belong to all these categories of people at different times. We are all fallible beings blundering through life and work the best we can, constantly in search, and never finding fully the right answers. This reflection itself is one of those fallible attempts wondering as to how best we could face the problems that come on our way. Opinions expressed here can be no more than exploratory.

To begin with, we may take it for granted that there will be some kind of opposition when we begin Church work in a new place. Those difficulties need not immediately be declared a VHP conspiracy, or an RSS plot. Such hasty conclusions will only prevent us from searching for the real causes of troubles and handling the situation as it needs to be handled. Premature judgments and over-reactions like that often blur our vision and blind us to the complexity of local realities. Emotion and rhetoric do not help careful analysis and wise interpretation.