November 22, 2012: A Muslim cleric and three Hindu ascetics will join some 400 Catholics
and Church leaders from India at the consistory in Rome on Saturday when Pope Benedict
XVI will install six cardinals.
The Indian delegation will witness the elevation
of Catholicos Moran Mar Baselios Cleemis as the youngest prince of the Catholic Church.
The 53-year-old prelate heads the Syro Malankara Church, the youngest of the 23 ritual
Church in Catholicism.
A Syro-Malankara Church spokesperson told reporters
at their headquarters in Thiruvananthapuram that an ecumenical team and an inter-religious
group from Kerala will attend the elevation of their Catholicos as a cardinal.
The
ecumenical team will comprise two Catholic archbishops and four bishops from other
Christian denominations while the inter-religious delegation consists of a maulavi
(Muslim cleric) and three swamis. Several federal and state ministers led by Deputy
Chairperson of the Rajya Sabha P. J. Kurian will also attend the consistory.
Others
in the group are Minister of State for Civil Aviation K. C. Venugopal, Indian Union
Muslim League’s Lok Sabha Member E. Mohammed Basheer and Congress legislator Palode
Ravi and Thiruvananthapuram mayor and Marxist leader K Chandrika.
With the
installation of Catholicos Cleemis, India will have seven cardinals, five of them
with rights to vote in a papal election. The oldest among them is Cardinal Simon Pimenta,
92, who now lives in Mumbai. Cardinals Simon Lourdusamy, 88, and Ivan Dias, 76, live
in Rome.
The other cardinals are Telesphore Placidus Toppo, archbishop of Ranchi,
Oswald Gracias, archbishop of Mumbai and George Alencherry, major archbishop of the
Syro-Malabar Church.
Catholicos Cleemis is the first cardinal from the Syro
Malankara Church, a faction of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church that joined the
Catholic fold in 1930. It has some 500,000 members.
Cleemis Catholicos was
ordained a priest in 1986, and holds a doctorate from the St. Thomas Pontifical University,
Rome. He was first appointed bishop in 2001, and elevated as the major archbishop
six years later.