Strategies And Visions For Making The Diaspora Youth A Dynamic Community of Christ’s Disciples By: Fr. Bijesh Philip
It is important to note that this unique seminar for giving a new life and boost for the Diaspora youth in India takes place immediately after the Sunday in which the Church celebrated the feast of Pentecost. In the first Pentecost day, many of the Diaspora Jews gathered in Jerusalem were moved by the abundant experience of the Holy Spirit by the early Christian community. That event laid the foundation for the Church through a communication beyond the language barriers. May the same Spirit guide the participants of this seminar, who have come from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, so that we could build up an effective Youth Movement in the ‘Babelic’ context of India.
The Changing Scenario Of The Indian Society
As an important prerequisite to empower the youth organizations, we need to have a clear grasp of the crisis and challenges our society is facing today. At present , the whirlwind of the forces of globalization is sweeping over our country, as well as other poor and developing nations. On the one hand, modern transportation and communication technologies have compressed the world into a global city, heightening the awareness of humanities interconnection and interdependence. Globalization has developed a capacity to extend the effects of modern development to all the parts of the world with ease and speed. But actually, through the process of privatization and liberalization, it is creating economic exploitation and political subordination of the poor countries by the developed ones, leading to greater misery and poverty for the poor.
It is creating a world where the market forces are reigning supreme, sidelining the real needs of the poor people and the earth. It is generating an ever-expanding greed for profit and power, promising an unending material progress, and causing irresponsible exploitation of rare resources of the earth and polluting the environment
1. It is spreading secularism and indirectly encouraging religious fanaticism. It is excluding the poor and the powerless more and more from the immense benefits of today’s scientific and technological progress. Another threat is “the cultural monism powered by the engine of religious fundamentalism and driven by the Sangh Parivar”
2. The motto of this conceptualization is: one nation, one people, and cone culture. This is countered by the concept of cultural pluralism promoted by secular forces and cultural subalternism. which is an effort to mobilize the Dalits, the secluded tribes, and the Backward classes as Dalitbahujans in order to be an alternative political and cultural force. Caste discriminations which are prevailing even within Church, unemployment of youth, unbridled migration for jobs, the displacement of the tribal, the discrimination against women, the degradation of eco- system are other negatives. These are mentioned not to minimize the developments, but to view the realities around us from the view point of the victims so that we could understand the pungency of serving God’s Kingdom by responding to these issues
Source IOH