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Most people will recall that last year Pope Francis officially declared Cardinal John Henry Newman a saint.
But how many of them remember that during the same ceremony on Oct. 13, 2019 at the Vatican the pope also canonized Sister Mariam Thresia Chiramel Mankidiyan, originally from Kerala (India).
Hostile to the caste system, Sister Mankidiyan was one of the leading Christian figures who focused on the Dalits -- the "untouchables" on the fringes of the caste system.
Officially, India has abolished castes. But in practice, it's a different story. The untouchables are still socially discriminated against.
They also pose a problem in terms of religious statistics. The Indian State, which counts the faithful according to their religion, does not really give the Dalits the possibility of freely expressing their attachment to Islam or Christianity.
This leads to a bias when it comes to counting Christians in a context where India has been undergoing a nationalist and Hindu shift in the last six years and is increasingly hostile to religious pluralism. Undervaluing Dalit conversions is a way of defending a national myth in which Hinduism serves as marker of identity.
The lockdown of the Indian population, which the Narendra Modi government extended until May 17, has not helped.
Under the guise of fighting the spread of COVID-19, the nationalist Indian state is taking advantage of the situation to tighten its vertical control over places of worship. This particularly true of mosques and churches, places of religious diversity that are not very popular with the authorities.
Might this be just a convenient way to justify a further clampdown on religious minorities?
If so, it forgets that buildings dedicated for religious worship do not sum up the vitality of the current Indian religious practice. Over the past 50 years, a powerful movement for house-churches, similar to the one in China, has developed off the official grid for places of worship.
Tens of thousands of small communities, gathered in people's homes, especially the homes of Dalits, are profoundly renewing Indian Christianity.
They are sometimes Catholic, and often evangelical, Pentecostal and prophetic. They are carried by a wave that takes over from the post-colonial Anglican Protestantism inherited from British colonization.
Nearly half of the 28 million evangelical Protestants in India today (out of a population of 1.4 billion) belong to these congregations that gather in private homes. Off the state's radar, these house churches are little affected by the restrictions posed by the current lockdown.
How can they prevent a small community meeting in a domestic space to celebrate the Lord's Supper, listen to preaching, pray and read the Bible?
A cartoon has been making its way through social networks to highlight the liturgical lockdown. And it expresses the situation in India perfectly.
The devil boasts that with COVID-19 he's closed all the churches.
But God answers: "On the contrary! I just opened one in every home."
Sébastien Fath is a historian and researcher at France's National Center for Scientific Research. He specializes in the study of evangelical Protestantism.
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