作者： bharat.cn

Pope Francis declared Indian nun Mariam Thresia Chiramel Mankidiyan a saint, during a ceremony at the Vatican on Oct. 13 that drew tens of thousands of pilgrims from around the world.

Huge banners of St. Mariam Thresia and four other newly canonized saints were hung at the front of St. Peter’s Basilica ahead of the open-air ceremony attended by government ministers, a member of the British royal family and throngs of faithful.

Born in 1876 into a wealthy family in southern India, St. Mariam Thresia insisted instead on living a life of piety from a young age, the Vatican News reported. She slept on a gravel floor rather than a bed and was committed to serving the poor and the sick in southern Kerala state.

“In imitation of Jesus, she helped the poor, nursed the sick, visited and comforted the lonely people of her parish,” Vatican News said of Thresia who founded the Congregation of the Holy Family, a religious order, in 1914.   

“She was also blessed with the stigmata but kept it secret to avoid attention. Her entire existence was tormented by demons and she offered her sufferings for the remission of the sins of the world,” the news service said. Thresia died in 1926 aged 50.

Among the audience at Sunday’s ceremony in Rome was an Indian family and their son, whose life Thresia is credited with saving in 2009 during a miracle performed soon after his birth.

The boy, born prematurely, was suffering from respiratory illness and was prescribed a medicine that needed to be administered through a special ventilator. With no such equipment available for the boy, doctors feared the worst, Sister Udaya, superior general of the Congregation of the Holy Family said.

“On the third day, the child was gasping, and doctors explained it was going to be fatal. So, the parents and the grandparents, who very fond of Mariam Thresia, were praying very hard,” she told Vatican News.

The grandmother placed a religious relic on the baby as they prayed to St. Mariam Thresia, and there was a sudden and “drastic improvement” soon after, the baby recovered “and the doctors said it cannot be explained medically,” she said.

St. Mariam Thresia was declared blessed by Pope St. John Paul II in 1999, and Pope Francis later authorized a decree, recognizing the miracle through her intercession, clearing her way for sainthood.

Sister Udaya said sisters of the order have since been preparing for the canonization ceremony, including with special prayers and a religious retreat. But, in keeping with St. Mariam Thresia’s work, they have mostly focused on charitable acts, including housing projects and helping students, the sick and others.

The other four canonized by the pope are St. John Henry Newman, the British theologian, poet and cardinal (1801-1890); Brazilian St. Maria Rita Lopes Pontes (1914-1992); St. Marguerite Bays, a Swiss laywoman and mystic (1815 – 1879) and St. Josephine Vannini, the Italian co-founder of the Daughters of St. Camillus (1859 -1911)

India’s top vegetable oil trade body has asked its members to stop buying palm oil from Malaysia, an unprecedented call aimed at helping New Delhi punish the country for criticizing India over its policy towards Kashmir.

The Oct. 21 directive by the Solvent Extractors’ Association of India (SEAI) shows how nationalist sentiments can affect international business, and is a big blow to Malaysia, the world’s second largest producer and exporter of palm oil after Indonesia.

India was Malaysia’s third-largest export destination in 2018 for palm oil and palm-based products worth 6.84 billion ringgit ($1.63 billion). Vegetable oil contributed 2.8 percent of Malaysia’s gross domestic product last year and 4.5 percent to total exports.

“Our government has not taken kindly to the unprovoked pronouncements by the Malaysian prime minister and is contemplating some retaliatory action,” SEAI President Atul Chaturvedi said in a statement carrying a note to its members.

“It would be in fitness of things, as responsible Indian vegetable oil industry, we avoid purchasing of palm oil from Malaysia till such time clarity on the way forward emerges from Indian government.”

He said the guidance was issued in its own interest as well as a mark of solidarity with the country.

Reuters reported that India was considering curbing imports of some products from Malaysia, including palm oil, after Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said last month that India had “invaded and occupied” Kashmir, a disputed Muslim-majority region also claimed by Pakistan.

India stripped its portion of the Kashmir valley of statehood and autonomy on Aug. 5.

Some Indian traders said refiners had already stopped buying Malaysian palm oil for shipment in November and December, fearing higher import taxes or other measures. In any case, household palm oil consumption falls in India during winter as the tropical oil solidifies at lower temperature.

India’s government has rebuked Malaysia for its stance on Kashmir but has not commented on any trade measures. India’s trade ministry declined to comment.

India is abuzz with Mahatma Gandhi in the year of the 150th anniversary of his birth but there is a new version to his message of “ahimsa” (non-violence) which the country’s enemies are finding out at a great personal cost.

Gandhi was the “apostle” of peace and non-violence who offered the other cheek when slapped but the India of today would rather leave a black eye on its aggressor as it did on Pakistan with retaliatory heavy shelling in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) on Sunday, which left at least 6-10 Pakistani soldiers dead and blew up three terrorist camps into thin air.

It was a grim fresh reminder to Pakistan that India has the doctrine of an eye-for-an-eye in its new rulebook and the “surgical strikes” and “Balakot airstrikes” which followed the terrorist attacks in Uri (2016) and Pulwama (2019) are the new philosophy and not an exception.

India is still an adherent to “non-violence” and has an unbroken history of peaceful coexistence, never eyeing others’ territory but the painful lessons of the past demand it puts a premium on the integrity of its Union.

India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval often reminds his audience that India was overrun by invaders despite being arguably the most advanced civilization of its time. It never protected its seas even though they straddle three of its four corners. It led to the servitude of almost a thousand years. It faced wars imposed by Pakistan on three of four occasions: 1947-48, 1965 and 1999. It didn’t use 90,000 prisoners-of-war as a bargaining chip nor did it advance deep inside Pakistan after winning a conclusive war in 1971 which led to the creation of Bangladesh.

India was seen as the epitome of a “soft” nation as terrorists kept crossing the Line of Control (LoC) through Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir and cost tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers’ lives since 1990. The horrific attack in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, when terrorists from across the border sprayed machine guns on civilians on the streets and five-star hotels, known as 26/11 in the nation’s damaged psyche, evoked no retaliatory response from India. Worse, the very next year in 2009, the same United Progressive Alliance (UPA), returned to power without any retribution from its masses.

All this has changed for good. India today is driven in its bid to modernize its army: It has only recently ceded its top spot to Saudi Arabia as the biggest arms importer of the world — the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reckons India accounted for 12 percent of the total global arms imports for the 2013-2017 period. It has lapped up Russia’s S-400 advanced missile system defying the threat of sanctions from the United States. It has gone ahead with its purchase of France’s Rafale fighter jets even though the move threatened to derail Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bid for a second term on unfounded charges of corruption this year.