EWTN News portal reports that on May 7, 2026, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) held a hearing on Capitol Hill in which witnesses described religious freedom in India as being on a “downward trajectory.” USCIRF Vice Chair Asif Mahmood stated that “religious freedom in India is abysmal,” noting that “religious minority communities and their places of worship remain particularly vulnerable to discriminatory legislation, surveillance, and harassment,” and that “members of the clergy are also routinely arrested and released under accusation of conducting forced conversions.” USCIRF Chair Vicky Hartzler cited anti-conversion laws in 13 of India’s 28 states, anti-terrorism laws targeting minorities, discriminatory citizenship laws, and the government’s failure to intervene in mob violence against religious minorities. Witnesses called for the State Department to designate India as a “country of particular concern” (CPC), impose sanctions, and make religious liberty a prerequisite in all diplomatic negotiations. India’s approximately 23 million Catholics — roughly 1.6% of the population — are among those affected by this escalating persecution.
That a secular commission in a secular republic must plead for the most elementary rights of the faithful in a nominally democratic nation exposes the utter bankruptcy of the modern order, which, having dethroned Christ the King, is incapable of guaranteeing even natural justice to His followers.
The Primacy of the Faith and the Duty of Nations
The persecution of Christians in India — the arson of churches, the arrest of priests on fabricated charges of “forced conversion,” the enactment of anti-conversion statutes in the majority of Indian states — is not an isolated political misfortune. It is the inevitable fruit of a world order constructed on the explicit denial of the social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), taught with Apostolic authority that “the Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men” and that “men united in societies are no less subject to the authority of Christ than individuals.” He further declared: “Rulers of states therefore should not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ, but should fulfill this duty themselves and with their people, if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate and contribute to the increase of their homeland’s happiness.” The encyclical is unambiguous: the state that refuses to acknowledge Christ the King undermines the very foundation of its own authority and sows the seeds of its own destruction.
India’s anti-conversion laws — legislation that criminalizes the very act of preaching the Gospel and winning souls for Christ — constitute a direct violation of the divine mandate: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations” (Matt. 28:19). These laws are not merely unjust; they are an explicit repudiation of the sovereignty of Christ over every nation and every human soul. The Indian state, by penalizing conversion to Catholicism, has placed itself in formal opposition to the divine constitution of the Church and the universal Kingship of Our Lord. This is the natural consequence of a political order built on the liberal principle — condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (proposition 77) — that “it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.” Once the state abandons the exclusive truth of the Catholic faith, it becomes, by degrees, hostile to that faith.
The Fabric of “Religious Freedom” as a Weapon Against the Truth
The very framework within which the USCIRF hearing was conducted — that of “religious freedom” as understood by modern liberal democracies — is itself a doctrinal error condemned by the perennial Magisterium. Pope Pius IX, in proposition 79 of the Syllabus of Errors, condemned the assertion that “the civil liberty of every form of worship, and the full power, given to all, of overtly and publicly manifesting any opinions whatsoever and thoughts, conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and minds of the people, and to propagate the pest of indifferentism.” The modern concept of “religious freedom” enshrines indifferentism — the idea that all religions are equally valid paths to God — as a fundamental right. This is not freedom; it is the legal codification of apostasy.
When the USCIRF calls upon the U.S. State Department to demand that India “uphold religious liberty,” it implicitly endorses the premise that Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and every other creed stand on equal footing before the civil law. But the Catholic Church has always taught, and continues to teach, that there is only one true religion — the Catholic faith — and that the state has a positive duty to recognize and favor it, while tolerating other religions only when and where the common good permits, and never granting them equal public standing. As Pope Leo XIII wrote in Immortale Dei: “The Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, each supreme in its own kind, and each confined within limits which are defined and fixed relative to its own nature and special object.” The “religious freedom” advocated by the USCIRF is not the Catholic conception of the right ordering of society; it is the liberal heresy that reduces the Church to one voluntary association among many, stripped of her divine mandate to teach, govern, and sanctify all nations.
India’s anti-conversion laws, moreover, are not merely a Hindu nationalist innovation. They are the logical application of the liberal principle that religion is a private matter and that the state has the authority to regulate its public expression. If the state possesses the competence to determine which religious conversions are “forced” and which are “voluntary,” it has thereby claimed jurisdiction over the interior act of faith — an act that belongs solely to God and the individual conscience operating under the authority of the true Church. The Church has never recognized the state’s right to arbitrate the sincerity of conversion. To do so is to usurp a prerogative that belongs to God alone.
The Silence on the Supernatural: A Telltale Omission
Strikingly absent from the entire USCIRF hearing, as reported by EWTN News, is any mention of the supernatural dimension of the persecution. There is no reference to the state of grace, no exhortation to martyrdom, no reminder that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church, and no acknowledgment that the sufferings of the faithful in India are a participation in the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The entire discourse is framed in the language of secular human rights — “countries of particular concern,” “sanctions,” “transnational repression,” “building cases” for future prosecution. This is the language of the flesh, not of the spirit.
Stephen Rapp, former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice, stated: “Maybe many of the perpetrators may never travel, but basically you send a signal that if you commit crimes like these there will be no rest in this life.” The promise of “no rest in this life” is a pale and wretched substitute for the reality of eternal judgment. The Church has always taught that persecutors of the faith face not merely international tribunals but the tribunal of Christ the King, who warned: “He that shall deny me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 10:33). The exclusive recourse to secular mechanisms of justice — sanctions, prosecutions, diplomatic pressure — betrays a worldview in which the supernatural order has been effectively abolished. It is the theology of Modernism, condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu and Pascendi Dominici Gregis, applied to the geopolitical arena.
David Curry, president of Open Doors USA, called for religious freedom to be “part of every discussion and negotiation” with international partners. But the Catholic Church does not negotiate the faith. She proclaims it. She demands its acceptance. She does not seek a seat at the table of secular diplomacy; she demands that the table itself be ordered according to the laws of Christ the King. The very notion that the Gospel must be advanced through State Department negotiations is a confession that the supernatural mission of the Church has been abandoned in favor of political lobbying.
The Hindu Nationalist Ideology: A Consequence of Dethroning Christ
The rise of Hindu nationalist ideology under Prime Minister Narendra Modi — who, as noted by Georgetown Law professor Arjun Sethi, was banned from entering the United States from 2005 to 2014 — is not an aberration but a predictable consequence of the secular liberal order. When a nation formally or practically denies the Kingship of Christ, it does not thereby establish a neutral, rational public order. It creates a vacuum that is inevitably filled by some form of idolatry — in this case, the worship of the Hindu nation as the supreme good. Pope Pius XI warned in Quas Primas: “When God and Jesus Christ — as we lamented — were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.”
India’s trajectory is a living illustration of this principle. The Indian state, having adopted a secular constitution that treats all religions as equal before the law, has thereby created the conditions for the most aggressive and intolerant form of religious nationalism to assert itself. Hindu nationalism does not arise despite secularism; it arises because secularism. By denying the one true God, the state opens the door to false gods — and the god of the nation is among the most cruel and demanding of idols. The persecution of Christians in India is not a failure of secularism; it is its fruit.
The Inadequacy of Secular Remedies
The remedies proposed by the USCIRF witnesses — CPC designation, sanctions, international prosecutions, diplomatic pressure — are, at best, palliatives that address symptoms while leaving the disease untouched. At worst, they are counterproductive, reinforcing the very secular-humanitarian framework that is the root cause of the problem. The designation of India as a “country of particular concern” by the U.S. State Department will not convert a single Hindu nationalist. Sanctions will not restore the Kingship of Christ over the Indian republic. International tribunals will not preach the Gospel.
The only true remedy for the persecution of Christians in India — and in every nation — is the social reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ. As Pope Pius XI declared: “If men were ever to recognize Christ’s royal authority over themselves, both privately and publicly, then unheard-of blessings would flow upon the whole society, such as due freedom, order, and tranquility, and concord and peace.” Until nations formally and publicly acknowledge Christ as King, until the laws of states are conformed to the commandments of God and the teachings of His one true Church, persecution will continue — whether in the form of anti-conversion laws in India, anti-terrorism statutes in Europe, or the subtle but no less deadly persecution of Modernism within the structures occupying the Vatican itself.
The faithful must not place their hope in the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, nor in the State Department, nor in the United Nations, nor in any human institution. Their hope is in Christ the King, and in the infallible promise of His Church: “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). The persecution in India, like all persecution, is permitted by Divine Providence for the purification of the faithful and the ultimate triumph of the Immaculate Heart. Let the faithful in India hold fast to the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, to the sacraments administered by validly ordained priests in communion with the true Church, and to the unchanging deposit of faith. Let them not be seduced by the false “religious freedom” of the secular order, which is nothing but the legal framework for the persecution of the truth. And let the faithful everywhere pray for the conversion of India — not through diplomatic pressure, but through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Rosary, and the reparation due to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, which alone can establish the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ.
Source:
India’s religious liberty on ‘downward trajectory,’ commission says (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 07.05.2026