Santosh may be an agnostic, and so do many individual Catholics. But the Catholic Church is not! It is the duty of the Church magisterium to ensure the orthodoxy of its beliefs and practices. Once that is clear to the believers, one can expect some Church authorities, depending upon their individual background, to be more or less conservative in exercising this magisterium.
I have known Anthony de Mello personally during some years at De Nobili College, Pune. That was the time he was "inventing" new ways of training the religious men and women to meet the challenges of the modern world after Vatican II. While before Vatican II the religious formation took place within the walls of the religious houses and with protective structures, after Vatican II the young religious were more exposed to the outside world. Many of them would frequent State Universities for the higher studies. This situation was generating many conflicts among the generation groups within the religious houses. Tony de Mello developed the "Sadhana" spirituality to meet this challenge. The suspicions raised by the conservative elements to some aspects of this spirituality and practices (partly identified with Rajneesh - later Osho, in Pune) led to a Rome imposed moratorium and evaluation of Tony de Mello's methods by a commission of Jesuit Provincials. They cleared him then, but he was forced to move his Sadhana Institute from De Nobili College to Kadakvasla - into a safe forested zone! Hence, it is not fully true that Tony de Mello became a victim of Vatican only 10 years after his death! Personally, I am convinced that he broke many tabus that needed to be broken and few had courage to do! Many generations of young Catholic religious men and women in India and elsewhere will vouch for this. However, from my limited personal dealings with Tony de Mello I remained with an impression that he had become too accustomed to be seen and treated as a guru by his many "chelas" ! He was quite *upset* (which he tried to teach others to avoid) and defensive when I asked him once if he was inventing a *Christian tantrism*! Teotonio R. de Souza ------------------ Santosh Helekar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Does the Catholic Church still not respect the democratic > right to dissent? Is this a mark of righteousness as the above poster seem to imply? Did >Anthony de Mello commit any crime? > > Cheers, > > Santosh