Former Hindu kingdom gets its first bishop

Twenty-one years ago Amulya Nath Sharma spent Easter in a Kathmandu police station for preaching before a gathering that also included Hindu relatives of churchgoers. Now, with the world's only Hindu kingdom becoming a secular state, he will lead Nepal's growing Christian community as the country's first bishop.

Earlier this month, Pope Benedict XVI elevated Nepal from a prefecture to vicariate and named Father Anthony Francis Sharma as the kingdom's first bishop.

Sharma, 69, embraced Christianity at the age of four when his mother, a widow, converted in India's Assam state. He will be ordained at an official ceremony in Kathmandu on May 5 when he will be sworn in by the Pope's representative, Papal nuncio papal Pedro Lopez Quintana, in a ceremony to be also attended by the archbishops of Patna and Bagdogra from India.

It is a moment of exultation for Nepal's Christian community who till the 1990s faced prison or other punishment for proselytising.

Conversions were a punishable offence in Nepal till last April, when a public revolt forced King Gyanendra to step down as head of government and the newly restored parliament declared the world's only Hindu kingdom a secular state.

Father Sharma remembers the earlier days when anyone found to own even a copy of the Bible faced imprisonment or deportation.

He joined the Jesuits in 1956 and spent his childhood in Kurseong in eastern India. Father Sharma was sent to the Philippines for higher education in counselling and psychology and returned to India again for several teaching assignments.

The most prominent was as principal and rector of Darjeeling's famed North Point School, where traditionally, Nepal's royal family used to send its sons for education.

Prince Dhirendra, the present king's younger brother who died in the palace massacre in 2001, was a student of father Sharma.

"I also admitted Crown Prince Paras to the school," the future bishop of Nepal told IANS.

Father Sharma returned to Nepal in 1984 when he was appointed superior of Nepal.

Now eight months away from his 70th birthday, the priest thinks the appointment should have gone to a Nepali Jesuit from the ethnic communities.

"My days are numbered," he said. "In any case, I will have to retire after six years.

"I want to spend that time preparing someone from the ethnic communities."

Though the first Jesuit missionaries arrived in Nepal as early as the 18th century at the invitation of the then Malla kings about 238 years ago, when the present king Gyanendra's ancestor King Prithvi Narayan Shah overran the smaller principalities and consolidated his kingdom, they were expelled on the suspicion they were spying for the British government.

However, after a pro-democracy movement in 1950 ended the tyrannical regime of the all-powerful Rana prime ministers, the Jesuit fathers were invited back, though only to run schools and hospitals. (IANS)

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