Kerala Bishops Repeat Criticism of Award-Winning Indian LGBTQ+ Movie

In India, the Kerala Catholic Bishops’ Council (KCBC) has reaffirmed its opposition to same-gender relationships after a film the Council previously criticized won a major award.

The KCBC previously pcriticized homosexuality in December 2023 after an Indian LGBTQ+ movie, Kaathal (Core), was released. The movie, which portrays a gay Catholic priest, opposes values “strongly advocated by the Church,” Fr. Michael Pulickal, secretary of KCBC’s Commission for Social Harmony and Vigilance, said at the time. “We are not against any movie, but when it deliberately targets our faith under the guise of freedom of expression, we oppose,” he added.

In their latest statement, the KCBC said that campaigns promoting same-gender relationships are “misleading propaganda by vested interests.” The bishops believe “a section of people who claimed to be progressive are spreading widespread misunderstanding in society that the Catholic Church and Pope Francis approve of homosexuality.”

When the film came out originally, Fr. Pulickal noted that, despites its opposition to same-gender relationships, the KCBC affirmed the church does not isolate people based on their sexuality and treats them with compassion. 

KCBC’s latest statement following Kaathal’s award is very much in line with the Council’s previous actions and statements, which also expressed praise for an anti-marriage equality ruling by the Indian Supreme Court. In that instance, a KCBC spokesperson said, “the union of marriage, according to the teachings of the Catholic Church, is between a man and a woman for the purpose of procreation and that is not the case with same-sex marriage.”

There is a contrast in Kerala, where the population is nearly 20% Christian, between the bishops’ and other Catholic ministers who have taken steps towards genuine compassion towards the LGBTQ+ community. As Bondings 2.0 reported, clergy and lay people in the state recently established “one of the few outreach programs for the transgender community by the institutional church in India.” Transgender Indians are much more likely to drop out of high school due to discrimination, with 57% of the trans people in Kerala not completing their high school education.

Catholics in India more broadly have been supportive towards the LGBTQ+ community in other ways. Cardinal Oswald Gracias of Bombay publicly opposed the criminalization of gay individuals on two different occasions. In an exclusive interview with Bondings 2.0, Gracias emphasized that the church welcomes and accepts LGBTQ+ people. Virginia Saldanha, an Indian laywoman and former head of the Office of Laity for the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences, called for the 2015 Synod on the Family to include LGBTQ people as a way of bringing them “in from the cold.”

But KCBC’s rhetoric to describe the mere depiction of a gay priest as “propaganda,” as well as their previous statements condemning the film for portray queer relationships as “natural,” is fundamentally at odds with the loving compassion due to every person.

—Elsie Carson-Holt (she/her), October 3, 2024