“Dishonesty is the child of darkness, corruption its brother. If you do not keep your courtyard clean, it is your fault. Do not blame the snakes that come to settle in the comfort of the weeds,” thus ends an appeal from the Archdiocesan Movement for Transparency, a lay people’s organisation in the Syro-Malabar Archdiocese of Ernakulam-Angamaly, on the Archdiocesan land sale scandal.
Copies of the appeal, signed by four lay persons and calling on everyone to join hands to realise the “dream” of an archdiocese of transparency, was distributed in parish churches at the end of the Mass on Sunday.
“It is not a tug-of-war for power. Neither is it a part of the liturgical row. It is a fight against evil; resistance of the ‘right’ in the face of the ‘wrong.’ If you do not respond now, future generations may never even hear of the archdiocese,” the appeal said.
The appeal said the Archdiocese had lost up to ₹37 crore as it had received only ₹9.13 crore out of the ₹46 crore it would have received had the land been sold at the prevailing market rate. The land was not sold at the market rate. Even in that case, the Archdiocese should have received ₹27.24 crore as per the decision of the Archdiocesan Curia, which agreed to the sale at the rate of ₹9.05 lakh a cent. A total of 301 cents of land was sold. The amount shown on the land deal documents, however, totals only ₹13.51 crore.
‘Secret deals’
The lay people’s appeal also said that the land purchases following the land sales were “secret” deals by Major Archbishop Cardinal George Alencherry and two of the archdiocesan functionaries Fr. Sebastian Vadakkumpadan and Fr. Joshi Puthuva.
It is for the first time that the details of the Archdiocesan land deal, most of it in 2017, have been put out for public view in the wake of the scandal, apparently involving the church hierarchy itself. Earlier, auxiliary bishop Sebastian Edyanthrath had written to the community of priests in the archdiocese, explaining the land deals and providing details such as information on the pieces of land sold, their prices, money realised, and the loss sustained by the Archdiocese.
The appeal distributed on Sunday more or less reiterates the facts and reflections in the letter written by the auxiliary bishop. It includes the admissions that civil and Canon laws were violated; that the Archdiocese had lost its moral authority. The land deals compromised the financial security of the Archdiocese and exposed the failure of the administrative set-up and a lack of transparency in deals.
