A Muslim cleric and three Hindu ascetics will join some 400 Catholics
and Church leaders from India at the consistory in Rome on Saturday when
Pope Benedict XVI will install six cardinals.The Indian delegation will witness the elevation of Catholicos Moran Mar Baselios Cleemis as the youngest prince of the Catholic Church.
The 53-year-old prelate heads the Syro Malankara Church, the youngest of the 23 ritual Church in Catholicism.
A Syro-Malankara Church spokesperson told reporters at their headquarters in Thiruvananthapuram that an ecumenical team and an inter-religious group from Kerala will attend the elevation of their Catholicos as a cardinal.
The ecumenical team will comprise two Catholic archbishops and four bishops from other Christian denominations while the inter-religious delegation consists of a maulavi (Muslim cleric) and three swamis.
Several federal and state ministers led by Deputy Chairperson of the Rajya Sabha P. J. Kurian will also attend the consistory.
Others in the group are Minister of State for Civil Aviation K. C. Venugopal, Indian Union Muslim League’s Lok Sabha Member E. Mohammed Basheer and Congress legislator Palode Ravi and Thiruvananthapuram mayor and Marxist leader K Chandrika.
With the installation of Catholicos Cleemis, India will have seven cardinals, five of them with rights to vote in a papal election.
The oldest among them is Cardinal Simon Pimenta, 92, who now lives in Mumbai. Cardinals Simon Lourdusamy, 88, and Ivan Dias, 76, live in Rome.
The other cardinals are Telesphore Placidus Toppo, archbishop of Ranchi, Oswald Gracias, archbishop of Mumbai and George Alencherry, major archbishop of the Syro-Malabar Church.
Catholicos Cleemis is the first cardinal from the Syro Malankara Church, a faction of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church that joined the Catholic fold in 1930. It has some 500,000 members.
Cleemis Catholicos was ordained a priest in 1986, and holds a doctorate from the St. Thomas Pontifical University, Rome. He was first appointed bishop in 2001, and elevated as the major archbishop six years later.
The Pope named the new cardinals on October 28.
Among them is another Asian, Archbishop Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila, the second youngest among the cardinals.