From Our Special Correspondent
Daijiworld Media Network
Bengaluru, Aug 3: The renovated spacious Church dedicated to St Pius X at St Thomas Town in Kammanahalli, which is barely half an hour’s drive from the Archbishop’s House in the city, which was closed for the last six months after its formal blessing and inauguration by Archbishop Most Rev Bernard Moras in February this year due to court intervention, was finally opened for service and devotion by the faithful by the Archbishop this evening.
It may be recalled that the St Pius X Church, the first and perhaps the only church dedicated to the former Pope, known for spreading the devotion to Mother Mary, and served as the supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church from 1908 till his death in 1914 and canonised in 1954, was established in the Bangalore Archdiocese in year 1965.
Ironically, the St Pius X Church will now be able to conduct religious services without any hindrances during its Golden Jubilee year.
However, with a total Catholic population of about 7,000, the originally built small church was taken up for expansion and the construction work was started in the year 2008 in a plot of land donated by a Catholic family. The original estimated cost of construction was around Rs 3 crore.
But a section of the local people, reportedly raised objections and caused hurdles even though the original building plans were submitted to the Archbishop’s consideration after unanimous approvals. Consequently, the building cost escalated and shot up to nearly Rs 7 crore, according to informed sources.
When the building project was ready and blessed and officially inaugurated on February 1, 2015, some of the local Catholics moved the court and filed a case against the Archdiocese contending that the necessary occupancy certificates and approvals were not obtained from the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP). These people, who were very much part of the original proposers, reportedly contended that the building was "structurally not strong enough."
The court directed that the church shall not be opened for religious service until the BBMP issued the necessary approvals and occupancy certificates. As a result, the Church had to be closed after its blessing and inauguration.
Now, with the BBMP finally issuing the necessary approvals and occupancy certificates, the Archbishop Most Rev Bernard Moras wasted no time in formally declaring the church open for religious service on Monday evening at a simple ceremony.
Incidentally, the language issue and the insistence of the Kannada Catholics that no other language except Kannada should be used in the liturgy is said to be another reason for the tussle among the faithful as a large number of faithful were keen on having liturgical services in Tamil and English.
With the recent initiative taken by the Archbishop Moras with necessary approvals from the Vatican and wide range of consultations with the priests and senate of priests as well as the College of consulters of the Archdiocese of Bangalore, in solving the festering language controversy, the Kammanahalli church may be expected to be free of the problems
While the St Pius X Church in St Thomas Nagar at Kammanahalli is the first and perhaps the only church dedicated to the former Pope in the archdiocese of Bengaluru, the coastal Udupi Diocese has two churches at Pius Nagar in Kundapur and in Palimar near Udupi, which are named after St Pius X.