Frank Hoare anoints Babita Kaur during Easter in 1997. She is between Sneh Lata and Jyotika Mala
On the first evening of a recent visit to Ba parish where twenty five years previously I had received five people into the Catholic Church I visited Jyoti, one of them.
I was glad to see that her husband, Martin Richard, had recovered from an illness that had left him paralyzed for almost one year.
I asked Jyoti if it had been difficult for her to leave her Hindu faith and become a Catholic. She said that it hadn’t because her family had advised her to be one with her husband in his religion. Family unity and the importance of a wife’s support for her husband in everything, are strong values in the Indian culture.
“Even though you prepared us for one year before baptism and confirmation I didn’t have deep faith in Christianity at first,” She added. “But when Martin was ill, I and others fasted and prayed every day for him for 145 days. The doctors couldn’t explain why he improved, gradually began to walk and began working again as head foreman in the sugar factory. That experience really deepened my faith.”
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