Hindus Perform Weddings for Donkeys

by Christopher A. Ferrara

        I recently came across the following news report from New Delhi (June 20, 2002): "The drought-plagued residents of a small village in southern India organized a ceremonial wedding for two donkeys to appease the Hindu god of rain, a news report said Thursday." Ah, there’s nothing like a June wedding.

        In case the reader thinks I am pulling his leg, there is more: "Dressed up like a bride and groom, the donkeys were escorted to a temple in the village of Sakkayanayakanur in Tamil Nadu State on Wednesday, the Press Trust of India reported. There, a local Hindu minister chanted prayers and led the donkeys in a ritual ceremony to propitiate the rain god, Varuna. The beasts were then led in a procession that ended with a wedding feast — for the donkeys and local villagers."

        And lest you think this was an aberration even by Hindu standards, you should know that "the donkey wedding was the second to be held in the small Indian village, which like much of the country has endured months of drought, aggravated by a heat wave that has claimed hundreds of lives. Temperatures in some areas have soared as high as 48 degrees Celsius (118.4 Fahrenheit)."

        As I have reported in previous columns, the same Vatican apparatus that refuses to permit a consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary is also telling us that the "world’s great religions," as they are now called, must join together with Catholics to "pray for peace" to their assorted gods — including the Hindus, who were given a room at the friary of Saint Francis of Assisi to "pray for peace" at Assisi 2001, which this writer covered as a reporter for The Remnant newspaper.

        How did Catholic churchmen reach a state of mind in which they seriously propose that world peace requires the "prayers" of a "great religion" whose "priests" think they can effect a marriage between two donkeys to appease Varuna the rain-god? What sort of lunacy is this? It is, of course, the "diabolical disorientation" of high-ranking churchmen that Sister Lucy has identified as a key feature of the post-conciliar epoch in the Church. The Third Secret would "be clearer" in 1960, she said — the very year in which Vatican II was being prepared. And now we learn that on Italian television Sister Lucy’s nephew, a priest by the name of Father Jose dos Santos Valinho, has declared that the Third Secret concerns the words which follow Our Lady’s phrase "In Portugal, the dogma of the faith will always be preserved, etc." Can anyone looking at the state of the Church today really doubt that the remaining words — which the Vatican has yet to reveal — speak of a loss of dogma in places other than Portugal?