Want to Get Married in this Kerala Church? First Prove You Are Not Impotent!

by Shalet Jimmy
Published in the New Indian Express, Kerala

If you are a parishioner of the Santa Cruz Basilica, Fort Kochi, and wants to get married in the church, you have to prove you are not impotent. The vicar of the church has already issued a circular stating that this is a canonical requirement and has published it on the notice board.
However, the Church leadership rejected the claim that producing the potency certificate was a canonical requirement for marriage.

Kerala Catholic Bishops Council deputy secretary-general Fr Stephen Alathara said though such a suggestion had come up earlier, it was turned down.

“For the smooth functioning of marriages, there was a suggestion to collect such details before one enters into wedlock. But the Church has not cleared it,” he said.

And medical experts have said potency tests aren’t always reliable. Said noted psychiatrist Dr C J John: “Since such clinical tests are being conducted under artificially stimulated circumstances, chances are high that one clearing the potency test is likely to be impotent in an actual situation and vice versa. Some can’t stimulate themselves under artificial circumstances. Hence it would be wrong to label them as impotent. That could destroy their lives. Besides, psychological factors also play a pivotal role in defining one’s sexuality.”

A parishioner, speaking on condition of anonymity, accused the local vicar of “creating a mess” by coming up with such strange rules under the pretext of implementing canonical law. “My plea to renew my ancestor’s grave was rejected several times. The church has become a company. Only those priests who can garner more funds are able to climb up the hierarchy,” he said.
Another parishioner complained that the church had laid down a rule that only married women who had given birth could be a godmother at baptism.

Vicar Fr Francis Fernandez wasn’t available for comment despite repeated attempts to contact him.
Asked to comment on the issue, Cochin Bishop Joseph Kariyil said he wasn’t aware of the new rule. “I will soon look into it,” he said.

Francis Kallarakal, Archbishop of the Verapoly diocese, said the church had taken certain decisions based on consensus during emergencies. “But such a clause — to produce a potency certificate — hasn’t figured in any of our talks,” he added.

Words from a budding writer - Harsha Mohan

She was in love with Hindi and music once upon a time. Seated in a corner in her classroom, little Harsha Mohan Sajin waited for an opportunity to hum the Hindi poems in books to the tune of latest Bollywood numbers. Even her classmates at the convent school could not help lending their ears to it.

Never did she miss any light music competitions or any other singing contest. Her mellifluous voice bore the stamp of a singer in the making. Years flew by. But much to the surprise of many, her craze for music was short-lived, for her interest turned to writing.


Soon she came out with ‘Oru Manjukala Kavarcha’. Acknowledgments poured in from all quarters and her joy knew no bounds when the work was selected for the Basheer Memorial Award 2013 for the best short story by a new comer.

Before the joy of recognition could sink in Harsha won the US Malayali International short story award 2014 for her short story ‘UAEyile Aanjanmangal’. Surprisingly, Harsha never wrote a single word till the day she went to Doha to join her engineer husband four years ago. “It would not be wrong to say that hectic life in Doha spurred her to write.

Though she started writing late, the seeds were sown much earlier. “Life in Doha was of course a driving force. But I think I was attracted to words even when I was a little girl. But I didn’t know it then. My love for words grew under the  tutelage of my Malayalam teacher - Bhanumati.   I would not have become a writer, had it not been for her,” Harsha says. Perhaps, this must be the reason why she dedicated her blog to her late teacher.


 Ask her if she does any research for her work, and she says, “Definitely. I don’t have much experience to develop ideas into a story, so I do a lot of research on the subject. But one of my works, ‘Muyalcheviyanmar’ is purely based on emotion.”

Harsha’s ‘Agnes Dimitriyude Thiruseshippukal’ for which she bagged the second prize under Qatar Samskrithi Cheru Katha Puraskaram 2013 was applauded by the judges for its new style of narration. “I had to do a little bit of research to get the geography of Italy, right.” The work is about the relationship between Agnes Dmitri Monero an Italian writer and Draupathi Dutta, an Indian writer.

The story ends with the death of Agnes, a strong personality and a known feminist, who wanted her unpublished stories on love, passion and emotions to be published in Draupadi’s name so that, her feminist image would be intact. Harsha says that the story did not develop from the thread but from the  name-Agnes. “I came across the name accidentally and I wanted to give the name a character. I started thinking about it. What she should be doing and of her personality which eventually gave way to a story,” she says.

Her blog  ‘Mazhakkadukal’ (Rainforest) is replete with almost all of her works.

published in The New Indian Express