The bishops’ gambit
Parsis who bemoan the traditionalist stance of the high priests and mobeds will be disheartened to read that 73% of American bishops have voted to draft guidelines denying US President Joe Biden communion. Biden’s support for abortion rights and birth control has angered the conservative element of the US Catholic Church. Communion is considered one of the most sacred rituals said to be initiated by Jesus Christ and involves sharing consecrated bread and wine. The bread represents Christ’s body, the wine his blood. How could one of the highest echelons of the Catholic Church in the most advanced democracy in the world refuse a devout Catholic like Biden religious succor?
A wave of conservatism is sweeping many parts of the world. The election of leaders such as Donald Trump (US), Narendra Modi (India), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Turkey) and Boris Johnson (UK), are all manifestations of a conservative renaissance. In India, we see the Hindutva agenda being aggressively advanced with the banning of beef, the "love jihad" legislation to curb interfaith marriages, the building of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya where the Babri Masjid once stood, and so on. Even the Indian Supreme Court has "expressed anguish at a PIL (public interest litigation) (by a Bharatiya Janata Party legislative member) seeking direction to the Center to take steps and consider a new law to check religious conversions," notes the Free Press Journal of April 4, 2021. The plea was withdrawn.
Among Parsis we can see the orthodox sway in the refusal of the Bombay Parsi Punchayet majority trustees to permit even the token recitation of funerary prayers at Doongerwadi for the Covid cremated. Or the Karani Agiary’s refusal to perform funerary rites for a Parsi male because he had married a non-Parsi.
But while our high priests are by and large traditionalists, the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis is liberal. The traditionalist US bishops, however, are "clashing with the Vatican, wresting influence away from Pope Francis’s top representatives in the United States and further polarizing the Catholic faithful in the process," noted The New York Times of June 21. So despite the liberal dispensation from the top, the conservative rank and file tread their own path.
In a change from the dogmatic US bishops’ approach, the North American Mobeds Council has followed a more pragmatic and liberal stance on the religion and the community. Women are accepted with some limitations as mobedyars, interfaith marriages are solemnized and navjotes performed of children of such couples. Since North American Zoroastrians do not have to worry about finding priests to manage a plethora of unfrequented fire temples, they can devote time to other important religious considerations.
Even among the US Hindus, we find liberals. A 40-year-old Hindu woman in the US "got ordained online by the Universal Life Church" so she could offer religious services including solemnization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning (LGBTQ) marriages, states The New York Times of June 23. "It’s close to impossible to find a woman pundit here in the States," she told the daily. She works as vice president of communications and brand marketing of a subscription-based organic food company.
Aside from priestly orthodoxy there is also the problem of diminishing numbers among Zoroastrians. Only those males born in athornan families can qualify for priesthood. Of those who opt to become navars, few take up mobedi as a full-time profession. Parsi women in India are barred from the priesthood unlike in Iran and North America. Much community energy, therefore, is diverted to finding priests to man the 100 or so fire temples in India. This task becomes all the more critical for agiaries located in places where few Parsis reside or where there are several fire temples competing for the same restricted pool of worshippers.
The Jamshedpur agiary trustees are advertising for a priest "for a period of five to six months as our existing dasturji is unwell and recovering." Finding a priest for a full-time vacancy is difficult enough. The Karachi Parsi Anjuman Trust Fund hired a priest from Iran. In Lahore women and other volunteers tend to the fire temple.
Moves to shift consecrated fires from one locale to the other are met with stiff resistance, often followed by costly and lengthy litigation. On shifting fires, the priests have been more pragmatic than the handful of laity who oppose such moves. The result, therefore, is often a stalemate, not to mention a destructive diversion of scarce community, human and financial resources.
Even where two fires are housed in one agiary, the costs increase considerably. Both fires have to be prayed over and fed with wood, an increasingly scarce and expensive commodity. There is also the cost of upkeep of the physical structure.
During the pandemic, over half-a-dozen fire temples have been restored/renovated at a cost of crores of rupees. If these institutions continue to be bereft of visitors, the expenditure will not serve the purpose for which they were created. As the community continues to age, the number of earning members decreases and the count of dependents grows. How will our depleting financial resources be replenished?
The conservatism of the US bishops is all the more worrying because it exists in a country where large segments of the population are liberal or have turned away from religion. In the Bombay Parsi community where last year over 50% of marriages were interfaith, large sections are institutionally discriminated against. While the realistic approach would be to welcome the spouses and children of interfaith marriages as happens in North America, there are objections from the priests and a sizeable chunk of the laity. The tussle between reform and dogma continues unabated. Consensus is viewed as an unacceptable compromise. The future appears dim, the present painful.