By I. J. Singh - Easter and Vaisakhi speak to us and our neighbors. These come at about the same time every year and remain defining days Christians and Sikhs, respectively. This year, Easter and Vaisakhi present some unusual but significant lessons for Christians and Sikhs – it has become a time that calls for some reflection and a sobering inward look.

For centuries, but particularly for the past decade or so, an ever increasing storm has been buffeting the Roman Catholic Church.

For the five year since he became the pope, Pope Benedict XVI has found little peace from the sex scandal swirling around him. Under the lens is his time as Joseph Ratzinger, the archbishop of Germany, and later as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which had overall responsibility for such cases since 2001.

“To err is human” is a universally understood truism, but not to the average Christian when applying it to the pope. The pope’s words carry infallible authority when he speaks from the Chair of Saint Peter on matters of faith and morals. He is the visible head of the mystical body of Christ. To question him or to cast aspersions on his conduct “is to attack the church universal,” said the Reverend James Martin, the Jesuit culture-editor of America, a Roman Catholic weekly magazine. Martin continued: “Over the past 100 years, the office of the pope has taken on greater stature and importance for the average Catholic.”

I personally found it unnecessarily preachy, even offensively galling, that in his annual message “Urbi et Orbi” -- “To the City and To The World” -- delivered from the balcony of the Vatican this year, the pope never once mentioned the sex scandals that have just about ripped apart the Catholic world.

All I can say to this is to cite Shaikh Farid from the Guru Granth. His words exhort us to use our intelligence not to explore the shortcomings of others but to look within ourselves: “Jay too akal lateef kaalay likh naa lekh, apnay gareeban sio(n) sir neeva(n) kar vekh.”

The pope’s words seemed to me akin to burying one’s head in the sand, particularly since the Catholic hierarchy, like any efficient bureaucracy, has circled the wagons and almost united in condemnation and rejection of any criticism.

And then, I couldn’t resist thinking about the travails of the Akal Takht, largely representing the seat of authority in Sikhi. Let me be totally and unequivocally clear that the Akal Takht is not the Vatican. Its leader, the jathedar, is not the pope. The Roman Catholic version of a pyramidal hierarchy with its inherent ecclesiastical authority was never the model of governance in Sikhi and, I fervently hope, it never will be, even though I have seen Sikhs drawing parallels between the two.

The current fanning of the flames on and about the Akal Takht seems to have started from the episode(s) involving Professor Darshan Singh with some fuel to the fire being added by the conflict around the playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, the author of “Behzti” and “Behud.”

But we have a longer history to this – from the excommunication and shunning of Teja Singh (Bhassaur), Professor Gurmukh Singh and Gurbakh Singh Kala Afghana among others, as well as the visiting of sundry punishment to Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Surjit Singh Barnala, Buta Singh and Pashaura Singh among many others. This list is at best incomplete.

Now we have a flash fire burning destroying good people in its wake. The current case of Darshan Singh seems to have polarized the worldwide Sikh community as nothing has in the past.

I do not write to defend or attack Darshan Singh here. That’s absolutely not my purpose today.

The reason may lie in the near iconic status that Darshan Singh has enjoyed for many decades, and also because many Sikhs now view the current Akal Takht as a bureaucratic reality with little independence, sagacity or credibility.

This does not at all mean that there are no defenders left of the Akal Takht and what they see as the historical authenticity of its authority. This does not disturb me quite so much.

History shows a cyclical path with an ebb and flow in the fates of men and institutions. Time has a way of working out the mazes and complications in our lives, as long as we keep on the problems with honesty of purpose and openness of heart.

Those that seemingly want to wipe the Akal Takht out of existence, I think, are bent on biting off their nose to spite their face. Their anger and frustration are righteous but are not productively channeled. They remind me of those who want to destroy the church, as some defenders of the church allege.

The obverse side of the coin has those who want to destroy the critics of the church and are turning a blind eye to the sins and failings of those who acted in the name of the church.

The so called “defenders of the faith” are equally blind. They see any questioning of the church or the Akal Takht as an attack on the fundamentals that has to be resisted with all and every weapon in their arsenal.

Both the defenders and attackers of the Akal Takht remind me of the troubles of the Roman Catholic Church today. Both are militants – not fundamentalists, but extremists. We need them both so that the issue will not die, but a solution is not what either side has.

The Catholic Church has now begun to fight and mount an aggressively vigorous defense that minimizes its own failings. In labeling its critics anti-Christian or anti-church, there is an element of denial of its own sins.

I see similar strain in the knee jerk defense of the arbitrary procedural policies of the Akal Takht. The critics of the church are not anti-Christian, nor are the critics of Akal Takht anti-Sikh.

Whether it is the Roman Catholic Church that is under the microscope or the Akal Takht, we don’t want to throw away the baby with the bath water. We also don’t want to batten the hatches, close our ranks and flame out those who disagree with us.

What troubles me is that the community is roiled so much that all civility has been lost. I know that the path ahead is cluttered with potholes, but the fog of rudeness only makes the way forward harder to see.

Diarmuid Martin, the archbishop of Dublin, Ireland, which continues to be rocked by sexual scandals of the church, asks us to see that “…the truth will set the church free, even if the truth is hard to digest.”

Guru Granth reminds us “Such sabhna hoi dary paap kadhhe dhoye,” meaning that truth is the panacea that will free us of our sins.


Note: Top image: File photo of Akal Takth Jathedar Gurbachan Singh announcing Tankhaiya of former Akal Takth Jathedar Darshan Singh from the Akal Takth in Amritsar. Photo by Munish Byala, SikhNN staff photojournalist.

The author, Inder Jit Singh, is an anatomy professor at New York University. He is also on the editorial advisory board of the Calcutta-based periodical, The Sikh Review, and is the author of four books: Sikhs and Sikhism: A View With a Bias; The Sikh Way: A Pilgrim's Progress; Being and Becoming a Sikh; and The World According to Sikhi. He can be reached at: ijsingh99@gmail.com