The Undying Myth of the Catholic Church as a Grand Landlord

Land sharks have their eyes on the Anglican churches, and state governments have started drooling, notes John Dayal.

The Catholic “wealth” was usually talked as bazaar gossip, writes John Dayal. 

(Photo: Vibhushita Singh / The Quint) 

The deep fake manufactured in some unknown rumour mill about the Catholic church as Indian’s premier landlord has taken a life of its own on the internet—with the ‘super bot’ Grok regurgitating a report in Organiser, the official organ of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), as the gospel truth.

No sources are quoted, no data is cited.

But both, the Sangh and Grok, confidently affirm the Church as a significant landowner, holding properties estimated to be worth Rs 20,000 crore (around $2.4 billion as of April 2025), making it if not the largest, then the second-largest landowner in the country, after the Indian government.

The Sangh has not been propitiated by the Catholic Bishops inviting Prime Minister Narendra Modi to church services or supporting its various anti-Muslim moves as in the recently passed amendments to the Waqf Board Act.

Such reports link properties, which span churches, schools, hospitals, and ‘agricultural estates’, accrued from the time of Akbar the Great in Agra, the Portuguese patronage in Kerala and Goa, the East India Company, the British Raj, and even the Indian government under the Congress. The Emperor Akbar reference is to the Akbar church in Agra, and the Portuguese to the several cathedrals in Old Goa, including the one with the relics of the Jesuit, St Francis Xavier.

The RSS Echo Chamber

The report in Organiser is a plagiary, albeit from the work of an ally. The report first appeared in OpIndia, a web-based news group closely aligned with the ruling establishment, especially the RSS, and usually targeting its political enemies in the Congress, the Communists, and the socialist groups.

In a 2022 story, OpIndia said India, despite being the world’s 7th largest country by area, possessed only 2.4 percent of the total landmass, with the government as the biggest landlord, with the army, railways, roads, grazing lands and public industries.

As a little more spice, OpIndia said, “With an estimated value between Rs 50,000 crore and Rs 100,000 crore, the Church’s vast landholdings, acquired through the Indian Churches Act of 1927, have been a subject of legal debates. The Church’s influence impacts small villages where its religious institutions become central to local life.”

“Functioning as a conglomerate of various trusts and charitable societies to spread Christianity in India, the Catholic Church employs over 50,000 religious sisters, making it the largest non-governmental employer in the country”, it added.

For the RSS, as enunciated by OpIndia, “as the country strives to accommodate its growing population, estimated to require 4 to 8 million hectares of land for residential use by 2030, navigating these complexities becomes paramount.” It goes on to demand “strategic land governance and comprehensive regulatory measures.

Numbers, Networks, and Misconceptions

But OpIndia, Organiser, Grok, and the Sangh, all conflate the many denominations of Christianity with the large presence of the Catholics, admittedly the most populous segment of Christians in the country, perhaps from 50 to 55 per cent of the population.

These are guesstimates from numbers claimed by parishes, the smallest community unit, and the 174 dioceses which constitute the Catholic church in India. A formal census has not been done.

This results in St Stephen’s College, of the church of north India, St John’s Agra, and the Christian Medical college in Vellore being counted with Jesus and Mary College, Delhi, St Xaviers, Mumbai, St Joseph’s university in Bangalore, all three of the Catholic denomination.

By their own admission, the combined Catholic and Protestant denominations collectively run – and own the land on institutions are situated – over 50,000 schools and 400 colleges, alongside healthcare facilities that include 2,457 dispensaries and six medical colleges, managing an estimated 85,000 hospital beds.

Together, they possibly count as the “single” largest non-government provider of services in education and health, a point official spokesmen of churches make while bemoaning the “persecution” of the community.

Persecution is the church term for hate speech and targeted violence. Just in 2024, for instance, the United Christian Forum reported over 800 incidents of violence. Hundreds of pastors were in jail for various periods on charges of enticing conversions.

Congress to Sangh: The Suspicion Lives On

To be fair to the Sangh, charges against the Christians are very old, dating back to the Congress regime while Jawaharlal Nehru was still Prime Minister of India, and a section of his party was raising a red flag against the Christians, accusing them of land grab and body snatching in the shape of illicit conversions in Dalit and tribal areas.

A senior leader of his Congress party and chief minister of the large Central Provinces, Pandit Ravi Shankar Shukla defied Nehru and set up the quasi-judicial Niyogi commission to probe the work of Christian missionaries in tribal areas.

Its notorious report is the mother of the anti-conversion laws that are now in operation in a dozen states, from Odisha to Arunachal Pradesh to Gujarat.

In the 1990s, the RSS began its campaign against landholdings by the Muslim community, especially their mosques, alleging that almost every one of them was built on the ruins of temples demolished by marauding hordes from the western borders. The 500-year-old Babri mosque in Ayodhya was demolished in 1992. Last year, PM Modi consecrated the temple to Lord Rama.

Islam has had an almost 1,200-year presence in north India—and came to Kerala in the south within decades of its founding. A mosque can be found in every cluster of India’s 400,000 major villages, other than perhaps the smaller states of the northeast such as Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya, and Arunachal.

Manipur, site of the ongoing bloody persecution of the tribal Kuki-Zo population, has an endemic Meitei-speaking Muslim population. Neighbouring Assam, the largest of the eight states the region, has a sizeable Muslim pollution, speaking both Assamese and Bengali; it shares borders with West Bengal in India and the now independent country of Bangladesh.

In this period, mosques, madrasas, idgahs and burial grounds across the country have been managed by local Waqf, or Auqaf, which is a sort of trust with roots in Islamic canons.

The Christian church has no such canons, and its community no such faith-based customs, though well-off families have donated land to their favourite church in the village or town.

This was the case in ancient Kerala, where the neighbourhood church may well be on a plot of land donated by the local rich patron. Even in this writer’s East Delhi parish, the community contributed handsomely to build the St Teresa church, a small pearl of a structure.

After the advent of the Portuguese in Kerala and Goa, and later the British rule after 1857, there were leases of crown lands in cantonments, metropolitan areas, and larger villages. Even as lease, the colonial government charged substantial lease fees, as records show.

After independence, every new church or institution has been built on land bought in the open market, so to say, or in government auction for schools and hospitals. Unlike the waqfs, now supervised by a central government organisation set up by an Act of parliament, and major Sikh gurdwaras in Punjab, Christian properties do not have a centralised ownership or oversight pattern.

Hindu religious properties too, have a complex ownership pattern. There is at least one, if not more, temple in every village. In several southern states, Devasthanam boards manage properties of the large temples. All local temples and their institutions are owned by local people, and not by the government, as is sometimes claimed.]

A Struggle for Survival, Not Supremacy

In recent years, Christian groups have had to struggle to get licences to receive foreign donations. Most major groups, including Caritas of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India, have lost their Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) licenses.

However, there is no government control on the finances of temples, or “Hundis” money vaults, as they are known. Even conspiracy theorists do not quote a figure of the wealth of the temples, other than saying it is several times the national GDP.

The Catholic “wealth” was usually talked as bazaar gossip.

A former president of the now 106-year-old All India Catholic Union, first said the Catholic Church had land more than that held by the Indian Navy. The late Prof Remy Denis, a well-known mathematician of the country, however never cited the source of the figure he had quoted. The ripple died down within a few weeks.

The church indeed faces questions from within. Accusations of alienation of land were made against former Syro Malabar church head Cardinal Alencherry. There are many other controversies in the diocese of Madras Mylapore, for instance. The non-Catholic Churches, including those following the Anglican, Methodist, and Baptist, traditions are mired in allegations of corruption and alienation of properties.

Many prime properties have been usurped by land sharks, and even by local governments. Even in Delhi, two ancient Christian cemeteries now have scores of apartments and thousands of residents, only a few of them Christians.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to buy land for new churches. And even more difficult to get government subsidised land for schools and colleges.

A current and present danger is that the 99-year leases given to major structures during the colonial British regime are now running out; only a handful of them are renewed.

Some of these properties, including some famous Anglican Churches and colleges, are in the midst of metropolitan residential and commercial sectors. Land sharks have their eyes on these properties and state governments have already started drooling, if not actually starting the process of grabbing the plum plots of land.

Christmas lunches with Mr Modi may not be of much use, then.

(John Dayal is a writer and activist. He is a former President of the 102-year-old All India Catholic Union. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)