The Advocate

Eight Hundred Incidents and One Question for India's Supreme Court

On July 15, two justices of India's Supreme Court sat down with a set of numbers that have been waiting four years for a verdict.

The petition in front of Justice P. S. Narasimha and Justice Alok Aradhe was filed by Rev. Dr. Peter Machado, the Catholic Archbishop of Bangalore, joined by the Evangelical Fellowship of India and the National Solidarity Forum. Its claim is blunt: Christians in India face a pattern of organized vigilante violence and hate speech, the attacks cluster around Christmas, Easter and Good Friday, and the state is not doing enough to stop them.

The numbers in the filing are hard to sit with. More than 800 documented incidents of violence against Christians in 2025 alone. Another 285 in the first six months of 2026. When the case began, in the middle of 2022, the count for a single month was 57.

India's constitution seems to settle this. Article 25 promises every citizen the freedom to profess, practice and propagate religion. So why has this case dragged on since 2022, and why might the government be right that the Supreme Court should be careful here?

Everyone Says Arizona Saved the Confessional. Read the Holding. It Did Something Larger.

A unanimous Arizona Supreme Court did not rule that confession is privileged. It ruled that no judge or jury may ask whether a clergy member read his own doctrine correctly. That is a much larger rule.

Engraving of a gavel at rest on its block beside a bound volume of case reports and a furled document tied with a crimson ribbon.

A Texas Judge Just Declined to Take the Posters Down. He Did Not Say They Were Lawful.

A denied temporary restraining order is not a ruling on the merits. The hearing that matters is August 17, and the standard at stake is one Texas Christians wrote for themselves.

New York Did Not Lose in Court. It Agreed to Wait.

The July 30 order protecting four orders of Catholic nuns was entered by consent. That distinction is the whole story.

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