Nepal: A huge carnage in honor of Gadhimai

To obtain her protection and to shield themselves from evil, her worshipers gather in Bariyapur, in the south of the country and offer her hundreds of thousands of animal sacrifices. In the last edition, in 2009, some 300,000 animals perished, mostly pigs, goats, chickens and pigeons, but also mice, rats, roosters, ducks and buffalo.

This year, the greatest ritual sacrifice in the world to be held in one place (note: there are even more sheep killed throughout the Muslim world for the feast of Aid-el-Kebir), this enormous sacrifice took place on November 28 and 29, transforming the city of Bariyapur into a giant, roofless slaughterhouse. The worldwide media insist mainly on the role of the animal defenders to try to forbid this “festival of Gadhimai”.

Former actresses such as Brigitte Bardot in France and Joanna Lumley in Great Britain have spoken out, petitions are being signed, and the country’s authorities are being accused for closing their eyes to such carnage… But it remains that this ritual of mass sacrifice is above all destined to quench an idol’s thirst for blood, since all these victims are decapitated and offered to the goddess Gadhimai, who is supposed to be appeased by the shedding of animal blood.

Commentary:

Such sacrifices lost their meaning 2000 years ago. God accepted such holocausts from Abraham or Jacob only because they prefigured the sacrifice that was one day to replace them. The prophet Samuel, after the Law of Moses was promulgated, announced:

Doth the Lord desire holocausts and victims, and not rather that the voice of the Lord should be obeyed? For obedience is better than sacrifices: and to hearken rather than to offer the fat of rams.

(I Sam. 15:22)

One day, when the time had come, the perfect sacrifice, that allied the sacrifice of obedience with the greatness of the victim, would be accomplished and take the place of all other creatures:

For it is impossible that with the blood of oxen and goats sin should be taken away. Wherefore, when he cometh into the world he saith: Sacrifice and oblation thou wouldest not: but a body thou hast fitted to me. Holocausts for sin did not please thee. Then said I: Behold I come: in the head of the book it is written of me: that I should do thy will, O God.

(Heb. 10:4-7)

The Church has just entered into the season of Advent, a liturgical time that prepares Christmas, the feast in honor of the Son of God’s entry into this world through the mystery of His Incarnation. The work of the Messiah culminated in His redeeming sacrifice, “He who delivered Himself for us, an oblation and a sacrifice to God for an odor of sweetness” (Eph. 5:2). He came to save all men, those who lie “in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Ps. 106:14), in order to deliver them “from pagan idols that are demons” (Ps. 95:5).

More eloquent than the blood of Abel, Jesus Christ is the mediator of the new Covenant that renders all the honors rendered to Gadhimai vain.