INDIA: A lack of Roman Catholic priests in North America and across Europe has resulted in the "outsourcing" of prayers to Indian clergymen.
American, Canadian and some European priests have been sending requests for special remembrance services for deceased relatives, prayers for newborns or for the peace of the soul of a deceased relative to Catholic priests in India, especially those in the southern state of Kerala which has the largest concentration of Christians in the country.
The "intention" or reason for the special prayers for overseas "clients" are then announced at what have become known as the "Dollar Masses" in churches across Kerala, where services are conducted in the local language.
Around 2 per cent of India's population of over one billion is Christian, of which the majority is Catholic.
According to the Asian Age newspaper, hundreds of requests were made each month for these special prayers through either the Vatican, local bishops or other religious bodies, but rarely ever directly to the priests themselves.
Many prayer requests arrived via e-mail, a sign of increasing dependency on information technology even in the ecclesiastical realm.
Whilst Rs 40 (72 cents) is a respectable donation in Kerala's churches for special prayers, the requests from overseas came with $5 offering.
Catholic priests whose monthly wages averaged around $55.55 are the beneficiaries of this largesse, supplementing their incomes from the "business activity" generated abroad.
Outsourcing of secretarial and accounting activity to cheaply-operated Indian call centres and computer stations by Western credit card companies, banks, airlines, lawyers and doctors is becoming a major political issue in countries like the US, Canada and Britain. Critics there accuses their governments of perpetuating unemployment by exporting jobs.