Savio Saldanha
DOI : 10.5281/zenodo.20749131
Date: 18-06-2026
A few years ago, I was a Jesuit novice
teaching catechism in a small parish near Belgaum. It was the kind of class
where you learn far more than you teach. One afternoon I was going around the
room asking each child to tell me the meaning of her own name, expecting the
usual answers — gift of God, light, little flower. One
girl was very quiet. When I gently pressed, she said, almost as a fact of life
and not a wound, “Nakusha.” We both knew it meant unwanted in Marathi.
I did not know what to do with that silence. I had walked in to teach them that God loves them without condition, that they are precious in his eyes. But before I could say a word, her own name had already said something else. The Gospel I wanted to proclaim arrived a few seconds too late. Nakusha had already been spoken. That moment has stayed with me through my formation, and it has become the heart of my Jesuit vocation. I want to share it here, not as an academic exercise, nor for any credit, but as the question it actually is: what does the Church say to a child whose own name calls her unwanted?
A
Campaign That Tried to Undo a Name
Nakusha is a real name, given mostly
in rural Maharashtra — my home state — to girls born when the family wanted a
son. In October 2011, the district administration of Satara, working with local
health officials and a girl-child welfare project, found close to 280 girls
registered under this name or its variants (Dagadi, Dhondi — both meaning
“stone”). They organised a public ceremony where the girls themselves, some as
young as toddlers and some in their late teens, were invited to choose new
names. Many chose names that meant the opposite of what they had been called:
beloved, powerful, true. It was, by every account, a moving day, and it is
still cited as a small but real victory for the dignity of the girl child in
India.
But a renaming ceremony, however
beautiful, does not change the conditions that produced the first name. India’s
sex ratio at birth has improved over the last decade through sustained public
effort, yet it remains skewed below the natural ratio, and in Haryana — one of
the states that had made the most visible progress — it actually slipped
backward again in 2024. The economists Ashwini Deshpande and Apoorva Gupta published
a 2020 study that still uses the word “Nakusha” as a working term, not a
historical curiosity, to describe how son preference shapes which children get
fed, schooled, and invested in. The name may now be rarer in official records.
The reality it named has not gone away. This is why the question is not history
for me. It is still happening.
That is the question this reflection tries to answer, and it unfolds in five simple moves. First, Amoris Laetitia teaches that every child is loved without condition and that women and men share equal dignity as the image of God. Second, naming a girl “unwanted” inscribes rejection into her very identity — this is the wound. Third, the Bible already knows this pattern: in the Book of Hosea, God commands names of rejection upon Israel’s children, and then reverses them. Fourth, if God does this for an unfaithful people, the same logic applies with even greater force to an innocent child. Fifth, the Church’s response cannot stop at theology — it has to become a pastoral practice: naming, accompanying, and changing the conditions that produce the wound in the first place.
Amoris
Laetitia
Pope Francis’s 2016 exhortation on
the family gives us three texts that matter here. In paragraphs 54–55, he
insists that women possess full and equal dignity with men as bearers of God’s
image, and he names outright the many forms of discrimination still directed at
women and girls. In paragraph 166, he writes that children are loved by their
parents even before they arrive — love that asks nothing in return, that is not
conditioned on what the child can offer. And in paragraph 170, he says that
every child has a place in God’s heart from eternity, quoting the prophet
Jeremiah: before I formed you in the womb I knew you (Jer 1:5).
None of this is new to Francis. It stands on ground the Church has held since the Second Vatican Council, which in Gaudium et Spes (no. 29) declared that any discrimination based on sex is contrary to God’s design, and on John Paul II’s 1988 letter Mulieris Dignitatem, which grounded women’s dignity explicitly in the creation account. What Amoris Laetitia adds is not a new doctrine but a pastoral instinct: it does not only proclaim that dignity, it asks how the Church walks with families where that dignity has been wounded. That, exactly, is what I am trying to do with the Nakusha question — and to see why, it helps to look honestly at what a name like this actually does to a child.
The
Wound Goes Deep
A name like Nakusha does not hurt
only the feelings. It works at three levels. It wounds identity itself: the
girl is not told she did something unwanted, she is told she is unwanted, from
her very first day, the one word everyone will call her for the rest of her
life. It wounds the capacity to receive love: if your first experience of
family is conditional — I would have loved you if you had been a boy —
it becomes harder, later, to believe in a love that asks nothing of you. And it
wounds faith before faith can even begin: how do you tell a child that God
loves her without condition, when her own parents — the first face of love she
ever knew — named her by her unworthiness? The name gets there before the
Gospel does. That was exactly what I watched happen in that catechism class.
Scripture, it turns out, has met this exact wound before — not in Belgaum, but some twenty-eight centuries earlier, in the household of a prophet named Hosea.
Hosea:
A Name Reversed
The Old Testament prophet Hosea is
asked by God to give his own children prophetic names: Jezreel, Lo-Ruhamah
(“not pitied”), Lo-Ammi (“not my people”). These names are a sign of Israel’s
broken covenant — judgment spoken over an unfaithful nation. But the story does
not end there. In chapter 2, God reverses the names: I will say to Not-My-People,
You are my people (Hos 2:23). And in chapter 3, God commands Hosea to love
his wife again, even after betrayal — a second act of love that refuses to let
the first failure be final.
I want to be precise about what this analogy is, and is not. It is structural, not moral. Israel deserved judgment for breaking the covenant; the Nakusha girl has done absolutely nothing wrong. I am not comparing her to an unfaithful nation, and I am not suggesting that God somehow permits or authors the wound of her naming so that a reversal can later happen. That would make God the author of cruelty, and nothing in the text says that. What the text does give us is a pattern: a name of rejection is spoken, and God refuses to let it be the last word. I want to be careful here, because reversal language can slide quietly into making the wound sound useful, as though the suffering was worth it for what came after. It was not, and it is not. The reversal does not give the wound a purpose; it simply refuses to let the wound have the final say over who this child is.
From
the Lesser to the Greater
This is where the logic, for me,
becomes hard to escape. If God reverses the names of rejection spoken over a
people who had genuinely broken faith with him, how much more readily — how
much faster, how much more completely — will God restore the name and dignity
of a child who is entirely innocent? Theologians call this reasoning a
fortiori, “from the lesser to the greater”: what holds true in the harder
case holds even more true in the easier one. Saint Paul uses exactly this logic
in Romans: if we were reconciled to God while we were still his enemies, how
much more, now that we are reconciled, will we be saved (Rom 5:10). The same
logic applies here. If mercy reaches a faithless nation, it reaches an innocent
child first, and more fully.
This logic does not stop at birth. Amoris Laetitia 170, quoting Jeremiah, insists that God’s knowledge and love of a child precede even conception. So if God restores the name of a girl who was born and called unwanted, God certainly does not abandon the child who was never even allowed to be born because she was a girl. The same eternal love that the prophet describes — known before the womb — reaches her too.
Renaming,
Accompaniment, and a Way Out
None of this matters much if it
stays on the page. So what would it actually look like, in an ordinary parish
in Maharashtra, to put this logic into practice? A pastoral response has to
begin where the wound is named, but it cannot stop at a beautiful ceremony. I
propose a simple renaming rite — not a second baptism, but a blessing, in the
spirit of the Church’s existing rituals of blessing a name. The community
gathers, reads Hosea’s words of reversal, reads Jeremiah’s words about being
known before birth, and says clearly to the child: we receive you, we name
you Priya — beloved. I have suggested the name Priya deliberately. It is a
word shared across Hindu, Christian, and Muslim communities in India, and it
carries the same resonance as the Song of Songs, as Hosea’s restored
mercy, as the voice at Jesus’ baptism: you are my beloved. The healing
should come from the Holy Spirit working within the culture, in its own
language, not as something imported from outside it.
A ceremony like this can change what
a community says over a child. It cannot, by itself, undo a habit built over
years. In the actual 2011 campaign, one father was reported calling his newly
renamed daughter by her old name a week later, simply out of habit, then
catching himself with an awkward smile. That is not a failure of the rite. It
is evidence that a name changes in a register long before it changes in the
heart, and the second change takes much longer than an afternoon. The moral
theologian Alain Thomasset, commenting on the same chapter of Amoris
Laetitia that speaks of moral education, makes a point I find essential
here: virtue is not learned by being told the rule once. It is learned the way
you learn to play a sport well — not just knowing it is forbidden to foul, but
acquiring, over time and within a community that practices it together, the
taste and the habit of the good. Changing a culture of son preference will take
the same patience: formation before marriage, accompaniment of mothers during
pregnancy, and ongoing catechesis that keeps repeating, year after year, that a
daughter is gift and not burden.
I also want to be honest about what
the parents in these situations are carrying — and that includes the mothers,
who are very often under the same pressure their daughters will inherit. But it
is worth saying clearly that women are not only the ones who carry this
pressure; they are very often the ones who break it. The 2011 Satara campaign
itself began at the suggestion of a local social activist, Sudha Kankaria, who
pushed district officials to draw up the list of Nakusha girls in the first
place. I do not think blame helps anyone here. Many of these families are not
cruel; they are frightened. The fear of dowry, the shame a community attaches
to “too many daughters,” the very real economic pressure of marrying off two or
three girls — these are not invented anxieties. They are heavy and they are
real. But naming that fear onto a newborn does not solve it; it only passes the
weight from the parent’s shoulders onto the child’s identity, and the child
carries it for life.
The way out has to address both ends at once. On the spiritual side, this means the parish-level formation and renaming rite already described, accompaniment of both daughter and mother, and the conviction — taught patiently, not imposed in one sermon — that a girl’s worth has nothing to do with what she can be married off for. On the social and governmental side, this means real enforcement of laws already on the books: the Dowry Prohibition Act and the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, which forbids sex determination before birth; it means making use of, and pushing local administrations to properly fund, schemes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao and conditional savings programmes for the girl child, so that a daughter becomes a visible economic asset to her family rather than only a looming cost. None of these instruments has worked as well as it should. Enforcement of the sex-determination ban has loosened in several states even as the technology to evade it has become easier to access, and an early government audit of Beti Bachao Beti Padhao found that more than half its budget had gone to advertising rather than direct support for girls. Naming a law is not the same as enforcing it, and any pastoral advocacy worth doing has to keep pressing on that gap rather than simply pointing to the law’s existence. It also means dioceses and Catholic social bodies working alongside these government efforts rather than separately from them, the way the Church already collaborates with girl-child organisations in several Indian states. James’s letter puts the choice bluntly: if you say “go in peace” to someone in need and do nothing for their actual situation, what good is that (Jas 2:16)? A purely spiritual solution, without addressing the dowry and the poverty behind the fear, would be exactly that — words without help.
God
Already Knew Her Name
Even with all of this in place — the
rite, the formation, the advocacy — it helps to step back and remember that
none of it is actually new. Scripture had already settled the deeper question
long before any ceremony tried to catch up to it. When God first brings the
animals to Adam in the garden, the man’s naming of them is an act of
relationship and care, not domination (Gen 2:19–20) — which tells us that
naming carries real moral weight; it is never a neutral act. To the prophet
Isaiah, God says of Israel: I have called you by name, you are mine (Is
43:1) — the divine name arrives before, and outlasts, any name a human being
gives. To Jeremiah, God says that he knew him before he was formed in the womb
(Jer 1:5) — the very verse Amoris Laetitia 170 borrows. And in the Book
of Revelation, God promises the faithful a new name, known only to the one who
receives it, a name that no human rejection can ever touch or cancel (Rev
2:17).
Put together, these four texts say
something simple and very large: every girl ever called Nakusha was already
named by God before her parents ever spoke a word over her, already known
before she was formed, and is already promised a name that will outlast every
name of rejection she has carried. The renaming ceremony the Church can offer
is not an invention. It is simply the community catching up, out loud, to what
God has already done in silence.
Ignatian spirituality has one more
thing to offer here, and it is not a technique but a habit of attention.
Ignatius taught that God is found in the concrete and the particular — in this
child, this family’s fear, this community’s silence — not in abstract talk
about “the problem of patriarchy.” Discernment begins by noticing what a name,
a fear, or a decision actually does to the heart: does it bring consolation, an
opening toward life and trust, or does it bring desolation, a closing in on
shame and despair? For the parent paralysed by the cost of a dowry, real
accompaniment does not minimise the fear — it helps distinguish the fear, which
is legitimate and deserves a real answer, from the despair that turns a
daughter’s name into a verdict. And for anyone trying to respond pastorally to
this wound, the same discernment applies inward: is my response coming from
love for this particular child, or from an urge to fix things quickly and move
on? Ignatius would ask us to sit with that question before we act.
I did not write this because I
needed an academic exercise to finish in Paris. I wrote it because of the one
girl in a Belgaum classroom who, years ago, told me without flinching that
their own names meant unwanted — and because nothing I have studied since has
answered that sentence more simply than Hosea already did, nearly three
thousand years earlier: rejection does not get the last word, not for an
unfaithful nation, and certainly not for a child who did nothing but be born a
girl. The Church does not need to invent that mercy, though it has not always
spoken it loudly enough, or to everyone who needed to hear it. What it needs to
do, starting now is say it out loud, in time, before the wound speaks louder
than the Gospel does.
I do not know if either of those
girls was ever told, the way Maharashtra tried to tell 280 others in 2011, that
she could choose a different name for herself. I hope someone has, by now. But
more than that, I hope for a day when no girl, in India or anywhere, needs to
be renamed at all — because no one ever called her unwanted to begin with.
Until that day comes, the least the Church can do is keep saying, clearly and
often: you are Priya. You always were.
Bibliography
Scripture
Hosea
1–3; Isaiah 43:1; Jeremiah 1:5; Genesis 1:27; Genesis 2:19–20; Galatians 3:28;
Romans 5:10; James 2:16; Revelation 2:17.
Magisterial
and Church documents
Pope
Francis, Amoris Laetitia (19 March 2016), §§54–55, 166, 170.
Second
Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes (1965), §29.
Pope
John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem (1988).
Catechism
of the Catholic Church, §§1272, 2156.
Theological and academic sources
Alain Thomasset, SJ, “L’éducation morale comme
apprentissage des vertus,” Revue d’Éthique et de Théologie Morale,
2019/HS, pp. 129–146.
Alasdair
MacIntyre, After Virtue (French ed., Après la vertu).
On
the Nakusha naming practice and the 2011 Satara renaming campaign
“‘Nakusha’
campaign successful as 280 girls renamed in Maharashtra,” DNA India,
October 2011.
“End
‘Nakusha’ campaign: Girls no more unwanted,” Zee News, 22 October 2011.
Freny
Manecksha, “Renaming Nakusa,” India Together, 6 September 2011.
Ashwini
Deshpande and Apoorva Gupta, “Nakusha? Son Preference, Resource Concentration
and Gender Gaps in Education,” Working Paper, 2020, discussed in Ideas for
India.
On
sex ratio and government policy in India
Ministry
of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India, Women and
Men in India reports; National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), 2019–21;
reporting on the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme and the Pre-Conception and
Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, 1994; parliamentary and audit
reporting on Beti Bachao Beti Padhao budget allocation; state-wise
sex-ratio-at-birth data on the 2024 decline in Haryana.
