Come April 10, and Pope Benedict XVI will be presenting on the occasion of Good Friday meditations and prayers scripted by Thomas Menamparampil, the Archbishop of Guwahati. This is the first time this special task has been assigned to an Indian and the the second time to someone outside the Vatican; after Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong.

“I am definitely surprised to get this special assignment from the Vatican. I consider it a rare honour which I want to share with all my fellow Indians, irrespective of caste, creed and religion,” Archbishop Menamparampil told The Indian Express here on Sunday.

“While I am the first Indian to have been given this task, I have woven the meditations and prayers around the ahimsa mantra of Mahatma Gandhi and the ‘nishkama karma’ of the great Assamese medieval saint-reformer Sankaradeva,” the Archbishop said.

The Archbishop, who was the first to head the Guwahati diocese created in 1992, had attracted the attention of Pope Benedict when he was asked to speak on behalf of the Catholic Churches of Asia at the Synod in Rome last year. “I think I left an impression during that presentation,” Menamparampil (72), who is currently the chairman of the Bishops’ Conference of Asia, said.

The meditations and prayers that the Archbishop has scripted for the Pope will cover a two-hour long ceremony, and have already been emailed to the Papal secretariat for translation into Italian, Spanish, French, German and other European languages. The script, as the tradition goes, covers the 14 scenes of Jesus’s painful journey to death through meditations and prayers.