By Sharanya Gopinathan

A video that’s been making the rounds on social media of a priest’s frankly creepy sermon in Kerala has broken records in being disgusting.

The priest begins his address by saying that when he sees some women in church approaching the altar for communion, he feels like throwing them out or leaving the church himself (wish he would) because of the clothes that they wear. The clothes in question? Jeans and pants, shirts and banians. He mocks women in jeans by saying that they wear indecent clothes and come to church pretending to be holier than Mary, and that instead of receiving blessings, women dressed like this would be cursed by god.

He goes on to discuss the three ways in which Satan changes the salwar-kameez (called a churidar in Kerala), an outfit that meets with his approval when it isn’t given to the devil for alteration. Firstly, Satan has thrown the dupatta away causing women to walk in a manner that suggests, to nobody in the world except this priest, that everyone must look at them. Second, Satan cuts the slit of the top up to a point that the priest says he doesn’t want to mention. And finally, Satan makes the pants as tight as a banian.

After dissing Satan’s skills as a tailor, he goes on to talk with much sympathy about boys who have approached him to complain about the sinful thoughts they had upon seeing women in jeans outside the church, and how evil it is of women to tempt boys and provoke them into sin by the clothes they wear. He then says that the Bible recommends that women who do this should have a rock tied to their neck and be drowned in the sea.

He finishes up with two family stories. One was to vilify a mother who dressed her daughter in clothes that the priest didn’t approve of, which he therefore automatically labels as a bid by the mother to get her daughter attention from strangers. The second was an anecdote about a scene that took place at an abortion clinic. Upon meeting a family seen at an abortion clinic, he found that a brother had impregnated his older sister because she wore “knickers” (a Malayalam word for shorts I guess) at home, and therefore he couldn’t stop himself from having sex with her when his parents went to work.

The only good thing about this video is how fed up and irritated all the women in the audience look. The whole speech is in Malayalam, but you can watch it here if you want. It was originally aired on Shalom TV.