HVK Archives: The heretic of Colombo
The heretic of Colombo - The Guardian Weekend
Jonathan Steele
()
5 July 1997
Title: The heretic of Colombo
Author: Jonathan Steele
Publication: The Guardian Weekend
Date: July 5, 1997
Father Tissa Balasuriya has spent half a century in the service of the
Roman Catholic Church. Now he has become the first priest to be
excommunicated over a doctrinal issue. What has this Sri Lanka social
worker done to enrage the Vatican so much? Jonathan Steele reports
The white-haired gentleman shuffles across his humid office, insistent on
adjusting the fan and giving his visitor some moving air. Can this be the
fellow whom Pope John Paul II has effectively declared to be the greatest
living internal threat to the Roman Catholic Church? "I am not sure why
I'm seen in that way myself," the 72-year-old sighs. "One can only
speculate." Father Tissa Balasuriya seems too soft to be a heretic.
Until recently, Sri Lanka's most celebrated resident was Arthur C Clarke,
the science fiction guru who has become a virtual recluse in his Colombo
home. Now, at least locally, Father Tissa's fame rivals Clarke's. For
earlier this year this social worker and intellectual became the first
priest to be excommunicated by the Vatican on an issue of doctrine since an
American Jesuit was made an example of in the early Fifties.
Most people would assume that Catholicism faces its greatest challenges in
the world's most developed countries. Doctrinal anguish over
contraception, divorce and abortion - as well as the wider collapse of
religious observance that comes with the onrush of consumer capitalism - is
spreading from North America and Western Europe into the Pope's own Eastern
Europe. So why should the Pontiff divert his ire to an Asian theologian in
a small and largely Buddhist country? "I suppose he's worried about
permissiveness. There's the issue of women priests, and the concept of
mission is changing,' Father Tissa ventures modestly.
Although it has been well-publicised in Sri Lanka and regularly covered in
the specialist Catholic media in Europe and the US, Father Tissa's case has
aroused surprisingly little general attention. The Pope's clamp-down on
Latin America's liberation theologians a decade or more ago made a bigger
noise, though it was less severe. The remoteness of Sri Lanka, coupled
with the smaller numbers of Asian Catholics, may go some way towards
explaining why this should be. Nevertheless, these factors have done
nothing to make the Vatican's desire to insist on strict orthodoxy any less
intense in Asia than it has been in Latin America.
Symbols of heterodoxy adorn Father Tissa's room. Above the bookcase a
crucifix is flanked by a wooden Buddhist prayer-wheel and a sculpture of
Hindu gods. On one wall hangs a poster of the Madonna, painted with a
strong African face. They are a constant reminder of Mary And Human
Liberation, the book which led to his excommunication. Father Tissa's
speech often breaks into impish chortles. He enjoys being a tease.
Challenging the line that priests must be men because all 12 apostles were
men, he once asked in an essay whether the same logic did not require
Catholic priests to be "Jewish and circumcised". At a church conference in
Sheffield in 1981 he stunned the audience by speculating that the Vatican
would one day have a woman Pope.
Yet this lifelong servant of the church is a deeply serious man whose
Christianity is infused with a profound anger over social and economic
injustice. His radical theology stems partly from what he sees as the
church's history of condoning colonialism, its tendency to doctrinal
arrogance, and the excessive focus on individual salvation. Now he has a
new source of indignation in the Vatican's arcane procedures for handling
dissent, which, he claims, have violated his rights and threaten others who
try to follow suit.
The central theme of his controversial book is that the Church has
"dehydrated" the "strong, working-class" Mary of the New Testament. Under
the influence of generations of masculine power-holders, it has turned her
into an "obedient, faithful, docile mother", whose perpetual virginity
makes her an impossible role-model for ordinary women. Citing the words of
the Magnificent which Mary utters in the Gospel of Saint Luke after being
told she is to give birth to Jesus Christ ("He bath put down the mighty
from their seats, and exalted them of low degree: he bath filled the hungry
with good things and the rich he bath sent empty away"), Father Tissa says
church traditions have deliberately reduced Mary from being the "disturber
of the comfortable" into the "comforter of the disturbed".
His view that the church must play a role of social activism - the
so-called "option for the poor" - was shared by Latin America's liberation
theologists, but the Asian context makes Balasuriya's position more
intriguing. The Latin Americans, as well as their counterparts among the
priests in the Philippines - some of whom went so far as to take up arms
with guerrilla movements - were working in societies where Roman Catholics
were a majority. In a country where only 8 per cent of the population is
Catholic (70 per cent are Buddhists, 15 per cent Hindus, and 7 per cent
Muslims) Father Tissa says he faces a daily need to rethink Christian dogmas.
Crucially, Father Tissa questions the doctrine of original sin, with its
affirmation that humanity was born alienated from the creator. It's this
key criticism which has stirred up the Vatican's wrath most of all. He
calls this basic tenet of Christianity "offensive to other beliefs",
suggesting that the Immaculate Conception, according to which Mary was
spared original sin, puts her on an impossible pedestal. He also
criticises the Catholic emphasis on baptism, which implies that "whole
generations of entire continents lived and died with a lesser chance of
salvation and is repugnant to the notion of a just and loving God".
If it is to survive in Asia, Father Tissa argues, Christianity has to start
a dialogue with other faiths and present its doctrines on salvation, Jesus
Christ and Mary in a modem context. "The oriental view of history is more
cyclical than linear. In Hinduism and Buddhism, this life is only one
stage in a vast cycle of birth, death and re-birth. The cycle continues
until all reach ultimate liberation in Nirvana or Moksha. In the Christian
view, this life determines one's ultimate and eternal destiny," he wrote in
the offending book.
His book scandalised the keepers of orthodoxy in the Vatican. Since the
collapse of Communism, the church authorities have identified the church's
most dangerous enemy as something called "relativism". Father Tissa's
message appeared to be a classic case of it. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
who chairs the Congregation For The Doctrine Of The Faith (the successor to
the Holy Office of the Inquisition) told the heads of doctrinal commissions
from other parts of the world last year that the uniqueness of Christ
cannot be diluted by notions of him as ,lone religious leader among
others". The Cardinal declared: "The faith, together with its practice,
either comes to us from the Lord through his church and the sacramental
ministry or it does not exist in absolute."
Worried by the popularity of Indian religions, he warned that the
"relativism of Europe and America can get a kind of religious consecration
from India's renunciation of dogma". The Vatican line on Buddhism produced
a fiasco when the Pope visited Sri Lanka two years ago (carefully avoiding
any encounter with Father Tissa). The country's leading Buddhist monks
organised protest demonstrations and refused an invitation to meet the
Pontiff because he had in a recent book described their religion as
"negative" as a result of its "indifference" to the world.
Father Tissa's attack on the "pre-suppositions" of Christian dogma - though
far from new - was equally unacceptable for the Vatican. Drawing
distinctions between the parts of the scriptures directly attributed as
Christ's teachings, unprovable myths such as the creation story, and the
body of doctrine which grew up later as part of church tradition, he claims
the last to be a product of compromise and socio-economic pressures, rather
than part of a seamless web of infallible truth revealed from God.
Two chapters of Mary And Human Liberation attack the standard view of Mary,
reflected in a thousand Renaissance paintings. Although there are few
references to Mary in the scriptures, he claims that by ,,using our
imaginations" we can flesh out her historical life as a "mature, adult
woman". After Christ's birth, she and her husband became political exiles.
Her son grew into a revolutionary, who shared much of his thinking with
his mother. She contested the injustices of the day at Jesus's side and
did not try to hold him back from the risks he, was taking.
In the final days when some of his disciples fled, betrayed, or denied him,
Mary remained faithful. "The predecessors of the apostles and the Popes
did not measure up to the occasion," Father Tissa writes in another typical
sword-thrust. Because of her loyalty and activism, he calls Mary "the first
priest of the new testament".
In the old days, those condemned as heretics were liable to be burnt at the
stake. Before the punitive fire came the chilling ritual of the bell, book
and candle. The symbolic book of life was snapped shut. A candle was
thrown to the ground to mark the extinction of the soul, and a funeral bell
began to toll. Father Tissa's excommunication was less extreme. Cardinal
Ratzinger's Congregation For The Doctrine Of The Faith simply issued a
"notification" to the press that the priest had automatically cut himself
off from the Church because of his published writings.
Although the style was softer, the manner was no less medieval than papal
bannings in the past. Father Tissa's repeated requests to his accusers for
an oral hearing, or even a trial before a panel of other Catholic
theologians, were rejected. Instead, a specially tailored Profession Of
Faith was sent from Rome with instructions to confess and sign. It was
nothing less than a formal recantation of all the arguments he had tried to
raise. "I firmly accept and hold that the Church has no authority
whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women," the confession was to
have stated. Other Catholic dissidents in recent times have been treated
less harshly. The German theologian Hans Kung, the Brazilian Leonardo Boff,
and the American Charles Curran, when they raised similar issues, were only
declared no longer to be Catholic theologians.
Father Tissa's long and fruitless battle to be granted an audience by the
authorities in Rome became a form of mental torture, from which he has not
yet recovered. There is something obsessive about the way this bright-eyed
and lively man regularly interrupts himself to fish out yet another
document from the piles of correspondence with the Vatican that clutter his
desk.
The only consolation is the torrent of sympathy he has had from theological
colleges, priests, and other Catholic professionals around the world. "I
have been excommunicated by one body but incommunicated by the media and
other people. I am experiencing a spirit-filled communion with innumerable
people from six continents. This is a spontaneous, explosive eruption of
solidarity, transcending all frontiers of faith, gender, race, nation and
age," he says. His file of support includes expressions of admiration from
Britain, Ireland, Holland, Austria, the US and the Third World.
The Tablet, the influential Catholic weekly in Britain, has denounced the
Vatican's action and strongly supported Father Tissa's right to be heard,
though it has also run articles criticising his views. "This is not a
private quarrel. The issues affect everyone in societies which are trying
to construct pluralistic frameworks," John Wilkins, its editor, argued in
one of several pieces on the affair.
In spite of the Vatican commandment that he no longer officiate at mass or
any other Catholic celebration, the monastic order of the Oblates of Mary
Immaculate to which Father Tissa has belonged for years has not expelled
him. He carries on working at the Centre For Society And Religion which he
helped to found in 1971.
Not all his supporters agree with his views, or have yet read his book.
Only 600 copies were originally published in English. But the drastic
punishment of excommunication for a man who has been a priest for 50 years,
with a lifetime of service to the church, has turned the matter into an
issue of due process and civil rights. In a booklet for the Asian Human
Rights Commission, Basil Fernando compared Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the
head of the Congregation For The Doctrine Of The Faith, to Andrei
Vyshinsky, the prosecutor in the Stalinist show-trials of the 1930s. The
comparison is far-fetched since the Pope has no Gulags, but it is
undoubtedly true that the end of the Soviet Union has left the Vatican as
the world's last international centre of power which still uses
authoritarian methods to enforce an ideology.
The irony of this whole affair is that Father Tissa's view of Mary as a
political activist is shared by only a small minority of Sri Lankan
Catholics. Visit any of the island's churches and you find a confused
mixture of Catholicism, Hindu and Buddhist religious practice.
The church of St Anthony in Kochchikade stands in Colombo's busy harbour
area less than two miles from Father Tissa's office. Every day thousands
of people drop in to touch or kiss the glass cases containing statues of
Mary and the other saints and plead for favours. Others sit cross-legged on
the floor, gazing in adoration at the replicas. Two lines of railings force
men and women into long separate queues to approach the church's most
sacred item, the "miraculous statue" of St Anthony. "Many of them are
Buddhists since they have no God of their own," says Dudley Fernando, the
church's assistant administrator. "We did a survey two years ago and
counted 20,000 people a day. Tuesdays are considered special. Then it goes
up to 25,000 visitors."
A nun is standing at a counter, handing out pamphlets headed Why Honour
Mary? She seems embarrassed by the materialism of some of the devotions.
"We get people who just want to have a car, or go abroad. They promise to
light candles if they succeed. I have to explain that the secret of getting
favours is to lead a good life. This is the way we should make the vow."
The geographical dispersal of Sri Lanka's Catholics still mirrors the
settlement pattern of the first wave of European colonisers, the
Portuguese. They held a few forts along the island's coastal strip, and
never tried to conquer die capital of the Singhalese longs in the
hill-country around Kandy.
When the fiercely anti-Catholic Dutch reached Ceylon, as the island was
then called, and expelled the Portuguese in 1658, their missionary zeal
spared the other religions but hit their fellow Christians hard. They
closed every Catholic church. But the Catholics' genius at adapting to the
local religious environment through the use of images, the cult of saints,
and magical miracle-worship meant that when the Roman Church was legalised
again with the arrival of the British in the 1790s, it emerged from the
underground almost intact.
>From then onwards missionary work centred on building and running schools.
Though the Anglicans also did their bit, they were outstripped by the
Catholics. Sri Lanka is a rare case of a former British colony where
Catholics outnumber Anglicans by at least ten to one (while the Dutch
Reformed have almost disappeared).
Today Catholicism remains strong among two widely different groups -
low-caste fishermen and their descendants along the coast, as well as
sectors of the country's ruling elite who attended the top Catholic
schools. There are a few exceptions to the geographical rule. Some Tamils
on the tea plantations turned to Catholicism, while in another part of the
hill country the village of Wahakotte boasts an unusually large church. It
serves a rare community of Catholics who fled inland from the advancing
Dutch in the 17th century.
I arrived in Wahakotte at the time of the annual festival of St Anthony and
found another rich fusion of Catholic and Buddhist symbols. The Bishop of
Kandy was due to celebrate mass at a special altar set up in the porch of
the church so that the thousands of pilgrims spread out on the grass could
watch him. Bare-chested Buddhist drummers wearing loose white turbans led
the Bishop's parade, while devotees prepared mountains of pink and white
lotuses to decorate the chariot that was to carry the statue of the saint.
A couple in designer jeans who had driven up from Colombo for the festival
wore little bracelets of white string tied round their wrists, just as
Buddhists do. "We put them on at Easter. Each one is the exact length of
Jesus's body when he was taken from the Cross," the young man explained.
How long do you wear them? "Until they break," he laughed.
This odd amalgam of customs provides one clue to Father Tissa's revolt.
Long before his theological dispute with the Vatican, he was battling
against conservatives at home. His struggle for a more modern view of Mary
stems from a desire to see the Sri Lankan church less riddled with
pietistic devotion and primitive superstitious practices and more concerned
with social issues. He wants an open dialogue with Asian religions, not
just a merger of symbols.
A child of the elite himself (his father had a relatively well-paid job as
travelling pharmacist on the government payroll), Tissa went to a
prestigious Catholic school and, after university, spent six years in Rome
studying philosophy and theology for the priesthood. On return to Sri
Lanka, he was a schoolteacher and later the rector of Aquinas University
College.
It was the 1971 youth rebellion that changed his life. Sri Lanka's
best-known writer, Michael Ondaatje, on a trip back from his Canadian home,
described the insurgency in his book Running In The Family. Roughly 80,000
mainly rural teenagers rose up in "a strange mixture of innocence and
determination and anarchy, making home-made bombs with nails and scraps of
metal, and at the same time delighted and proud of their uniforms of blue
trousers with a stripe down the side, and tennis shoes. Some had never
worn tennis shoes before."
Led by students and unemployed new graduates, the insurgents called for
land reform and jobs. Known as the JVP (Janatha Vimukhti Peramuna, or
People's Liberation Front) they seized a score of police stations, raided
hundreds of houses for weapons, and came close to taking control of several
regions. Within three weeks the insurrection was brutally suppressed,
leaving 8,000 dead and twice as many in prison.
The rebellion - and the ferocity with which it was repressed by a
government that called itself socialist - prompted one of Tissa's mentors,
Bishop Leo Nanayakkara, to resign from the prestigious diocese of Kandy and
move to Badulla, one of Sri Lanka's poorest areas. Tissa himself resigned
from Aquinas College and set up the Centre For Society And Religion. He
revived a journal called Social Justice and turned it into a campaigning
showcase for human rights protection and economic reform.
His work with the poor began in 1976 after Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the
world's first woman Prime Minister, forcibly removed a community of Colombo
street-dwellers who were living along the route which heads of government
coming for the Non-Aligned Movement's summit conference would have to take.
They were dumped in a marsh. Father Tissa began to help them organise to
demand lighting, water, schools and the allocation of plots of land for
each family.
Known as Summit City (Sammanthranapura), the area still only has a few
outdoor water pipes and communal toilets, but it is vastly better than when
it started. Father Tissa loves nothing better than to pick up his umbrella
against the sun and take visitors around this and other shanty-towns where
his Centre runs schools. Adoring people wave as his familiar figure passes
by.
A second JVP uprising in 1988 and 1989 was even more cruelly repressed.
Some 60,000 were killed and 40,000 others "disappeared", according to
Father Oswald Firth, the new director of the Centre For Society And
Religion. "If Jesus were born here, he would probably have been someone
who was 'disappeared' or killed. He was a young revolutionary," he says.
Father Tissa takes a similar line. He rejects the JVP's violence, but says
the "mature, adult" Mary, whom he admires from the New Testament, reminds
him of Sri Lankan mothers and sisters searching for news of loved ones.
He works closely with the Sri Lankan Civil Rights Movement but is not
directly involved with the civil war which is pitting the government
against the Tamil Tiger guerrillas in the north of the island around
Jaffna. Other Catholic clergy who live among the Tamils have tried to
safeguard civilians and refugees from both Tiger and government army
reprisals.
Father Tissa's effort "to realise the values of the gospel in society" -
"it's a conversion to righteousness around issues rather than a conversion
to the Church" - has never been welcomed by the Sri Lankan hierarchy. They
took up the cudgels against his book when it appeared in 1990, long before
referring it to the Vatican. Bishop Malcolm Ranjith, the secretary of the
Catholic Bishops Conference of Sri Lanka, ordered him not to reprint it,
sell it on church premises, or translate it into Singhala, where it would
have a much wider impact.
The book only became an issue in the Vatican in 1994, when the Congregation
For The Doctrine Of The Faith demanded Father Tissa retract it. Rejecting
the special Profession Of Faith they wanted him to sign, he offered to sign
the more liberal Credo of Paul VI with a clause saying he did so "in the
context of theological development and Church practice since Vatican II and
the freedom and responsibility of Christians and theological searchers
under Canon Law". The Second Vatican Council had called for a more open
attitude to other religions and established some decentralisation in the
church by leaving more issues to local colleges of bishops.
Father Tissa wrote a 55-page explanation of his views and a rebuttal of the
criticisms, but the Vatican said neither this nor his qualified offer to
sign the Credo of Paul VI was acceptable. After being summoned to the
Apostolic Nuncio in Sri Lanka in December and warned that excommunication
was imminent, Father Tissa wrote to the Pope to ask for a hearing in which
"the accusers are not also the judges". Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the
Vatican Secretary of State, wrote back to say John Paul II "personally
approved" the steps taken against him.
In spite of this, Father Tissa continues to give the Pope the benefit of
the doubt. "I don't think the Pope has seen all the documents. My respect
for him is such that I don't think he would act like this if he had," he
says. He warns darkly of manipulation in the Vatican at a time when an
ageing Pope is weak and ill. "He shouldn't allow justice in the Church to
be hijacked by a small group." Although forbidden to say Mass, he declares
defiantly: "I live my mass every day, for the development of Asian
theology, for the rights of women in the church and society, and for human
rights within the church." Provided he gets a hearing or trial from
"independent theologians", he will ,Accept their verdict if they consider
his book is in error.
One of the few Sri Lankan priests who has followed the case closely and
takes a neutral stance is Dalston Forbes, a fellow member of the Oblates of
Mary Immaculate, who has known Tissa since they studied in Rome 5 0 years
ago. He criticises the Sri Lankan bishops, and particularly Bishop
Ranjith, for mishandling the affair. "It was a psychological wound for a
senior priest to be attacked like that by a junior bishop. Everything
springs from that," he says. According to Father Forbes, Tissa's book is
weak on several grounds. Its study of revelation is insufficiently
nuanced. Its statements on faith are hasty. It caricatures the concept of
original sin and overlooks modern scholarship. "But the Vatican's reaction
is much too harsh, and quite unnecessary. Cardinal Ratzinger should be
sacked for this," he says.
The Tissa case opens two fundamental questions for the next millennium.
First, how will the Church adapt its internal mechanisms to the legitimate
demands for pluralism and due process which have forced other authoritarian
establishments in the last two decades to adapt or die? Second, now that
the number of Catholic worshippers in the Third World has overtaken those
in the developed West, will the Vatican be able to reflect this change
within its own structures?
"Thirty years ago the Second Vatican Council offered more power to local
bishops, yet in Sri Lanka they don't use it. They become office-boys of
Roman diplomats and bureaucrats," says Father Forbes. "It's the old
mentality - Big Daddy is in Rome. Let him decide."
The worldwide Synod of Bishops has a majority of members from the Third
World. They meet roughly every two years for about a month, but allow the
agenda to be set by Rome, as well as the editing of the final documents.
As Father Forbes argues, the Vatican likes this contradiction. "Its
message is 'Let the Third World develop, but we are the ones who decide,"'
he declares.
In a sense the "heretic" of Colombo is caught in the same contradiction.
Father Tissa Balasuriya is as aware as anyone in the Vatican of "the
un-churching of the West" and the shift in the weight of Catholic numbers
to the East and South. But his message of reform is based on an agenda of
rational pluralism and social action which has few followers, even in his
native Sri Lanka. The Vatican clearly feels his efforts to undermine the
traditional worship of saints and the mechanistic use of prayer for favours
are more likely to reduce the church's appeal in Asia than increase it.
Heretic or not, there is little doubt that he is a subversive.
Mary And Human Liberation, with additional commentary and extracts from the
correspondence with the Vatican, will be published by Cassells in September.
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