Jesus not the (only) Saviour.

Fr. Tissa Balasuriya

London - Detroit -- On January 2, 1997, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) declared that Sri Lankan priest, Father Tissa Balasuriya, had grievously deviated from the truth of the Catholic faith and thereby incurred automatic excommunication. Together with his rejection of Church teaching on Original Sin and on Mary, the Mother of Christ (Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, Assumption, which, he says, serve "the capitalist, patriarchal, colonialist, first world of Christendom" to the detriment of the working class and the poor), he also rejects Christ as the Redeemer of the world. This, he states, is "not presentable in our multi-religious context" (see Thaddeus Pruss' article, CI, June 1997).

Invited to speak at the November 1997 Call to Action convention in Detroit, USA, Balasuryia first made a tour of Europe, giving press conferences in Paris and Brussels, before continuing to London where he arrived for the launching of the English edition of his book Mary and Human Liberation. He was treated as a conquering hero. A large crowd which heard him speak in the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields applauded him enthusiatically. The Catholic weekly The Tablet quoted one official of a religious congregation as saying that such an arbitrary act of excommunication was more of a scandal to the Church than anything a theologian could write.

The editor of The Tablet himself praised him and said that there was a widespread opinion in the Church that the treatment of him was indefensible. He asked, "Must we wait 200 years before Rome gets around to making an apology?" In support of this, he published an inconsequential article by a like-minded Jesuit from India, Samuel Rayan, who accused the Vatican of misunderstanding Balasuriya's theology, though his explanations confirmed the CDF's judgments in every respect. In Canada the article was reprinted in the Prairie Messenger (Dec. 8, '97).

Was Balasuriya repentant when he went to London? Not in the slightest. Did he address the substance of the charges against him? Not at all. Instead he complained about the CDF's procedures, and said, "I think we need something like Magna Carta."

Detroit

In Detroit, too, he received a hero's welcome, addressing some 1500 "progressive" Catholics on the subject of "Human rights in the Church." The CDF must have more African and Asian members, he said, and "must be open" to new theological currents. He did not mention that it was the Sri Lankan bishops, all of them Asians, who asked the CDF to back them in their condemnation of his heretical writings.

The penalty of excommunication is meant to make the heretic or other person involved in grave sin reflect on his situation and possibly repent. Repentance was obviously the last thing in Father Balasuriya's mind. Why should it be, when he was being praised by supposedly Catholic journals for defying Rome?

Moreover, he was invited to give the keynote address at a meeting that the late Cardinal Bernardin hoped would bring about dialogue between differing factions in the Church. How can there be fruitful dialogue between faithful Catholics and those who ridicule fundamental doctrines of the Faith as this Sri Lankan priest has done?