Vatican’s crimes pushed under the carpet

(Courtesy of Buddhist Times)

The forthcoming visit of Pope Francis to Sri Lanka in January raises many questions in the minds of concerned Sinhala Buddhists. The questions relate to the state of mind of our ‘Buddhist’ rulers (both past and present) and of our leading Buddhists.

We cannot remember any Buddhist Sangharaja of Thailand visiting the country on invitation by the State.

The visit of Francis will be the third visit of a Pope to this country, the first being in 1970.  But we cannot remember any of our Governments or Buddhist organizations demanding that the Vatican should apologize for the atrocities committed against Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims by the Portuguese in name of the Catholic religion and with the Vatican’s blessings.  So far only the BBS (Bodu Bala Sena) has made such a demand.

Earlier Pope John Paul II made a string of apologies – apologizing to almost everyone who had suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church but not to those in Asia (with the exception of China).

But our rulers want to ignore history for the sake of ‘religious harmony’ and keep the present generation ignorant of the past. Instead they prefer to be non-committal not only on the proposed canonizing by Pope Francis of the Catholic missionary Joseph Vaz (who was beatified earlier in 1995 by Pope John Paul II in Colombo) but also the Pope’s planned visit on January 14 to the Madu shrine (former site of Pattini Devale, also called the Amman Kovil) which belongs to the Mannar Parish the head of which is the notorious Tamil separatist Bishop Rayappu Joseph who was a close associate of LTTE leader Prabhakaran.

It was Rayappu Joseph who took the shrine’s statue to Tiger-held areas during the war and gave the Catholic Church’s blessings to the LTTE. In 2013 he backed the TNA’s call for Indian intervention to create a separate state in the island’s North and East. He also made unsubstantiated allegations against the armed forces that they used chemical weapons during the fighting.  The man has not still given up the Tamil Eelam dream. Why is the Catholic hierarchy tolerating this traitor and liar?

Before canonizing Joseph Vaz, Sri Lanka’s Catholic Church should get the Pope to express his gratitude to the Sinhala kings who gave shelter to the Catholics who fled the Dutch occupied Maritime Provinces, despite the fact the Catholic Church became the Portuguese Trojan Horse in suppressing Buddhism and Buddhists in a way far worse than happened under the Dutch.

Also it should be not forgotten that Joseph Vaz was first imprisoned in Kandy as a Portuguese spy though released later. The earlier suspicions of the Kandyan rulers about him have not been fully unproved to this date, going by the facts revealed in the book, Globalising Goa (1660-1820) by Ernestine Carreira.

Quote: “In Goa, however, hopes ran high until the late 1670s and the (Portuguese) Viceroys (in Goa) maintained networks of active informers (Jesuits) in the Malabar region and even on the island of Ceylon, which they also believed they could get back in the near future”.

It is in this context the visit of Joseph Vaz has to be fully studied regardless of his missionary.

The Vatican has declared that the third millennium will be used by the Roman Catholic Church to evangelize and bring people of Asia within the fold of Christianity and it is already blowing its trumpet at the success achieved in South Korea, a once predominantly Buddhist country, but where the total number of Christians in that country now exceeds that of the Buddhists (JP).