BY ROBINHOOD
Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith stood before the faithful at the 150th Jubilee celebrations at Makewita Church and delivered an observation that he appeared to regard as surprising. People are no longer coming to church. The congregation is drifting. His Eminence seemed genuinely troubled by this development.
He should not be surprised. He should be reflective. The Catholic Church in Sri Lanka has survived five centuries of upheaval, political turbulence, and social transformation. It built its moral authority slowly, carefully, and at considerable cost across generations of faithful leadership. That authority was not inherited by Cardinal Ranjith. It was entrusted to him. The distinction matters enormously, because what has been entrusted can also be squandered.
Sri Lanka has never witnessed a period in which the Catholic Church attracted this volume of public criticism. The criticism is not directed at the institution’s theology or its humanitarian work. It is directed squarely at the Cardinal’s political conduct, which has been extraordinary in its range and its inconsistency. Mahinda and Shiranthi Rajapaksa received his visible blessing. Maithripala Sirisena followed. Gotabaya Rajapaksa was next in the procession. Sajith Premadasa was courted and then abandoned with a timing that political observers noted with considerable interest. Anura Kumara Dissanayake now enjoys the Cardinal’s approving proximity.
This is not pastoral engagement with the political process. This is a pattern of alignment with power in its available form, adjusted as power shifts. Every Sri Lankan who has watched this sequence understands it for exactly what it is. The faithful who have stopped attending understand it too. People do not leave an institution because they have lost faith in its founding principles. They leave because they have lost faith in its present leadership.
The Cardinal’s political endorsements have not protected the Church. They have exposed it. Each alignment with a political figure carried the implicit suggestion that the Church’s moral authority was available for deployment in the service of electoral outcomes. Each subsequent abandonment of that figure confirmed that the authority was not principled. It was tactical.
President Dissanayake would be prudent to register what every previous recipient of the Cardinal’s political affection eventually discovered. The warmth is genuine until the calculus changes. The hosannas are sincere until a new congregation of power assembles elsewhere. Leaders who have stood where the President now stands have learned this lesson at significant personal and political cost.
The Cardinal’s concern about declining attendance deserves a direct and honest answer. The people of Sri Lanka are not losing their faith. They are exercising their judgment. They are separating the Church of Jesus Christ, which asks its leaders to speak truth to power, from a Cardinal who has spent years singing that power’s praises. They know the difference between a shepherd and a courtier, even when the courtier wears the vestments of a shepherd.
Sri Lanka’s Catholics are waiting for their Cardinal to return to the Church. The building alone is insufficient. The purpose must return alongside him. The courage to stand apart from political authority rather than beside it. The willingness to speak for the poor and the wronged rather than for the powerful and the convenient.
The word of Jesus Christ was never intended to be delivered from the front row of a political reception. It was intended to be delivered from a position of complete independence from exactly the kind of power the Cardinal has spent years cultivating.
The congregation will return when the pulpit recovers its integrity. The recovery begins with the Cardinal himself deciding which congregation he is truly serving.
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