Excommunication?

In the grip of yet another spasm of millenarian distemper, the Vatican decided to celebrate the New Year with an excommunication. Excluded from the community of believers for his heretical views was an elderly Sri Lankan priest, Fr. Tissa Balasuriya. Not well known in the west, Fr. Balasuriya has won plaudits in Asia for helping Catholic theology address the considerable social, political, and economic ills which plague third world countries, including his own. The runes of this excommunication, when read carefully, yield disturbing information about the heresy hunters in Rome.

To the modern mind, heresy has an odd, anachronistic ring--which may explain why the media covered the story with little more than a shrug. The New York Times report quoted a Rome-based Catholic scholar (the brave soul asked not to be identified) who rebuked the Vatican for the fuss and "making a somebody out of a nobody." In contrast, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the neo-conservative journal First Things, seemed to think that Balasuriya's head on a pike had saved Catholic doctrine from contamination and this would help the Pope "promote dialogue among the world's religions."

With nearly a billion Roman Catholics in the world today, an effort must be made to investigate Rome's motives when it does something as unhinged as separating an old man from his life-long community. Human and natural rights are at stake. The spotlight in this horrible drama must fall principally on the Pope's grand inquisitor, the Bavarian Cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger.

Ratzinger, arguably the most powerful man in the Roman Catholic Church today, has never made any bones about his admiration for the pre-war German Church in which he grew up. No apologies for that Church's accommodation and concordats with Hitler have ever tripped off his tongue, nor for his own stint in the Chancellor's Youth Movement. It is a pretty kettle of fish when the man in the Vatican calling the shots on heresy cut his teeth politically in a fascist context.

Fr. Balasuriya was an obvious target for a rabid Occidentialist like Ratzinger. Oriental and other, the Sri Lankan couldn't help but make the Bavarian nervous, even before he had written a word. While a fear of syncretism is one hobgoblin haunting the Cardinal, the proximate cause for the heresy verdict was liberation theology. Fr. Balasuriya does social analysis, entertaining the quaint notion that theology should provide folk with the tools to free themselves from grinding, dehumanizing poverty. His books on Jesus, Mary, and the Eucharist have taken on, variously, capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. Like Marx before him, he is afraid of the opiate potential of religion and has observed that prayers like the Hail Mary play a role in "tranquilizing Catholics."

The prosecutor in Fascist Italy responsible for imprisoning the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, said "We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years." Without prison, the stake or the rack at his disposal, the Roman Inquisitor sought Fr. Balasuriya's silence through excommunication. Rome has battled modern political and economic ideas for more than 150 years. Its suspicions are also raised whenever layfolk appropriate the Bible and read it as a manifesto for deliverance from institutions that oppress them. Pius IX, in his encyclical Qui Puribus, published in 1846, condemned "crafty Bible societies which renew the skills of the old heretics, and ceaselessly force on people of all kinds, even the uneducated, gifts of the Bible."

The current papacy has given permission for contemporary representatives of anti-modernism to crawl out from underneath their rocks. Recently I read a promotional brochure for a publication of theirs called Catholic Dossier. Promised in an upcoming issue is a rewriting of the history of the Spanish Inquisition: "It wasn't what the Church's enemies claim." These people never apologize--they just revise. Also scheduled is a rehabilitation of Pius XII who, as we now know, could have done so much more in standing up to Hitler.

What is so shocking, wicked even, is that Ratzinger has almost certainly never set foot in Sri Lanka and seems indifferent to its grave problems. Sri Lanka continues to be mauled by the Tamil Tigers in a civil war rooted in long standing ethnic tensions. It is clear that as long as the political violence continues, Sri Lanka's rampant poverty will not be alleviated. Shortly after the excommunication was announced, the BBC World Service broadcast a report by Sue Lloyd Roberts on one consequence of this poverty--the widespread pedophilic skin-trade in Sri Lanka. Young boys' bodies are being bought and sold, and it is German men who are the chief consumers and purveyors.

This is the political and economic context which has shaped Balasuriya's liberation theology. Like the author of the Book of Proverbs, he believes that "the poverty of the poor is their ruin." His theology loosens the mortar which keeps hierarchies in both Church and State in place. It is the starting point of a strategy to empower ordinary people at the grassroots level.

Balasuriya's excommunication has also lifted the veil on Cardinal Ratzinger's racism. His choice of victim, a brown-skinned man without powerful friends, living half a world away, is no coincidence. White, well-connected, controversial theologians living in Europe and the US have offered a challenge to Church authority every bit as radical as that of Fr. Balasuriya's; they have not been subjected to the Panzer Cardinal's spite.

Shortly after having silenced the pesky liberation theologian, the Pope, in a feat of breathtaking humbug, proceeded to lecture diplomats assembled for his annual New Year address on the need for a moral code to keep stronger, richer nations from dominating others and "imposing their cultural models, economic diktats or ideological models." How are we to understand such contrariness? The answer, I think, lies with Rome's ingrained paternalism. Lofty pronunciamentos from the Pope on justice are one thing. Having an indigenous prophet teach and activate folk at the grassroots to seek justice and dignity for themselves, is quite another.

Ann Pettifer is the publisher of Common Sense the alternative newspaper at the University of Notre Dame.