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For the Sri Lankan Catholic community, getting to the truth behind the 2019 Easter bombings has posed a number of discursive and political challenges, especially when evidence emerged of government complicity in the attacks. The paper first presents an overview of the history of Catholicism in Sri Lanka, then focuses on the Catholic response to the bombings. Centering on the public pronouncements of Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, the paper argues that what has emerged in the Catholic response is what could be called a Sri Lankan nationalism of the common good, which is simultaneously prophetic and, interestingly, non-sectarian except concerning one particular issue that has vexed Sri Lankan Catholicism just as it has Sri Lankan society as a whole
Being pinay (Filipina) is particularly characterised by an inferiority complex of being brown which makes them feel inferior to "white" people. To imagine a brown pinay Catholicism through devotion to Mary seems unthinkable or outside of the pinay imagination until one considers the Virgin of Balintawak of the Indigenous Philippine Christian Church, Iglesia Filipina Independiente. This paper briefly lays out the intersectional oppression of pinays and the use of Mary in Catholicism to reinforce this oppression. It turns to the Virgin of Balintawak to suggest a brown Catholicism that can not only help pinays reembrace their brownness, but also help them decolonize and reindegenize. Overall, the paper seeks to grapple with Filipin@ migrant Catholic Marian belief as a double-edged sword, a bolo, and to carve this sword from a weapon that perpetuates pinay oppression to a symbol of their resistance against their ongoing intersectional oppressions.
In a small fishing village on the outskirts of Chilaw, Sri Lanka, people pack into a room to seek healing from a woman who channels Mary the mother of Jesus. Thushari, who was 44 when I met her in 2016, heals hundreds, it is believed, and prays over the widows of those who “disappeared” during the Sri Lankan Civil War, holding her hands over the photos of these men and giving their surviving widows hope. Married to a fisherman, Thushari ministers also to women who have lost their husbands out at sea. She has no schooling beyond second standard and claims not to be able to read or write. But for years she has “miraculously” been writing reams of messages that Mary has given her: in Hebrew, English, Tamil, and Sinhalese. This paper investigates Marian devotion in Sri Lanka, particularly in relation to war, and Thushari’s healing and writing practice as she sends these messages to the Pope, seeking Papal blessings.