Outspoken Roman Catholic priest and social activist in Sri Lanka who was excommunicated during the papacy of John Paul II
Tissa Balasuriya, who has died at the age of 89, was an outspoken Roman Catholic priest and social activist in Sri Lanka who became the only liberation theologian to be excommunicated during the papacy of John Paul II. He was punished in 1997 for challenging official views on the Virgin Mary, the concept of original sin, the need for baptism, the right of women to become priests and the role and value of other world religions. After widespread international publicity, the ban was lifted a year later, but Balasuriya remained a strong critic of Joseph Ratzinger, who in his role as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had been in charge of the Vatican's proceedings against him.
Shortly after Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, Balasuriya wrote: "He has to have a less eurocentric view of the world. He must be ready to accept that God can speak to humanity through other media than the Christian church".
Although liberation theology and the view that priests should take an active role in fighting social injustice swept across Latin America and the Philippines to the Vatican's dismay during John Paul II's papacy, none of its proponents was treated as severely as Balasuriya.
As a Catholic on an island that was largely Buddhist and Hindu, Balasuriya's views might have been ignored by the Vatican. Even among Sri Lanka's Catholics and most of its local hierarchy his ideas, which were expressed most clearly in his book Mary and Human Liberation were considered unconventional. But they appeared to rile the authoritarian Ratzinger (then a cardinal) as a prime example of the "relativism" which the future Pope identified as the Catholic church's most dangerous enemy at the time. He felt they had to be stamped on hard for fear they might spread.
Balasuriya's depiction of the mother of Jesus Christ as a strong-willed revolutionary challenged centuries of European iconography in which Mary is portrayed as docile and voiceless. This was something which not even the Latin-American theologians had argued. A dedicated anti-imperialist, Balasuriya was acutely conscious of the leading role that the Catholic church and its missionaries had played in advancing the colonial cause.
The Vatican declared the book on Mary to be heretical. Its fierce reaction may also have been prompted by an earlier row with Sri Lankans. Shortly before visiting the country in 1995, Pope John Paul II had described Buddhism as "negative" because of its "indifference" to the world. The country's leading Buddhist monks organised protest demonstrations and refused to meet him.
By contrast, Balasuriya stated that in Asia, where Catholics are a minority, it was important for them to be respectful of other religions. "The oriental view of history is more cyclical than linear. In Hinduism and Buddhism this life is only one stage in a vast cycle of birth, death and rebirth. The cycle continues until all reach ultimate liberation in Nirvana. In the Christian view this life determines one's ultimate and eternal destiny," he wrote in the offending book.
Ratzinger sent Balasuriya a "profession of faith" that was specially written for him, and that he was ordered to sign in repudiation of his views. Balasuriya refused to recant.
Instead, after six days of negotiation in Colombo with senior church officials, he signed a "statement of reconciliation" in which he merely regretted that other people had perceived doctrinal errors in his writings and thereby taken offence. He also said he had expected "a more open dialogue for an objective scrutiny of my book". The excommunication was lifted in January 1998.
Balasuriya was born in Kahatagasdigiliya, in the northern part of the island to a middle-class family from Negombo, on its west coast. His father, a travelling pharmacist on the government payroll, sent him to a prestigious Catholic school. After graduating from the University of Ceylon in economics, he spent six years in Rome studying philosophy and theology before being ordained in 1953. He briefly did postgraduate studies in agricultural economics at Oxford University before returning to Sri Lanka, where he became a teacher and later rector of Aquinas University College in Colombo.
A member of the country's dominant Sinhalese majority, Balasuriya was radicalised by the youth rebellion in 1971, when Sinhalese students and unemployed new graduates mounted a violent uprising against the government. Known as the JVP (Janatha Vimukhti Peramuna or People's Liberation Front), and demanding land reform and jobs, they captured rural police stations and came close to taking control of several regions in the south of the island. The uprising was put down with ruthless brutality. Some 8,000 insurgents and their sympathisers died.
Shocked by the sharpness of the issues that could lead to such bloodshed, Leo Nanayakkara, one of Balasuriya's mentors, resigned as bishop of Kandy, and Balasuriya himself abandoned his post at Aquinas University College. He started working in slum areas of Colombo and revived a journal called Social Justice, turning it into a campaigning showcase for human rights promotion and economic reform. He founded the Centre for Society and Religion to organise inter-ethnic dialogue and encounters with Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims. He helped to found the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians.
Balasuriya did not advocate violence, but argued that if Jesus had been born in Sri Lanka he would probably have been one of the young revolutionaries who disappeared or were killed. Mary, his mother, reminded Balasuriya of hundreds of tough Sri Lankan mothers and sisters searching for news of missing loved ones and holding desperate families together.
Citing the words of the Magnificat that Mary is said to have uttered after being told she was to give birth to Jesus Christ, ("He hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree..."), Balasuriya argued that Mary was a "strong, mature, working-class woman" who helped to bring up her son as a revolutionary and shared his thinking. While many of his disciples fled, or denied or betrayed Jesus, Mary remained faithful. Because of her loyalty and activism, Balasuriya called her "the first priest of the new testament", who had been "dehydrated" for generations by the church's male power-holders. In an interview with me in his book-cluttered office in the monastery compound of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the order to which he belonged for decades, Balasuriya said the church hierarchy had reduced Mary "from being the disturber of the comfortable to the comforter of the disturbed". His image of a strong Mary was a better role-model for women, he thought, than the pale virgin of a thousand Renaissance paintings.
Balasuriya was an impish figure who always loved verbal sword-thrusts. But he had just been excommunicated when I saw him, and he clearly felt upset, as well as angry at his undemocratic treatment. Supported by progressive Catholics in Europe and the US as well as Asia, he was demanding a chance to have an audience at the Vatican, where he could face his accusers and argue his doctrinal differences rather than just be ordered to recant.
A few weeks later both sides reached a compromise, though lower-ranking officials were sent to Colombo to meet him to discuss his case. Ratzinger stayed aloof. Instead of the special statement sent to him by the Vatican which included a sentence saying the church did not have the authority to ordain women, Balasuriya professed his faith according to the Credo of the People of God, a general statement used throughout the church. Explaining his part of the compromise, he said his "reconciliation" did not accept that the church could never ordain women.
Free to celebrate mass again, Balasuriya spent his last years publishing essays on the injustice of the capitalist system and working with poor communities around Colombo. His frailty did not permit him to go to Tamil areas in the north of the island or take an active part in supporting human rights during the civil war that ended in 2009.
Until his death, he continued to argue that the Vatican should be more willing to acknowledge the crimes of Europeans during the colonial period as well as the Crusades, the inquisition and the burning of witches.
In a 2006 essay after Pope Benedict's visit to Auschwitz, where he prayed "Why do you sleep, O Lord?", Balasuriya recalled how a young Sinhala militant had addressed a statue of the seated Buddha during the 1971 uprising with the worlds: "Rise up, you have been seated long enough for 2,500 years."
"While the Pope is deeply moved by the massacres in Europe, it is necessary that a further cry goes up to God to ask why such a long period of inhuman cruelty could have been tolerated by the Christian churches," he wrote.
• Tissa Balasuriya, theologian and activist, born 29 August 1924; died 17 January 2013