Fr Tissa Balasuriya

Damian Thompson today has a post on his always interesting Holy Smoke blog about a new book, Catholic Social Justice. It appears to be a rather worrying book. In his article Fr Tissa Balasuriya speaks of the Pope`s inability to understand the developing world because he lives in an atmosphere of white racism. He also has a sentence which reads: “The 21st century was born in violence, with the ‘terrorist’ air attack on New York on 11 September 2001 and the invasion of Iraq by the USA, the UK and Australia on 18 March 2003.” Mr Thompson rightly questions why the word terrorist is in inverted commas. Fr Tissa Balasuriya was excommunicated in January 1997 for his opinions expressed in his book Mary and Human Liberation which endorsed a relativistic view of religions and so denied the unique place of Christ. In January 1998 he signed a statement which satisfied the authorities that he still held the Catholic faith and was reconciled to the Church. However the article in this book shows that he is not as much at peace with the Church as one might hope.