The only historical authority who could tell us when exactly was the earliest contact between Ceylon and the Faith that is Catholic, would be the Recording Angel. The question of when embraces the question of who precisely were the persons who were the intermediaries. The same paramount authority would perhaps be the only competent judge even of this other matter urged by historians of lesser standing that the Yonas referred to supposed anachronistically, in the Mahawamsa in the reign of Pandukabhaya as settled at the west gate of Anuradhapura were a Christian body. If the Yonas were Persians, no matter when exactly they flourished as settlers in this happy isle in their early enough time there would still be the question to decide whether their Church had the marks of unity catholicity and apostolicity, as the Persian Christians are generally supposed to have been Nestorians.
If however the Persian creed fell short of orthodoxy, the Persian cross can boast full historical reality, considering that a slab of granite on which they had made their cross in this country was in our own time dug up and identified for what it was. It is possible to date this cross: because it is possible to date the commercial intercourse of the Parsians with Ceylon. This would be the sixth century. And the slab of granite marked with, the Persian cross can perform its present day duty in serving for a memory that, in that distant time, a group or groups of people first made the sign of the Cross in Ceylon being pioneers in making that mark of Christ which is so widespread in these days in this land rising into the air, atop the chapels and churches, lying flat on earth on the tombstones, and always and everywhere immediately indicative of the Son of God incarnated among men, of Himself and of His Gospel as also of the following of that Gospel.
Other early evidences of Christian belief or practice there are, but without anything of the solidity of the Persian cross which may be no more than beautiful travellers’ tales or pious poetic flights of early Christian visitors. The works carrying those references make a considerable and curious literature but as no authority is available to certify to the absolute historical truth of these evidences save that seat of paramount historical knowledge, the Recording Angel, they can pass. In a pageant of Asia in the early modern age a most splendid and inspiring scene would be the exploit of St. Francis Xavier bringing Christ home to the East from which He sprang, Lux ab Oriente.
St. Francis Xavier’s breath-taking odyssey is history. And documents of the first order, substantiate it. But there is nothing in that history to prove the tradition current throughout among the Catholics of Ceylon that St. Francis Xavier came to these shores in person and led the predication of the good news. No doubt this great and indomitable adventurer in the cause of the Lord cast eyes of longing upon this most delectable of the islands and wrote to St. Ignatius Loyola, the Commander-in-Chief at headquarters, to inform him that “there is an island off India.”
There is nothing in the Xaverian documents to show that his desire was realised. But in that abiding monument of historical writing, the Spiritual and Temporal Conquest of Ceilao by de Queyroz, there is recorded a visit of St. Francis to the Ceylon side over across the Pearl Fishery on the invitation of the people of Mannar and from there to Trincomalie and of a visit also to Jaffna peninsula, in which this extreme north was traversed. There is the possibility of mistaking St. Francis Xavier for his disciple and namesake Francis Xavier but in 1545 St. Francis writing to Don Joao III of Portugal reported that “in Jaffnapatam and on the Coast of Coulan it may well be that before the year more than a hundred thousand souls will have been added to the Church of Christ.”
Whether it was the zeal of St. Francis in person or that zeal communicated to others that was at work, the result was achieved and it was sensational enough. Round about those years missionaries and preachers of the word who had lit their torches at the flame of the Xaverian spirit worked wonders in both senses of the term. Not miracle but marvel was the word for seventy thousand of a people of the maritime parts embracing the Faith in a body, the seventy thousand going under the yoke of Christ like one. But by the time of the Xaverian blitzkrieg of the spirit on India and the Island off India others had made the contact between Ceilao and the Faith is Catholic.
A second historical document of the Catholic Church in Ceylon is a portion of granite: the boulder torn off a promontory at the head of the roadstead of Colombo and having engraven on it the Padrao, the arms of his Catholic Majesty of Portugal. On November the 15th, 1505, Lourenco de Almaida landed in Colombo and at once performed this ritual of the Portuguese conquistadores by a seal on the rock. It is well de Queyroz entitles his book the Conquista and specifies a temporal and a spiritual conquest. The great historian adorned his tale and pointed the moral that his countrymen had bound the two conquests, to different in temper and inspiration, too tightly together; the Faith that is Catholic is not to be tied to the tail of the sovereign power of the State. But the Luciads offered an opportunity for the carrying of the Faith in the navies of the Portuguese Empire.
Cheek by jowl the missionary went with the coloniser, the former at variance with the commercial morality of the latter, and the latter impatient with the former for being a nuisance and a conscientious objector to the progress of His Majesty in the newly discovered realm of the East. Politics and policies indeed play their part in the affairs of the Sinhalese monarch as also in those of the conquistadores. These temporal things live for their day. The enthusiasm and fervour of the kings of Kotte for the spirit of the Christian gospel was a different matter; and it was then at the very initial letter of an immortal chapter of history pertaining to the soul of a people.
The Portuguese power fell; in that collapse the spiritual conquest broke loose from the temporal one and it survived in triumph in Kotte and in Jaffnapatam and in the kingdom of Kandy itself, Kings and Queens and nobles and ministers and officials and the great miscellaneous crowds of three kingdoms had been annexed in the spiritual conquest. In de Queyroz the story is double strain. In the last balance of things, is the temporal conquest a help or a hindrance?
The Kotte of Don Juan Dharmapala in the forty-six years of that monarch’s reign presents as perfect a picture of the peace and order, happiness and progress, under the inspiration of the Faith that is Catholic as may be in the world. In 1597, in Kotte a hundred thousand Catholics could be numbered; the “temporal conquest then ensued a freedom in which all the agencies of the Catholic faith were for the uplift and betterment of men who were exceptionally active and productive. But the temporal conquest at other times, in other places brought in its train wars and sieges and the ruin and havoc of long and indefatigable labours and the sack of churches and religious houses, all culminating in the glories of martyrdom, in the celebrated martyrdom of the six hundred of Mannar are for ever symbolized the misery and agony of the power of princes. The Faith that is Catholic created, but to have all destroyed in the clashes of the Portuguese power with the kingdoms in the North and in the central hills.
Then the new challenger appeared and when, in the series of engagements which followed the Portuguese encounter with the Dutch colonial expeditions, the temporal conquista collapsed and finally withdrew in a complete surrender, one firing and one thing alone survived, the Faith that is Catholic, the spiritual conquest, that is, which stayed on even to outstay the century and a half of Hollandish persecution and trial by ordeal more ruthless and destructive than the terror of a hostile campaign of a Mayadunne or a Sankilly.
A seer and mystic of the Jesuit Order in Cochin saw the whole story of the Conquista in vision and explained that the complete defeat of the Portuguese arms in Ceilao was a punishment for the sins of the temporal arm, which were not to be atoned for even by the nobility of mind and chivalry of the Constantino de Sas who from time to time administered the province of Ceylon according to the light of the Gospel which the missioners of Portugal had brought to these shores. The Dutch terror, however, would exhaust itself, the visionary added, and then the Hollanders would “disappear as salt in water”. The ancient orders of religious life in the Catholic Church were all present in the Ceilao of the Portuguese; the sons of St. Francis and St. Dominic and the followers of the rule of St. Augustine and of St. Ignatius Loyola all co-operated to the grandeur that was the-spiritual conquest. Under the Hollander’s lash all was brought to nought, very nearly to nought.
Even at the height of the spiritual conquest Ceilao did not boast a, bishop. The administration was from Goa, later from Cochin. Ceilao was part of an Indian diocese.
It was a pars magna. In de Quiroz there broods a sense of futility as the record recites the old unhappy far off things and the battles long ago of the temporal conquista. But the great historian’s writing in the same language as of the epic of Camoens, exults in the chronicles of the Christandade in Ceilao. In that most beautiful chapter which recites the churches of Ceilao all over the Portuguese domain with their various dedications which are like a heavenly litany of the godhead and the saints there is a sense of doom prevailing. The material structure of the spiritual conquest would also fall to pieces. But the spirit would endure through the very worst of the worst. So it happened in the Zeilan of the Dutch era.
The Dutch administration for all its concern for the permanence of the Roman law swooped upon a far sublimer and more enduring thing which had come from Rome. The allegiance Of the Catholic peoples in Zeilan, in their very midnight of the soul, to the Supreme Pontiff was a staunch bond which no penalty could break. A churchless, leaderless, priestless people kept the Faith that is Catholic, all by themselves and all on their own. Here there was the very height of the spiritual conquista, when the temporal one was a ruin.
In the throes of an unspeakable adversity the Faith that is Catholic showed itself in its most inspiring colours. The Faith went underground as in the days of the Roman imperial persecutions, as in .the days of the worst of the English Reformation. The Faith that is Catholic appeared to die the death; but it would rise again on the third day. Sole medium of the resurrection was a certain adventurer from Goa with a price on his head and a divine mission in his soul, a wandering Tamil coolie to look at, but answering to the faithful to his immortal name of Joseph Vaz, a priest of the Oratoriam order, out to do or die in the preservation of the Faith that is Catholic in Ceylon. With his trusty lieutenant, Jacome Gonsalves and a handful of companions, he enterprized the matter and out of a complete material ruin restored the spirit.
The Catholic following that could flee, fled to the mountains which were part of the Kingdom of the Sinhalese monarch. Father Vaz and his band of valiants also established themselves in the Sinhalese Capital and rallied forth on foot on their precarious journeys of the ministry, north, south east and west. When they had the friendship of the Sinhalese King it was still good going; with that lost, as it happened from time to time owing to the spasms of distrust or enmity felt in the struggles for power among the ruling class of the Sinhalese capital, the going was definitely bad. But the people of the Faith that is Catholic survived imprisonment, fines, social ostracism, dispossession, reduction to poverty and death.
The epic of Father Vaz is a thing to dazzle as also to terrify the imagination. “In Colombo, “wrote a visiting priest who was not allowed to land, “are three thousand Catholics without one priest. A large number came on board to me to confess and they brought rosaries and candles for blessing and asked me for holy water. They edified us all by their piety.” Yet Colombo, as a discovery of Portugal, was a Catholic creation and the term “Ceylon” deriving from Ceilao, is redolent of the Faith that is Catholic when it made its historic entry into Sri Lanka, Sinhala-dwipa or Serendib.
With the exit of the Dutch power it was not the Catholic Faith that disappeared as salt in water. In the British period the Faith that is Catholic is, happily, not to be tied to the tail of a sovereign power of the State. Like the many miraculous escapes of Father Vaz. The escape of the Faith would be a matter beyond the chance and changes of this world. The resurrection is assured; the recovery is rapid and even sensational. A spectator of the Dutch period living on into the settlement under the British Crown and into old age would have marvelled at the energy which comes almost out a Catholic catafalque and re-gathered its strength for more spacious and expansive spell of life.
The dispersion returned home. New religious orders entered the mission field; the Sylvestro-Benedictines and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who are prominent in the Catholic landscape to this day, the Society of Jesus also weathered the storm and returned to their posts. What was the part of an Indian diocese ruled a local Vicar-General spread out into a Vicariate Apostolic which again was to branch into two separate Vicariates. These again were transformed into the dioceses and the establishment of the hierarchy marked a coming of age for the Faith that is Catholic, securing for the Church in Ceylon a status level with the great nations of the organisation of the Catholic world.
The churches have multiplied, and a clergy drawn from the sons of the soil, numerous and competent, has become a matter of course. The full programme of the cultural and ameliorative labours for which the Faith that is Catholic is renowned in all the world was launched here in the earliest days of the British period. The works of mercy and the works of educative and regenerative, idealism increased and rendered their devoted service.
And now in pursuance of the pontifical policy which is enshrined in the celebrated Leonine words, Pili, tui, India, administri, tui, salutis, in the episcopal sees the sons of the soil have charge of the highest and gravest office and bear the responsibility to the manner born and to the manner bred.
Under the dome which tops the capital of Ceylon is gathered a unity. Catholicity and apostolicity which is as a Jerusalem builded as a city and compact all together.
Independence Souvenir — 1948.