By Dilrukshi Handunnetti
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka
Pope Francis canonized Sri Lanka's first Catholic saint during a holy mass in the island's capital, Colombo, attended by nearly a million devotees on Wednesday.
At the special mass conducted to confer sainthood upon Reverend Father Joseph Vaz, a Catholic missionary from Goa who arrived in the island’s north four centuries ago and reinstated the Catholic Church, the Pope also prayed for peace and reconciliation in the South Asian nation.
“I encourage all of you to look to Father Joseph Vaz whose patient suffering in the cause of the Gospel is a cause for celebration," said Pope Francis. "This saint lived in an era of rapid and profound transformation in an island where Catholics were a minority and were being persecuted.”
Referring to Saint Joseph Vaz as a “living icon of reconciliation,” whose service of peace and his to love towards humanity overcame all differences, the Pontiff noted that the canonized priest demonstrated “great missionary zeal and Christian charity.”
Decribing the newly-declared saint as courageous, the pontiff said the right to practice any religion was a fundamental freedom and a right.
“I pray that the Christian population in this blessed island would follow Saint Joseph Vaz’s great example of promoting justice and reconciliation in Sri Lanka. This is what this country needs from you, what Saint Joseph Vaz, your own patron saint, requires from you and the church seeks from you," the pope said.
"As you pray to your new saint, offer a special prayer for this island’s permanent peace,” he said.
Father Joseph Vaz was beatified by Pope John Paul II, as a form of regonition for his services, a decade ago and following requests from both India and Sri Lanka, he was canonized as Sri Lanka’s first saint.
The head of the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka, Malcom Cardinal Ranjith, thanked the Pope for “conferring upon Sri Lankans, the gift of your holy visit and the gift of an apostle, Saint Joseph Vaz. The new saint is the pride of Goa and God’s precious gem, gifted to Sri Lanka.”
Cardinal Ranjith also referred to Sri Lanka's decades-long civil war, which ended in 2009.
“In that search towards true healing of our collective hearts, the strength to ask pardon from each other, to forgive and forget, arrive at a process of give and take between the parties of conflict, we look to your sublime example and the ways of our faith to reach out to each other,” said Cardinal Ranjith.
Pope Francis will conclude his two-day tour to Sri Lanka with a visit to the Sacred Shrine of Our Lady of Madhu in the island’s north -- where rebel Tamil Tigers fought against the armed forces to carve out a separate homeland -- a place of Christian worship, hugely popular among both Tamil and Sinhala communities and considered a symbol of unity.
