The missionary life is no highway paved with comforts. It is a journey of grit and grace, often walked amid many difficulties and hardships. You leave behind your homeland, your language, your family and begin afresh in lands where your name means nothing and your faith is everything. You must learn to speak a new language, eat what the people eat, walk where they walk and suffer as they suffer. It’s not a life for the fainthearted, but for those made of sterner stuff and deeper faith.

Two such men embodied that calling. One was Guillermo Steckling, a German Oblate who served with distinction in Paraguay. The other, an American Augustinian named Francis Prevost, laboured in tough terrains of Peru. Their missionary work was not just about building churches but about building lives – working alongside the poor, walking with the marginalized and anchoring the Church in places long forgotten by power.

They were, quite literally, men with little say but had big hearts to help the poorest of the poor and the marginalized. But Rome had its eye on them. Their work bore such fruit that both were called to lead their global congregations. Steckling became Superior General of the Oblates and Prevost Prior General of Order of St. Augustine.

Still, Pope Francis, ever the shepherd with a nose for humble holiness, sent them back – not to offices in Rome, but to the dusty front-lines where they had made their mark. Steckling returned to Paraguay as Bishop. So did Prevost in Peru. Pope Francis loved missionaries and he knew they were capable men. It was a move as pastoral as it was prophetic – a strategy to shape the future leadership of the Church not through ambition, but through service.

Today, that same Francis Prevost has succeeded his mentor Pope Francis as Pope Leo XIV – shepherd of 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide. A professor of Canon Law and a mathematician by training, he was never considered a front runner for pope by Vatican watchers. In fact, when he entered the Sistine Chapel for the Conclave, he had been a Cardinal for barely two years. Yet, four ballots later, the white smoke rose.

Cardinal Prevost’s election recalls the October Conclave of 1978, when little known Karol Wojtyła, the Polish Cardinal who became John Paul II. But unlike 1978, where a stalemate between Italian heavyweights led to a compromise choice, this time the Cardinals rallied behind Prevost early. The two-thirds majority came swiftly after four ballots unlike in 1978 where they had eight ballots.

When he stepped onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, his first words were not lofty proclamations, but a whisper to a wounded world: “Peace be with you.” In an age riven by conflict – in Gaza, in Ukraine and in Kashmir – his greeting rang out like balm on an open wound.

Pope Francis had often urged global leaders to be instruments of peace. Pope Leo XIV seems poised to carry that mission forward – not with diplomatic finesse, perhaps, but with the moral weight of a man who has lived among the poor and who speaks not from a podium but from the heart.

He has never shied away from uncomfortable truths. Even before his elevation, Cardinal Prevost voiced his concerns over U.S. immigration policies, particularly the practice of separating children from their families. He took on Vice President J.D. Vance – a fellow Catholic – when Prevost said, “Jesus does not ask us to rank our love.”

He may be the first American Pope, but he does not carry the triumphalism that often trails that label. Born in Chicago, yes – but shaped in Peru. His spiritual passport bears the stamps of Lima’s slums, not Washington’s corridors. His theology is rooted not in ideology but in going after the lost sheep.

His choice of name – Leo – is a signal in itself. The last to wear that name was Leo XIII, the great “Pope of the Workers,” who reigned for 25 years at the turn of the 20th century and became a beacon for social justice. Leo XIII was the author of an encyclical that championed the rights of labourers and demanded dignity for those who toil. It was a milestone in Catholic social teaching. By invoking that name, Pope Leo XIV seems to be saying: the mission continues.

Indeed, for centuries the papacy was seen as Rome’s to keep. That hold was first broken in 1978. John Paul II broke barriers in a papacy that ran for 27 years.

This time, many assumed the pendulum would swing back to Italy, especially with several seasoned Italian Cardinals in contention. But the College of Cardinals, guided by the spirit of Pope Francis, chose not a bureaucrat, nor a diplomat – but a missionary. A man who has “the smell of the sheep.”

Pope Leo XIV may have entered the Conclave a rank outsider; he now carries the keys of St. Peter to further Pope Francis’ mission and vision for the church.

Saturday 10th May, 2025

The much-awaited Local Government (LG) elections are over, but political battles continue. The government and the Opposition are all out to gain control of the hung local councils, which outnumber those with clear majorities. This issue has distracted the public from a crucial issue––campaign funding and expenditure. The NPP obviously outspent its rivals, who also must have spent huge amounts of funds on their election campaigns.

The Election Commission (EC) has asked all candidates who contested Tuesday’s LG elections to submit detailed reports on their campaign funding and expenditure, on or before 28 May. Commissioner General of Election Saman Sri Ratnayake has said this process is part of the EC’s efforts to ensure transparency and accountability in the electoral process. The EC has issued this directive under the Election Expenditure Regulation (EER) Act No. 03 of 2023, which requires all candidates to submit returns of donations or contributions received and expenditure incurred in respect of an election, to the EC within twenty-one days of the date of publication of the results thereof.

The EER Act has fulfilled a long-felt need. However, it contains serious flaws, which have stood in the way of its enforcement. Truthfulness is not a trait attributed to Sri Lankan politicians, and therefore the returns of campaign funding and expenditure are falsified in most cases, and they reveal only a fraction of campaign funds and expenditure. These returns are not subject to scrutiny. This has stood unscrupulous candidates in good stead, and the goal that the EER Act was intended to achieve remains unfulfilled due to the loopholes in the new law.

Unless the flaws in the EER Act are rectified urgently, it will not be possible to arrest the erosion of public trust in the electoral process. Election campaigns usually serve as a key enabler of money laundering and various forms of corruption in this country, as is public knowledge. Party war chests are the ground zero of corruption, as we argued in a previous comment, for they pave the way for undue influence, policy manipulations, etc.

One may recall that the perpetrators of the sugar tax racket under the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government were the financiers of the SLPP. The UNP benefited from the largesse of the Treasury bond racketeers ahead of the 2015 general election.

The submission of falsified returns of campaign funding and expenditure has made a mockery of the EER Act. Some anti-corruption outfits and election monitors have been demanding amendments to the EER Act to rectify its flaws. Their campaign deserves public support.

The incumbent NPP government came to power, vowing to eradicate corruption, and therefore it will have to ensure that the EER Act is rid of loopholes and noncompliance is severely dealt with. It is hoped that either the government or the Opposition will take the initiative without further delay, and Parliament will unanimously ratify the amendments to be moved.

Friday 9th May, 2025

The battle’s lost and won, but the hurly-burly is not yet done, one might say about the post-election blues in Sri Lanka—with apologies to the Bard. When the clouds of uncertainty will clear and the newly-elected local councils will begin functioning in earnest is anybody’s guess.

Since the conclusion of Tuesday’s local government (LG) elections, government politicians and their propagandists have been vigorously peddling an argument that the people have endorsed the way the JVP-led NPP is governing the country and reaffirmed their faith in it by enabling it to win a majority of local councils. This argument is not without some merit, but the question is why the people stopped short of giving the NPP absolute majorities in many of those councils.

The government has to come to terms with the fact that its vote share has declined considerably across the country; the majority of voters backed the Opposition parties and independent groups in Tuesday’s election.

There is another school of thought that the significant drop in the NPP’s vote share and the fact that the rivals of the NPP have together polled more votes than the NPP justify the Opposition’s efforts to secure the control of the hung councils. However, the people would have given the Opposition parties clear majorities in those councils if they had wanted those institutions to be run by the opponents of the NPP.

There is no way the NPP can form alliances with the independent groups, without compromising its much-avowed principles and integrity. The NPP has won elections by propagating its hidebound binary view of politics and politicians. The main campaign slogan of its leaders was that “either you are with us or you are with them, and only those who are with us are clean and others are rogues”. Having resorted to such ‘othering’, the NPP has no moral right to seek the support of the independent members of the hung councils. But the problem is that expediency also makes strange bedfellows. There is hardly anything that politicians do not do to gain or retain power, especially in this country.

During the NPP’s LG polls campaign, Prime Minister Dr. Harini Amarasuriya urged the public not to vote for the independent groups which, she said, consisted of undesirables who were wary of contesting from the Opposition parties for fear of being rejected again. All other NPP speakers echoed that view. So, how can the NPP justify its efforts to control the hung councils with the help of those independent groups?

Both the government and the Opposition ought to heed the popular will, reflected in the outcome of the LG polls, and act accordingly, instead resorting to horse-trading to muster majorities to further their interests, regardless of the methods used to achieve that end. Worryingly, the two sides are reportedly trying to secure the backing of the independent councillors and others by using financial inducements in a desperate bid to sway the balance of power in the hung councils. This sordid practice must end. After all, the NPP and the main Opposition party, the SJB, have promised to bring about a new political culture, and their leaders wrap themselves in the flag and make a grand show of their readiness to do everything for the public good. They never miss an opportunity to take the moral high ground and pontificate about the virtues of good governance. If their love for the country is so selfless and boundless, why can’t they sink their political and ideological differences and work out a strategy to share power in the hung councils, adopt a common programme and work for the greater good? They should be able to share the leadership positions in the non-majority councils on a rotational basis, if necessary. This is the moment of truth for the self-proclaimed patriots.