Features

Pope Francis pitches for renewed hope in a wounded world

Published

5 years ago

2020/10/25

by Rajan Philips

On Saturday, October 3, Pope Francis issued the second encyclical letter of his papacy, in Assisi, Italy. Entitled “Fratelli Tutti”, or Fraternity and Social Friendship in its English translation, the encyclical is a call for renewed hope in a world beset by pathogens and prejudices, through sisterhood, brotherhood, and social friendship. The Pope travelled from Rome to Assisi to sign the encyclical at the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi, after whom the Pope took his papal name and from whom he draws spiritual and temporal inspiration to fight the dominant prejudice of our time targeting Muslims.

Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) is one of the most venerated medieval Christian saints. Born to an Italian silk merchant father and a French mother, he converted himself from a wealthy and worldly young man to a spiritual poverello (little poor man), and at the age of 24 met with and managed to persuade the then Pope (Innocent III) to support a reform movement within the Church led by the so called mendicant orders. They were founded on poverty, humility, simplicity, and peripatetic preaching, and they helped rehabilitate a growingly decadent Church by re-identifying it with the life and sufferings of Christ. Francis of Assisi founded the Franciscan Order of Brothers and the St. Clare Order of Sisters.

The special relevance of Saint Francis, to the Church today and to Pope Francis, is in the inter-faith linkages that Saint Francis strove to create with his Muslim brethren during Crusades (1096-1271), the religious wars of the 12th and 13th centuries. In 1219, during the Fifth Crusade, Francis travelled to Egypt, crossing battle lines, to meet with the Sultan of Egypt, who graciously gave him permission to visit Christian sacred places in the Holy Land and to establish the presence of Franciscan monks in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The Franciscan Order has been a continuous and constant presence in the Holy Land ever since.

It is to this inter-faith legacy of St. Francis of Assisi that Pope Francis constantly turns for inspiration and encouragement. It is not the only legacy of Saint Francis. There are other legacies – elevating tolerance over condemnation, inclusion over exclusion, fraternity over alienation, friendship over enmity, and nature conservation over destruction. Pope Francis draws from all of them in his leadership of the Church and in his messages to the world. Even the encyclical title “Fratelli Tutti” is a phrase that the Saint used to address the brothers and sisters of the Franciscan and Saint Clare Orders. And the encyclical recounts the meeting between St. Francis and the Egyptian Sultan, and the Saint’s instruction to his Brothers during the Crusades, that in dealing with Muslims (Saracens) and other non-Christians, they (the Brothers) were not to “engage in arguments or disputes, but to be subject to every human creature, for God’s sake.”

Urgency and futility

Pope Francis holds out as example the leadership Saint Francis showed 800 years ago in dealing with Muslims and other non-Christians, that Christians should eschew hostility and intolerance and embrace humility and brotherhood. What is wrong with this message in the current situation of – what the Pope calls – the “wounded world”? The encyclical is a spirited effort to provide a long and elaborate answer to that question. The Pope was already working on the text of the letter when the Covid-19 pandemic “unexpectedly erupted, exposing our false securities, and the inability of various countries to work together.” Without Covid-19, the encyclical would have been a lamentation and a call for action on poverty, racism, and violence, the chronic scourges of the early 21st century. It would have been a sequel to his 2015 Apostolic Exhortation, “Laudato Si” (Care for our Common Home), and his joint declaration with Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb of “The Document on Human Fraternity,” in Abu Dhabi on February 4, 2019.

Alas, within two weeks of the release of the encyclical came the brutal beheading of Samuel Paty, a French school-teacher in Paris, by an 18-year old Chechen-born French Muslim, underscoring both the urgency and the futility of the Pope’s message. Sri Lanka experienced the same horror firsthand and on a mass scale in the 2019 Easter bombings. The reverberations are still continuing not only at the human level of those who were victimized, but also at the political level of others bandying ethnic misgivings and given to mischief making.

Fratelli Tutti may not have much of an impact on the men of the cloth in Sri Lanka, but it shows up what the Pope commends as the Christian approach inspired by the parable of the Good Samaritan – whose imitation the Pope calls for among fellow Christians everywhere “in order to rebuild (our) wounded world” of which they are very much a part. “The decision to include or exclude those lying wounded along the roadside,” writes the Pope, “can serve as a criterion for judging every economic, political, social and religious project.” The alternative is the path of political revenge and legal retaliation targeting whole communities and victimizing innocent individuals for the crimes of a few desperadoes.

Elsewhere, the violent ISIS movement may have become dormant, but there are flashpoints of conflict everywhere in the Middle East. In his own maddening ways Trump has redrawn the region’s frontiers of conflict disregarding international law, agreements, and conventions, and emboldening similar actions by other countries in their own backyards. The Netanyahu government in Israel has got whatever it wanted from Trump – relocating the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, new settlements in contested sites including the Golan Heights, and new agreements between Israel and Arab States further isolating the Palestinians, and thinks it can do whatever it wants in the Middle East.

In India, the Modi government followed suit in Kashmir, China snuffed out protests in Hong Kong while continuing to be heavy handed in its treatment of the Uyghur Muslims, Lebanon is left abandoned in permanent chaos, Belarus in permanent protests, while Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran are jostling for positions in proxy wars from Yemen and Libya, to Cyprus, and to the Caucasus states of Armenia and Azerbaijan. All of this in the midst of a global pandemic and its second wave.

The pandemic is nowhere as horrendous as in Trump’s America, where the people are also in the throes of a hugely consequential election. Arriving in the middle of a bitterly contested election campaign, Pope Francis’s encyclical has generated varying reactions among American Catholics. Liberal Catholics are reading the encyclical as a rebuke of Donald Trump, while conservative (Republican) Catholic commentators are calling it an overreaching “humanitarian manifesto” that is of little practical value even as it deviates from some of the traditional teachings of the Church. These criticisms are not inaccurate, but they are wrong.

Points of departure

For an encyclical, Fratelli Tutti is a long document, with eight chapters in 90 pages. A conservative American Catholic critic has commented on its “sheer length,” which at 43,000 words (in English including footnotes), is apparently “more than the Book of Genesis (32,046) and three times the size of the Gospel of John (15,635).” Much of it is also a recounting of the Pope’s statements and writings on human fraternity and social friendship during the seven years of his papacy. But the points of departure for this new compilation are in its timing, contextualization, and clear departures as well from some of the longstanding Catholic doctrinaire positions on private property, solidarity/subsidiarity, and justifying ‘just wars’. Like Francis of Assisi, Pope Francis is looking to embrace not the rich and the powerful, but the meek and the marginalized, the heretics and the outcasts.

Historically, as laid out in the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII, written as a direct response to the spectre of socialism in the late 19th century, property rights have been divine rights in the eyes of the modern Church. In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis falls back on anterior Christian experiences to declare that “the Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property.” In the same vein, the Church has privileged individual subsidiarity over the solidarity of the collective. Francis emphasizes the value of solidarity, and potentially as a basis for rethinking the foreign debt obligations of less developed countries. He decries the market being celebrated as the panacea to satisfy all the needs of society, and in the context of globalized inequalities, he calls for strong and efficient international institutions.

Although written from a “Christian perspective,” the encyclical is “an invitation to dialogue among all people.” Without “dialogue and friendship in society,” people will drift apart and grow insensitive and indifferent to the difficulties and problems of one another, leading to conflicts and violent eruptions. The Pope advocates “the culture of encounter,” and stresses “the need for peacemakers, men and women prepared to work boldly and creatively to initiate processes of healing and renewed encounter.” To be successful, “every peace process requires enduring commitment. It is a patient effort to seek truth and justice, to honour the memory of victims and to open the way, step by step, to a shared hope stronger than the desire for vengeance.”

While “forgetting is never the answer,” there can be no closure to any upheaval without “forgiveness and reconciliation.” Francis calls for the resolution of conflicts through negotiation and the United Nations Charter, and decries the rationalization of military aggression by “all sorts of allegedly humanitarian, defensive or precautionary excuses.” Given the proliferation and the hugely destructive capacity of weapons, the Pope asserts that societies “can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war’. “

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Features

Ranking public services with AI — A roadmap to reviving institutions like SriLankan Airlines

Published

1 day ago

2026/03/13

Thilina Walpola

Efficacy measures an organisation’s capacity to achieve its mission and intended outcomes under planned or optimal conditions. It differs from efficiency, which focuses on achieving objectives with minimal resources, and effectiveness, which evaluates results in real-world conditions. Today, modern AI tools, using publicly available data, enable objective assessment of the efficacy of Sri Lanka’s government institutions.

Among key public bodies, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka emerges as the most efficacious, outperforming the Department of Inland Revenue, Sri Lanka Customs, the Election Commission, and Parliament. In the financial and regulatory sector, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) ranks highest, ahead of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, the Insurance Regulatory Commission, and the Sri Lanka Standards Institution.

Among state-owned enterprises, the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) leads in efficacy, followed by Bank of Ceylon and People’s Bank. Other institutions assessed included the State Pharmaceuticals Corporation, the National Water Supply and Drainage Board, the Ceylon Electricity Board, the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, and the Sri Lanka Transport Board. At the lower end of the spectrum were Lanka Sathosa and Sri Lankan Airlines, highlighting a critical challenge for the national economy.

Sri Lankan Airlines, consistently ranked at the bottom, has long been a financial drain. Despite successive governments’ reform attempts, sustainable solutions remain elusive.

Globally, the most profitable airlines operate as highly integrated, technology-enabled ecosystems rather than as fragmented departments. Operations, finance, fleet management, route planning, engineering, marketing, and customer service are closely coordinated, sharing real-time data to maximise efficiency, safety, and profitability.

The challenge for Sri Lankan Airlines is structural. Its operations are fragmented, overly hierarchical, and poorly aligned. Simply replacing the CEO or senior leadership will not address these deep-seated weaknesses. What the airline needs is a cohesive, integrated organisational ecosystem that leverages technology for cross-functional planning and real-time decision-making.

The government must urgently consider restructuring Sri Lankan Airlines to encourage:

=Joint planning across operational divisions

=Data-driven, evidence-based decision-making

=Continuous cross-functional consultation

=Collaborative strategic decisions on route rationalisation, fleet renewal, partnerships, and cost management, rather than exclusive top-down mandates

Sustainable reform requires systemic change. Without modernised organisational structures, stronger accountability, and aligned incentives across divisions, financial recovery will remain out of reach. An integrated, performance-oriented model offers the most realistic path to operational efficiency and long-term viability.

Reforming loss-making institutions like Sri Lankan Airlines is not merely a matter of leadership change — it is a structural overhaul essential to ensuring these entities contribute productively to the national economy rather than remain perpetual burdens.

By Chula Goonasekera – Citizen Analyst

Features

Why Pi Day?

Published

1 day ago

2026/03/13

Thilina Walpola

International Day of Mathematics falls tomorrow

The approximate value of Pi (π) is 3.14 in mathematics. Therefore, the day 14 March is celebrated as the Pi Day. In 2019, UNESCO proclaimed 14 March as the International Day of Mathematics.

Ancient Babylonians and Egyptians figured out that the circumference of a circle is slightly more than three times its diameter. But they could not come up with an exact value for this ratio although they knew that it is a constant. This constant was later named as π which is a letter in the Greek alphabet.

Archimedes

It was the Greek mathematician Archimedes (250 BC) who was able to find an upper bound and a lower bound for this constant. He drew a circle of diameter one unit and drew hexagons inside and outside the circle such that the sides of each hexagon touch the sides of the circle. In mathematics the circle passing through all vertices of a polygon is called a ‘circumcircle’ and the largest circle that fits inside a polygon tangent to all its sides is called an ‘incircle’. The total length of the smaller hexagon then becomes the lower bound of π and the length of the hexagon outside the circle is the upper bound. He realised that by increasing the number of sides of the polygon can make the bounds get closer to the value of Pi and increased the number of sides to 12,24,48 and 60. He argued that by increasing the number of sides will ultimately result in obtaining the original circle, thereby laying the foundation for the theory of limits. He ended up with the lower bound as 22/7 and the upper bound 223/71. He could not continue his research as his hometown Syracuse was invaded by Romans and was killed by one of the soldiers. His last words were ‘do not disturb my circles’, perhaps a reference to his continuing efforts to find the value of π to a greater accuracy.

Archimedes can be considered as the father of geometry. His contributions revolutionised geometry and his methods anticipated integral calculus. He invented the pulley and the hydraulic screw for drawing water from a well. He also discovered the law of hydrostatics. He formulated the law of levers which states that a smaller weight placed farther from a pivot can balance a much heavier weight closer to it. He famously said “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth”.

Mathematicians have found many expressions for π as a sum of infinite series that converge to its value. One such famous series is the Leibniz Series found in 1674 by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, which is given below.

π = 4 ( 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + 1/9 – ………….)

The Indian mathematical genius Ramanujan came up with a magnificent formula in 1910. The short form of the formula is as follows.

π = 9801/(1103 √8)

For practical applications an approximation is sufficient. Even NASA uses only the approximation 3.141592653589793 for its interplanetary navigation calculations.

It is not just an interesting and curious number. It is used for calculations in navigation, encryption, space exploration, video game development and even in medicine. As π is fundamental to spherical geometry, it is at the heart of positioning systems in GPS navigations. It also contributes significantly to cybersecurity. As it is an irrational number it is an excellent foundation for generating randomness required in encryption and securing communications. In the medical field, it helps to calculate blood flow rates and pressure differentials. In diagnostic tools such as CT scans and MRI, pi is an important component in mathematical algorithms and signal processing techniques.

This elegant, never-ending number demonstrates how mathematics transforms into practical applications that shape our world. The possibilities of what it can do are infinite as the number itself. It has become a symbol of beauty and complexity in mathematics. “It matters little who first arrives at an idea, rather what is significant is how far that idea can go.” said Sophie Germain.

Mathematics fans are intrigued by this irrational number and attempt to calculate it as far as they can. In March 2022, Emma Haruka Iwao of Japan calculated it to 100 trillion decimal places in Google Cloud. It had taken 157 days. The Guinness World Record for reciting the number from memory is held by Rajveer Meena of India for 70000 decimal places over 10 hours.

Happy Pi Day!

The author is a senior examiner of the International Baccalaureate in the UK and an educational consultant at the Overseas School of Colombo.

by R N A de Silva

Features

Sheer rise of Realpolitik making the world see the brink

Published

2 days ago

2026/03/12

Sahan Weerasooriya

A combined US-Israel attack on Iran.(BBC)

The recent humanly costly torpedoing of an Iranian naval vessel in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone by a US submarine has raised a number of issues of great importance to international political discourse and law that call for elucidation. It is best that enlightened commentary is brought to bear in such discussions because at present misleading and uninformed speculation on questions arising from the incident are being aired by particularly jingoistic politicians of Sri Lanka’s South which could prove deleterious.

As matters stand, there seems to be no credible evidence that the Indian state was aware of the impending torpedoing of the Iranian vessel but these acerbic-tongued politicians of Sri Lanka’s South would have the local public believe that the tragedy was triggered with India’s connivance. Likewise, India is accused of ‘embroiling’ Sri Lanka in the incident on account of seemingly having prior knowledge of it and not warning Sri Lanka about the impending disaster.

It is plain that a process is once again afoot to raise anti-India hysteria in Sri Lanka. An obligation is cast on the Sri Lankan government to ensure that incendiary speculation of the above kind is defeated and India-Sri Lanka relations are prevented from being in any way harmed. Proactive measures are needed by the Sri Lankan government and well meaning quarters to ensure that public discourse in such matters have a factual and rational basis. ‘Knowledge gaps’ could prove hazardous.

Meanwhile, there could be no doubt that Sri Lanka’s sovereignty was violated by the US because the sinking of the Iranian vessel took place in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone. While there is no international decrying of the incident, and this is to be regretted, Sri Lanka’s helplessness and small player status would enable the US to ‘get away with it’.

Could anything be done by the international community to hold the US to account over the act of lawlessness in question? None is the answer at present. This is because in the current ‘Global Disorder’ major powers could commit the gravest international irregularities with impunity. As the threadbare cliché declares, ‘Might is Right’….. or so it seems.

Unfortunately, the UN could only merely verbally denounce any violations of International Law by the world’s foremost powers. It cannot use countervailing force against violators of the law, for example, on account of the divided nature of the UN Security Council, whose permanent members have shown incapability of seeing eye-to-eye on grave matters relating to International Law and order over the decades.

The foregoing considerations could force the conclusion on uncritical sections that Political Realism or Realpolitik has won out in the end. A basic premise of the school of thought known as Political Realism is that power or force wielded by states and international actors determine the shape, direction and substance of international relations. This school stands in marked contrast to political idealists who essentially proclaim that moral norms and values determine the nature of local and international politics.

While, British political scientist Thomas Hobbes, for instance, was a proponent of Political Realism, political idealism has its roots in the teachings of Socrates, Plato and latterly Friedrich Hegel of Germany, to name just few such notables.

On the face of it, therefore, there is no getting way from the conclusion that coercive force is the deciding factor in international politics. If this were not so, US President Donald Trump in collaboration with Israeli Rightist Premier Benjamin Natanyahu could not have wielded the ‘big stick’, so to speak, on Iran, killed its Supreme Head of State, terrorized the Iranian public and gone ‘scot-free’. That is, currently, the US’ impunity seems to be limitless.

Moreover, the evidence is that the Western bloc is reuniting in the face of Iran’s threats to stymie the flow of oil from West Asia to the rest of the world. The recent G7 summit witnessed a coming together of the foremost powers of the global North to ensure that the West does not suffer grave negative consequences from any future blocking of western oil supplies.

Meanwhile, Israel is having a ‘free run’ of the Middle East, so to speak, picking out perceived adversarial powers, such as Lebanon, and militarily neutralizing them; once again with impunity. On the other hand, Iran has been bringing under assault, with no questions asked, Gulf states that are seen as allying with the US and Israel. West Asia is facing a compounded crisis and International Law seems to be helplessly silent.

Wittingly or unwittingly, matters at the heart of International Law and peace are being obfuscated by some pro-Trump administration commentators meanwhile. For example, retired US Navy Captain Brent Sadler has cited Article 51 of the UN Charter, which provides for the right to self or collective self-defence of UN member states in the face of armed attacks, as justifying the US sinking of the Iranian vessel (See page 2 of The Island of March 10, 2026). But the Article makes it clear that such measures could be resorted to by UN members only ‘ if an armed attack occurs’ against them and under no other circumstances. But no such thing happened in the incident in question and the US acted under a sheer threat perception.

Clearly, the US has violated the Article through its action and has once again demonstrated its tendency to arbitrarily use military might. The general drift of Sadler’s thinking is that in the face of pressing national priorities, obligations of a state under International Law could be side-stepped. This is a sure recipe for international anarchy because in such a policy environment states could pursue their national interests, irrespective of their merits, disregarding in the process their obligations towards the international community.

Moreover, Article 51 repeatedly reiterates the authority of the UN Security Council and the obligation of those states that act in self-defence to report to the Council and be guided by it. Sadler, therefore, could be said to have cited the Article very selectively, whereas, right along member states’ commitments to the UNSC are stressed.

However, it is beyond doubt that international anarchy has strengthened its grip over the world. While the US set destabilizing precedents after the crumbling of the Cold War that paved the way for the current anarchic situation, Russia further aggravated these degenerative trends through its invasion of Ukraine. Stepping back from anarchy has thus emerged as the prime challenge for the world community.