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The Archbishop was speaking at a felicitation ceremony in Colombo by President Chandrika Kumaratunga on his elevation to the position of the Archbishop of Colombo and Metropolitan of the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka. Among the distinguished gathering was Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe. “And there is no way out of this situation until and unless we all get together, led by the leaders of the two most powerful and leading political coalitions in the country,” he said. Appealing on behalf of ‘all people longing for peace’ and on behalf of ‘all the people suffering, both from the ravages of the war, and from the unbearable burdens of day to day life’, Archbishop Gomis invited the two leaders to rise up to the call of the moment to work out the ‘critical’ issues in unity to bring peace and prosperity to “our battered nation”. “Foremost of these would be the peace issue; then that of the economy and health, and the rest would follow. None of these issues could be settled, unless there is strength. And strength is not possible without unity,” he said. “All that we experience in the country today is an accumulation, in geometric progression, of all that we have been doing in the past. It is the harvest of all that most of us have sown, during the half-century of our national Independence,” he said. “There is no point in blaming the past. The past is there only to teach us lessons. And the biggest lesson that our past teaches us is that whenever we were divided we were subjugated. This happened with the Portuguese, the Dutch and with the British. Leave it not, to happen again,” the Archbishop cautioned. “As Shakespeare said, ‘there is a tide in the affairs of men, which if taken at the flood leads on to fortune, omitted all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.’ I would add - there is a tide also in the affairs of a country and this moment is the crest of that tide,” he added.
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“As
the two great persons to whom the people have entrusted the fate of this
country, you are capable of seeing the tragedy of the nation… the
responsibility of pulling the nation out of this mire into which it has
fallen, devolves primarily on Your Excellency and the Prime Minister,” the
Most Rev. Dr. Oswald Gomis, Archbishop of Colombo said.
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