Sustainability and Social Justice

The Catholics in the Aragalaya and the Aragalaya in the Catholic Church: Between Prophetic Witness and Institutional Pragmatics

Document Type

Book Chapter

Abstract

Sri Lanka’s 2022 Aragalaya forced the Catholic Church to confront its own contradictions. As a fragile minority within a majoritarian ethno-state, the Church had long balanced prophetic witness against institutional self-preservation; the uprising broke that balance, demanding the Church ground its legitimacy in the justice it proclaims and answer for it. Within and outside the Church, the Aragalaya was itself an arc bending toward justice—yet one still anthropocentric and instrumentalist, its trajectory curving toward human ends alone, with little clarity about what justice ultimately demanded. This study argues that beneath this reckoning lies a deeper tension: a mandate for justice the Church cannot renounce, set against a complicity with its own dogmas and institutions it has not yet confronted. Even a Church awakened to human injustice risks repeating this same exclusionary logic at another register. What is needed, this study contends, is a theology of inclusive justice—termed here multispecies justice—in which justice is the inherent right of all species and their habitats, not a human privilege. Such a reckoning raises the defining question of an emancipatory faith: does the Church incarnate the freedom it preaches, or endorse that freedom in word while avoiding the cost of solidarity? For the Church to be in the world without being of it, yet confine its boundaries of justice to the interests of the nation-state, or shelter behind dogma and self-interest, is idolatry—a breach of the first commandment. Politicians’ involvement in the struggle may be optional, determined by expediency; for the Church, it is not, since its mandate had already answered the question. The uprising sought a just political regime and, unexpectedly, the liberation of the Church—achieved through clergy and laity who risked pulpit, position, and peace, not institutional resolve. The 2019 Easter Sunday bomb attacks, which killed hundreds of Catholics, had already begun to soften the hierarchy’s conservative stance. Arriving amid Pope Francis’ and now Pope Leo’s push for global reform, the Aragalaya measures how far that shift actually went: cautious, belated, uneven, and sustained by a minority of clergy resisted by their own hierarchy. © 2027 selection and editorial matter, Kalinga Tudor Silva and Ramesh Ramasamy; individual chapters, the contributors.

Publication Title

Democracy Protest and Resilience: Reflections on the Aragalaya Uprising in Sri Lanka

Publication Date

2026

First Page

144

Last Page

172

ISBN

9781042533138

DOI

10.4324/9781003628859-9

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