Tissa Balasuriya, O.M.I., the 72-year-old Sri Lankan theologian declared an excommunicated heretic by the Vatican Jan. 2, has accepted an invitation to speak at the CTA National Conference next Nov. 14-16 in Detroit.

Despite protests from his Oblate community and from Catholics throughout the world that Fr. Tissa had been denied due process, the highest court in the Vatican has refused to hear his appeal, because the Pope had personally approved the Jan. 2 action. As the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church commented, under present canon law "there is no due process to deal with the decision of a pope, no matter how unjust that decree."

What Tissa's book says
The book which caused the extraordinary Vatican censure is "Mary and Human Liberation," a slim 192-page work published in 1990. ARCC recently asked theologian Gerard Sloyan to summarize the book and the issues it raises. Here is his summary, as it appeared in the ARCC newsletter in March:

• Mary has been presented in the devotional life of Catholics over the centuries as the spotless virgin mother whose concern is for weak and helpless sinners, not as the author of the Magnificat with its fierce cry for social justice (Luke 1:51-53) or as the strong mother who stood as she witnessed the execution of her Son (John 19:25).
  
  
• Marian doctrines and piety have been developed on the basis of a reading of the Adam-Eve garden story as history from the time of Justin and Irenaeus onward, in which the myth has yielded insupportable teachings such as "original justice" and immortality before the "fall," a virgin Eve who tempted Adam to disobey, etc. Augustine's literal reading of early Genesis made this tale serve as doctrine in the West.
  
  
• A male teaching office in the Church has employed the doctrinal structure to keep its female members in a subordinate position, including incapacity to serve in every role of service open to men.
  
  
• The Church's teaching on a human race alienated from its Creator at birth is incomprehensible to a Buddhist and Hindu world; further, the way the doctrine of original sin has been taught is, in its effect, exclusionary of these vast populations.
  
  
• A chapter on "Presuppositions in Theology" concludes with an evaluation of the power of myths in other religious cultures, which must be taken fully into account by a Church that hopes to proclaim its Gospel intelligibly.
  
  
• "Mary in Traditional Theology" lays bare the way she has been presented in hymnody and catechesis in the author's homeland, chiefly through Portuguese influence. "Mary, A Mature Adult Woman" draws on the few New Testament places that describe her to show the place she ought to have in the lives of Christians.
  
  
• The book hints at, rather than spells out in detail, a soteriology in which Jesus is Savior as much by his teaching as by his obedient death and resurrection.
  
  

Sloyan concludes:
The book probably received the papal censure it did because it was perceived to have taught the "relativism" of all religions, Christianity among them. It is part of a growing body of theological writing that insists on the ethical demands inherent in the doctrine of human redemption and on the ways God is self-disclosed in other religious traditions than the Christian. Reading the book and the (excommunication) notification in parallel discloses two theological and pastoral mentalities not easily reconciled, as well as the far from minor irritants of the Asian author.

In its recent public statement, ARCC "encourages Catholic theologians to study the works of Balasuriya and other Third World theologians who seek to make Christianity more intelligible to non-Christians. Catholics who are concerned with the missionary thrust of the church must be concerned about the treatment dealt to a theologian in a missionary country. Rome, it seems, has not learned from the blunders it made in dealing with the early missionaries in India and China. By stopping the work of Fr. Matteo Ricci, SJ in China and of Fr. Robert DeNobili, SJ in India, the evangelization of those countries was largely brought to a halt."