Legal teams of the Catholic Church are currently studying the counter-terrorism legislation the government intends to bring in place of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and the Archbishop of Colombo will not take a public position until that work is finished, Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith said on Friday.

The Cardinal was answering a question from journalists about the proposed law, Hiru News reported. He said the Church is examining the Bill through its lawyers, and that he would not offer views on it until those studies conclude.

That is the whole of his remark on the legislation. He did not say which provisions the Church is examining, when the study is expected to finish, who is conducting it, or whether the Church intends to petition the courts or make submissions.

The Bill, not an Act

Hiru’s headline refers to the “PSTA Act” and its report to a “proposed anti-terrorism act.” Both are loose. The legislation is the Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill, which was presented to Parliament for its first reading on 6 October and has not been passed. It is intended to repeal the 1979 Prevention of Terrorism Act, and it is currently the subject of petitions before the Supreme Court challenging its constitutionality. This desk refers to it as a Bill for that reason.

Why the silence is itself notable

The Catholic Church has been among the most persistent critics of Sri Lanka’s terrorism laws since the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks, and the Cardinal has been one of the loudest voices on civil liberties and on the handling of the Easter investigations. Objections to the Bill have accumulated from the Bar Association, Transparency International Sri Lanka, Amnesty International and the UN human rights office, and from workers and civil society groups who have protested against it. The government has said it is open to discussion on the Bill.

Against that backdrop, the Archdiocese of Colombo declining to take a position pending legal advice is a deliberate withholding rather than an absence of interest — and the Cardinal’s practice has been to make a statement once such a study is complete.

The rest of the briefing: education

Most of Friday’s filing concerns education rather than the Bill.

Education is not confined to a classroom or to textbook knowledge, the Cardinal said, but is a process of forming a complete person — one with spiritual strength and good character, able to meet future challenges.

He said the Catholic Church had given education priority from its earliest period, and that it had a founding hand in institutions including the universities of Bologna, Paris and Oxford. On that foundation, he said, the Church in Sri Lanka runs schools and higher education institutions such as the Benedict XVI Catholic Institute (BCI) to meet the higher-education needs of Sri Lankan children.

He argued that contemporary Sri Lankan society shows a deficit of discipline and has produced an environment in which people do not live in accordance with conscience or the tenets they profess, and that various social problems follow from it. Any education reform, he said, should give primacy to character development and disciplined conduct over knowledge acquired from books or in a laboratory, and a central task of an education system should be equipping children to face everyday difficulties according to the religious principles they hold.

Sourcing note

Hiru News was the only verified newsroom carrying these remarks at the time of writing. Searches of the Daily Mirror, NewsFirst, Daily News, the Island, Daily FT, EconomyNext and Colombo Gazette returned no report of the same briefing, and the live Daily Mirror and NewsFirst rails carried no item on it. The two named outlets’ own filings on the Cardinal in this period concern separate matters. This article is therefore single-source, and the remarks above are as Hiru reported them.