Arch-anarchist Father Xavier Francis redeems himself as peace pacifist

(A Report from Toronto)
 
Sixteen years ago, he was raising an emergency fund to meet the immediate needs of the LTTE for certain sophisticated small arms inviting a selected group of people to lend a repayable sum of Rs.25,000 each to purchase and dispatch these weapons. He was an ace campaigner for armed struggle and would have succeeded in his efforts. He is a strange kind of parson not quite sure how his moods will dictate his actions. Once he tried to force himself into a Hindu   ritual of initiating the child in learning the first elements of education much to the irritation of the parents. Today four score and for years old, Father Francis Xavier had a Roman Cathoic beginning that took him to the pulpit and the confessorial but celibacy evidently did not appeal to him.

Having met an attractive Sinhalese lass under potentially connubial possibilities, Father Xavier said good bye to his Vatican masters and like King Henry VIII who married six wives – or is it the other way? – and became an Anglican priest. He loved the Anglican vestments everywhere the parson went, the vestments too as adornmets.

As a supporter of the LTTE he was more active than of those of the Vatican hierarchy in the Wanni when the late Prabakaran ruled the roots. He admired the authority the late Prabakaran commanded in the Wanni and the way he administered justice quickly dispatching those erred out of their very existence or committed to dark bunkers of hell that he himself had constructed; and chained forever and never to come out again.

He was Father Xavier’s hero no matter whether he mounted God’s pulpit every Sunday and preached the gospel of peace every Sunday if ever he did because Monday to Satuday he advocated terror attacks on innocent people in Sri Lanka and with that conscription of children.

Conscious that not much mortal time is left for him, the Reverend Faher Francis Xavier has made peace with God and his people. In action, not just words alone, he made this determination  of his redemption evident in public by attending the Diwali celebrations at Toronto’s Sri Lankan Consul-General’s office and even participated in the lighting of the Lamp of Blessings and not missing to adorn his forehead with the Holy Ash too.

His great wish now is to make a final journey as a pilgrimage to his little village in Sri Lanka and pay homage to his people there and conduct mass on a Sunday morning.

To be or not to be is a predicament that ever bothered him. He went with the wind, storm and hurricane and the late Prabakaran represented the taunami version of his life. Sadly, tat was bad because thousands perished and regions devastated.

Anyway, thank God, Father Francis Xavier is a man of peace now. His conversion is a landmark crack  on the LTTE Diehard Fortress of Canada.