Oblate played key role in reconciliation: U.S. priest drew on basketball, teatime in Tissa negotiations

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 20, 1998 by Pamela Schaeffer

Oblate Fr. Thomas Singer is unlikely to ever make splashy headlines like his fellow Oblate Cardinal-to-be Francis George of Chicago.

Yet, when the history of the Catholic church is updated to this century's final years, Singer will have earned his footnote as the facilitator who coaxed along a settlement restoring an excommunicated theologian to the church.

"What seemed impossible happened," Fr. Marcello Zago, superior general of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, wrote to Singer in early February, thanking him for his role as facilitator during six intense days of talks involving Fr. Tissa Balasuriya, declared excommunicated as a heretic by the Vatican on Jan. 2, 1997. Balasuriya was restored at a "reconciliation ceremony" on the sixth day, Jan. 15, 1998, a year and 13 days after his excommunication became public (NCR, Jan. 30).

Balasuriya's problems dated to 1990, when his Center for Society and Religion published 600 copies of his book Mary and Human Liberation. Sri Lankan bishops condemned the book in 1994, saying it undermined basic tenets of Catholic theology, including the doctrine of original sin and the divinity of Christ. The bishops gained the support of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who heads the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and ultimately the pope's support as well.

The recent negotiations, aimed at both reconciliation and face-saving, involved 10 Oblates, including the order's top official from Rome and the 73-year-old Balasuriya, who throughout the standoff had publicly criticized Vatican officials as bullies. Those officials were an absent but deeply involved party in the negotiations.

Singer, 65, said much of what he knows about facilitating groups is the product of intuition, some comes from graduate course work in social psychology and the rest derives from life experience, including strategies he developed as national coordinator for his order for eight years and, in his younger years, as a basketball coach.

As national coordinator, Singer had to balance the needs of five regional Oblate leaders. In coaching he learned that "the critical thing is momentum -- knowing when to maintain the momentum and when to break it, to call timeout," he said. Of the recent proceedings, he said, "I called `teatime' quite often when things were getting tense." Teatime is a custom in Sri Lanka, a former British colony.

Singer feels the impasse that developed between Vatican officials and Balasuriya before he was excommunicated last year was the result of dynamics gone sour, "of poor communication and miscommunication," Singer said. "There was a lot of buildup," a long standoff involving different cultures, "a lot to be tended to," he said. "We had to build a climate of trust, and it couldn't be rushed. Healing doesn't come from the outside."

The Oblates, wanting the situation resolved, had devised a plan during a general council meeting in November to send a reconciliation team to Sri Lanka. The Vatican, anticipating a synod of Asian bishops in April and May, was willing.

Top Oblate officials in Rome, including Zago, had done advance work at the Vatican, arriving in Sri Lanka with "guidelines" for reconciliation, Singer said.

"It was an ambiguous situation for us," Singer said of the worldwide Oblate religious order. "Tissa is one of our members, our brother." So ambiguous, he said, that nine Oblate leaders gave the process six days, offering Balasuriya an open floor to talk and be heard.

After reviewing events leading up to the impasse, "it dawned on me that he had never been listened to," Singer said. As a result, via faxes, E-mail, speaking engagements and telephone, Balasuriya spent the better part of a year protesting against a Vatican punishment he regarded as unduly harsh and unjust.

With positions hardened on both sides, Singer said the negotiations threatened up to the final minutes to slide offtrack as delicate points of Balasuriya's "reconciliation statement" were fine-tuned. "We went through nine drafts" of that statement, Singer said, running each by Balasuriya and the last two by the Vatican. In the end, there were two statements: Balasuriya's, which was signed by the nine witnessing Oblates, and a "decree of reconciliation" signed by Archbishop Nicholas Fernando of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Finally a "reconciliation ceremony" was held at the archbishop's residence on Jan. 15, where Balasuriya read a profession of faith written by Pope Paul VI. That profession was in lieu of a profession provided Balasuriya by the Vatican last year, which he refused to sign. Balasuriya's concession in the recent negotiations was to withdraw a caveat he had added to the Paul VI profession affirming the role of theologians in developing theology.

In his reconciliation statement, Balasuriya agreed "that the meaning of dogmatic formulas remains always true and unchangeable, though capable of being expressed more clearly and better understood." He agreed to submit future writings to bishops for an imprimatur before publishing them.