Introduction

Looking back at the shrines discussed in previous chapters, a distinction has to be made between short-term cyclical processes and long-term trajectories. If we take Kudagama for instance, as the shrine grew in popularity so pressures were generated which increasingly undermined its existence. As the crowd of devotees grew, so did the amount of money given at the shrine. Suspicions grew that Father Jayamanne's assistants were misappropriating these funds thus tarnishing the shrine's sacred image. Similarly, as the number of pilgrims grew, it became increasingly difficult to control behaviour at the shrine, and the criticisms levelled against older places of pilgrimage such as Madhu and Talawila were increasingly directed against Kudagama. Such pressures were in part responsible for the growth of Suvagama and Katunayake, but as they grew in popularity so they too became the object of such criticisms. And in the case of Kudagama there was a further problem: the dangers of being co-opted into the mainstream of diocesan life.

Yet at the same time, another process was at work in the 1970s and increasingly in the 1980s which began to undermine not just particular shrines but also Catholic shrines in general. Clearly the sort of world hankered after by the faithful at Kudagama, Suvagama and Katunayake is a mirage. There can never be a return to the imagined golden age of the Catholic community in Sri Lanka. Today, Catholics form a small minority in a country dominated by tensions in which to be Catholic is increasingly irrelevant and ethnicity or political persuasion more and more important.