Nilushan Prasad Fernando, a government school teacher in Sri Lanka, observes that Catholics are again celebrating feast days and there are Sunday school sessions for children.
 

COLOMBO (UCAN): Fernando Cardinal Filoni, prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, made an unheralded visit to Sri Lanka to show solidarity with Catholics still reeling from the Easter Sunday suicide bombings that claimed over 250 lives and injured more than 400.
 

COLOMBO (UCAN): Catholic churches in Sri Lanka reopened for Sunday Mass on the weekend of May 12 as bishops stepped up efforts to ensure interfaith harmony following the Easter Sunday suicide bomb attacks that killed 258 people.
 
Church-run schools are also slated to reopen after state schools resumed classes on May 6.
 
Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith said Sunday Mass were resumed after consideration of the security situation in the country.
 

COLOMBO (UCAN): Sunday Masses were cancelled again in Sri Lanka as churches remained closed for a second week following the Easter Sunday suicide bombings on April 28 that killed more than 250 people.
 
Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, of Colombo, had previously announced that Sunday Masses would be held on May 5, but cancelled services after considering the latest security alert. Instead, he celebrated a televised, private Mass at the Archbishop’s House in Colombo.
 

NEW DELHI (UCAN): About a hundred people, including Muslims, joined hands to form a human chain in front of New Delhi’s Sacred Heart Cathedral on April 23 to pay homage to the victims of suicide bomb attacks in Sri Lanka that killed 359 people, mostly Christians.
 
Leaders from Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh faiths came together to express solidarity with the families of victims of the Easter Sunday blasts.
 

NEGOMBO (UCAN): American Jesuit Father Benjamin Henry Miller, who documented thousands of abductions and disappearances as well as other abuses during Sri Lanka’s 1983 to 2009 civil war, died on January 1 at the age of 93, in his small but beautiful room in an old attic of St. Michael’s college in Batticaloa, a major eastern city of the island nation.
 
He had been under medical care for age-related illnesses for several years prior to his death.
 

COLOMBO (UCAN): Sri Lanka’s religious leaders appealed for an end to the bitter political crisis that is threatening the island nation’s democracy.
 

KANDY (SE): Sri Lanka’s president, Maithripala Sirisena, will appoint a commission comprised of three retired judges to investigate attacks on Muslims in the city of Kandy by Buddhist mobs in Sri Lanka, Firstpost reported.
 
The government declared a 10-day nationwide state of emergency on March 6 and police imposed a curfew in the Theldeniya and Pallekele areas of Kandy after Buddhist mobs attacked a mosque, Muslim businesses and houses on March 4. 
 

DILI (SE): Lucille Abeykoon, a social worker from the Human Rights Office Kandy in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, is wondering why one of the youngest countries in the world, Timor-Leste, has made so much progress in the protection of human rights, accountability and the rule of law, while her own land, which has been independent from its colonial power for 69 years, has made so little.