Harin Fernando kept father’s forewarning a cardinal secret

Don’t shoot the messenger, pleads Minister: Why not? When he didn’t deliver the message

Heavy must hang the head that wears the crown of remorse’s thorns. And for Minister Harin Fernando it must still give him a splitting headache this morn as it would have given him all week long for his failure to convey to his Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith and to his leader the Prime Minister the ominous warning given to him by his father from his hospital bed ‘do not attend Easter Sunday mass for a CID officer has told me that a fanatical Muslim group will attack Catholic churches on Easter Sunday”

As he told a news conference on that black Easter Sunday eve after the event: “My father told me not to attend Easter mass because he had been told by an old CID friend of his that churches would be attacked on Sunday. He specifically mentioned St. Anthony’s church in Kochchikade. I said are you mad and left.”

Good for him. But had he not kept his father’s forewarnings of doom unto himself alone, he perhaps could have saved the lives of over three hundred people had he not kept his dad’s warnings a cardinal secret. Nay, swelled by a sense of self importance, he considered himself to be the supreme arbiter of hat to do with the information received from his own father, he decided to dismiss it out of hand.

His Eminence, the Archbishop of Colombo, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith was not amused by the failure of one his flock, a minister no less, to warn him -- for whatever it was worth --intelligence of a possible attack on Catholic Churches. In fact, he was absolutely livid. The Cardinal on Monday castigated Harin Fernando in public on national television and said that had Harin told him that Saturday night of the warning, he would have ordered his churches to cancel Easter Sunday mass the following day.

Tormented by this cardinal rebuke, he rose in Parliament on Wednesday to defend his lack of judgment and even quoted scriptures for this purpose, then proceeded to quote from the Quran before returning to quote chapter and verse from the Bible.

He even went to the extent of belittling parent in Parliament and said “sometimes my father advises me not to travel to Colombo from Badulla or from Badulla to Colombo but I am not the sort of man who takes such advice. So when my father lying on a hospital bed with half of his leg amputated told me that a friend of his in the intelligence service field had told him that churches were going to be attacked the following Easter morning, I did not take any notice of it’.

What a pity. What a great tragedy. He did not think of asking his father the number of his CID friend and personally making inquiries from him as to status of the threat to churches or the trustworthiness of the source. No he just dismisses it out of hand. He gives it not a tosh.

Now he pleads to the Archbishop Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith saying ‘Please don’t blame me. I have been made to feel like Judas. Please don’t criticise me.”

Don’t criticise? Perhaps the Archbishop who publicly said on Monday, “I would have been grateful if I had been informed of this information. I would have cancelled Sunday’s service if I had been informed," privately feels Harin should be crucified for this grave lapse.

Alas, poor Harin who seems to think that he will not be man enough if he gives ear to his father’s advice may also have been, unbeknown to him, God’s own messenger to deliver the missive to save the innocents from the carnage that awaited them the following morn. He now says in Parliament, “Pease don’t shoot the messenger.”

Why ever not? He failed to deliver the message. HARIN: Telecommunication Minister failed to communicate deadly warning