Bishops urge countrymen to vote for worthy candidates

Sri Lanka’s Catholic Bishops are appealing to their countrymen to choose worthy candidates for ‎parliament during the nation’s August 17 general election.  The bishops are urging citizens to think of ‎present and future generations by electing representatives with great care.

“Loyalty to a party should ‎not be the sole criterion for voting,” said Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, Archbishop of Colombo, president ‎of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Sri Lanka, CBCSL.  “The Catholic Church has always upheld ‎the importance of electing worthy candidates to the legislature as the people’s representatives,” the ‎bishops said in a July 31 statement.  “Educational background, general culture, integrity and honesty, ‎respect for law and order are qualities that should characterize those who are aspiring to political ‎leadership,” the bishops said. 

Bishop Raymond Wickramasinghe of Galle told UCANEWS that the bishops wanted to remind ‎citizens of their fundamental responsibility to cast an educated vote. The Diocese of Chilaw distributed more than 50,000 leaflets printed in the Sinhala and Tamil languages ‎among its 47 parishes insisting on the importance of casting a vote for a qualified candidate, Ucan reports.