Fact Check: Did Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith state that Lord Jesus is spineless and should step down from heaven ?

Facebook user Saman Sumanaweera had shared a post on how His Eminence Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith made a statement that Lord Jesus should step down from heaven if he is unable to prevent such calamities from happening with reference to the Easter Bombings, which happened on 21^st April, 2019. Post further mentions that Lord is spineless and could not take any action to prevent the deadly disaster, which took 250 lives.

Below is a screenshot of the viral post which appears to have been extracted from a local newspaper.

FB Post

Fact Check:

On carrying out careful inspection of the image we noticed that the above image resembling a newspaper layout, had mentioned page 2 (2 පිටුවට) at the bottom light, indicating that the expert was taken from a front page of the respective newspaper. Also the name of person reporting the story, Bernad Weerasinghe (කටාන බර්නාඩ් වීරසිංහ) from Katana was seen.

Hence, after examining main Sinhala newspapers for last few days, we came across the 22^nd July issue of Mawbima Newspaper, which had carried clipping similar to the viral image, as seen below.

Below is a comparison of the viral image (on the left) with the actual newspaper clipping from 22nd July Mawbima (on the right)

Therefore, we were able to confirm that the viral image is in fact an edited version.

Furthermore, investigation of the original video of Cardinal Malcom Ranjith on 21st July morning mass held at Katuwapitiya church, we could ascertain that he was referring to political leadership of the country as spineless by neglecting critical information of a possible threat. Cardinal Malcom Ranjith's remarks can be seen below.

Conclusion :

From our investigation, it is evident the claim that Cardinal Malcom Ranjith stating that Lord Jesus is spineless and should step down from heaven with regards to the Easter Sunday Attacks in Sri Lanka is false, and had been edited version of a Mawbima newspaper front page from 22nd July 2019.

In fact Cardinal Malcom Ranjith has actually mentioned that politicians without a clear policy should step down.