Every hymn is beautiful. When we used to speak them in Latin…they were so beautiful. The masses of the past. They were beautiful. The masses from those days. 

Those days we used to get hymn books. They had the notations of the melodies in them. By readying those, we learnt the melodies. During mass, the priests had a big book. Inside, it had written music…Like that there was music. Even the priests read this book and sang.

When you pray, you must pray with belief. When you ask for something, we must ask with belief. Just because you ask for something, God won’t give it to us.

Earlier when they used to conduct mass in Latin, we used to recite the Prayer of the Faithful in Tamil. But everything else was done in Latin. We couldn’t understand Latin. But then later,  on 1965 they started conducting the mass in Tamil. It was then that they began conducting masses in the language of the relevant country. In Sinhala. In Tamil. It was the Second Vatican Council that discussed the issue and made these changes to hold mass in any language. Only on Sundays we used to have five masses. Out of these five, the early morning mass was in Tamil, the one at seven o’clock in the evening was in Tamil. All the other three masses were in Sinhala. In the old days, the people who spoke Sinhala lived beyond the river. When they came here