Category: In Focus

A person living in the Middle East in the millennium before Christ, was bound to have a difficult time with the spiritual world. Literally, hundreds of deities, minor spirits, and gods fought for attention. Each ethnic group, often each clan, had its own pantheon. Among the gods known in the region, two stand out because of their following and their request to the faithful. Ashtart, also known as Astarte, was a mother–goddess, out of which the most important of the Semitic deities were developed. Her name appears in the Old Testament and Solomon built a temple for her near Jerusalem. Ashtart was the goddess of fertility and sexual love. Worship before the days of the prophets may have somewhat prejudiced that of Yahweh, the only God. While we think of the Jews as monotheist – that is following only one God – the reality is that, for a long time, the Jews followed many gods. It took the work of many prophets and reformers to understand that God is one, and only one. Ashtart was a danger for Israel: it was a temptation for polytheism; because the cult to Ashtart foresaw the use of swine’s blood, it was a graphic rebuttal of God’s request for purity; since she was often considered God’s wife, this goddess simply denied one of the main pillars of Judaism. A far worse god was Moloch. Moloch was a strong god who wanted sacrifices. During the rite of consecration, children were made to pass between two lines of fire. At times, children – especially the first child – were sacrificed to Moloch. Jeremiah and Ezekiel make the point that Yahweh never asked for human sacrifices, and that first–borns were to be consecrated to God through circumcision, not killing. All the same, there were Jews who followed Moloch – there was a temple near Jerusalem – and even others who mimicked Moloch’s cult and sacrificed their children to Yahweh! There were also a number of Ba’al, which means ‘lords,’ for whom small temples were erected on top of the hills. The prophet Hosea speaks clearly about the moral and religious ruin caused by this cult. The shrines were little more than altars where the fruits of the earth were offered to the gods. Yet, also the Ba’al were the occasion to run away from the worship of the only true God.   The dawning of Yahweh With time, the Jews used the names of smaller deities and applied them to Yahweh as a way of describing different aspects of Yahweh. The prophets used these names to show that Yahweh alone is the God of all. Little by little, the names of these smaller gods become some of the names of God. El–Shaddai, for instance, means God of the Mountains. Yahweh Sebaoth means the Lord of the Armies (i.e. the armies of the heavens). All the prophets called people back to the true faith in the only one God. They spoke of Yahweh as Creator, as Father and

The apostolic Church. Where does this particular word come from? The word itself cannot be found in the texts of the Bible, but what we mean by it certainly comes from the very person of Jesus, from His words and deeds and, of course, from the teachings and the actions of His Apostles.  Already in the first decades of the life of the early Christian communities, people started using this word to speak about the Church and its members. For the very first time, we also find the word ‘apostolic’ referring to the Church in a letter written by Saint Ignatius, bishop of Antioch in Syria, to the Trallians while he was on his way to Rome where he suffered martyrdom, killed by the beasts, probably in the Coloseum in the year 107. The second time we find this word is in the Martyrdom of Polycarp. Here, Polycarp himself is called ‘apostolic.’ He was the bishop of Smyrna until around the year 155. (Smyrna is today called Izmir, a city on the west coast of Turkey.) The most important reference to this term is in our Creed which was decisively shaped in the Council of Nicea (325) though, at that time, the text ended with the words.. “and (we believe) in the Holy Spirit.” The part that we continue to recite today: “… the Lord, the Giver of Life, and in the one….. apostolic Church…” was officially included there by the Council of Constantinople in the year 381, though the council fathers probably took the words from an earlier document written around 374 by Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis on the island of Cyprus.     ‘Apostolic’ in the New Testament The word is not there, but those who began to use it certainly did so to say that both what we believe in, as Christians, and also much in our way of living, as a Church, certainly come from Jesus and His Apostles. We could say that the first ‘apostolic person’ in the New Testament is Jesus Himself. The word comes from the Greek verb apostellein which means to send. We remember, at once, that Jesus used the words of Prophet Isaiah to introduce Himself to His contemporaries in the synagogue of Nazareth – precisely as the One who has been anointed by the Spirit of God and sent (Lk. 4:18). The idea that He was sent by the Father is clearly seen as the main motivation behind everything that Jesus said and did. No wonder that the author of the Letter to the Hebrews will call Jesus ‘Apostle and High Priest of the faith that we profess’ (Heb. 3:1). But Jesus is not the only one sent. From the very beginning of His mission, He extended to His disciples this fundamental dynamics of His own intimate life: “As the Father sent me, so I’m sending you” (Jn. 20:21). After His death, His every appearance to His disciples ends with words or gestures that send them (e.g. Jn. 20:17–18). And His

The adjective ‘apostolic’ is one that we specifically use about the Church. It is, in fact, one of the four words (one, holy, catholic and apostolic) that Christians, down through the centuries, have always used to say what we basically believe about the identity, the life and the mission of the Church.

On March 17, 1865, Fr. Bernard Petitjean found 15 Japanese outside the door of the new church that had been constructed to serve the European community in Nagasaki, Japan. Three of the women among the group knelt and said to the priest, “The heart of all of us here is the same as yours.” There had been rumors that in spite of more than two centuries of persecution, there were still Christians in Japan, the kakure kirishitan or “hidden Christians” who had secretly passed their faith from generation to generation. Those people who risked their lives to visit the Oura Church were proof that the rumors were true. The risk to their lives was real. Christianity was still outlawed, and when officials learned of their visit, a new spate of persecutions broke out focused on Urakami, a village on the outskirts of Nagasaki. This persecution began with the arrest of 100 kirishitan. By the time the protests of Western governments caused the Japanese government to halt the persecution of Christians in 1873, 13 had been executed and 3,000 exiled to different parts of the country. The origins of the kakure kirishitan date back to the 1630s after the revolt against the shogun government in which Catholics played a leading part. Christianity had been outlawed in 1587 and persecution began ten years later with the execution of 26 Christians in Nagasaki. When the Shimabara Rebellion failed, persecution became total throughout Japan and Christians went into hiding. Many fled to small islands where they would not be noticed by officials based in the cities. Some brave priests, Japanese and foreign, attempted to minister to the scattered Catholics but, by the 1640s, Japan was without priests.    Mass baptisms The evangelization of Japan began with the arrival of St. Francis Xavier on August 15, 1549, and aimed, like much of the Church’s missionary work at that time in the Americas, Africa and Asia, at the baptism of as many people as possible. Many missioners saw their work as a rescue operation, saving souls that were, otherwise, bound for damnation. One result was that catechesis was not stressed. Even today, we see the influence of this style of mission in Latin America and the Philippines where the Church has a broad, but not always, deep presence. People were baptized while having only a very rudimentary understanding of the faith. They knew some prayers (often in Latin) and some devotions to Mary and the saints. Some of these Christians went on to learn more about their faith and set up a system of lay leadership in the Church. When Catholics were driven into hiding, some communities were better equipped than others to remember and pass on their faith. As time passed, even the best-trained communities gradually drifted. Latin prayers, passed on to their children by farmers and fisherfolk, became garbled. The Hail Mary, “Ave Maria gratia plena dominus tecum benedicta,” became “Ame Maria karassa binno domisu terikobintsu.” It was gibberish, and no one knew what

In the wake of Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake, prominent advocacy groups are calling on the U.S. and the international community to reverse decades of racial and political discrimination and build relief and reconstruction efforts on human rights principles, transparency, and respect for the dignity of all Haitians. The director of one of the groups, Monika Kalra Varma of the RFK Center for Justice & Human Rights, commented: “Over the years, help for Haiti has been shaped by ideological politics and broken promises. Generally, the international community has made pledges to Haiti that remain unfulfilled. Donor states have human rights obligations to Haiti as well – they must do no harm. When states pledge funds to Haiti on which the Haitian people and the government rely to meet their needs, particularly monetary pledges to strengthen water, education, and health systems, and that money doesn’t come in, the donors violate their human rights obligations.” Some development experts who have worked in Haiti for years spoke on condition of anonymity because they have friends and family members involved in the relief effort. “There have been hundreds of millions of dollars in development assistance that have gone to benefit Haiti’s elites – government, business and the military – at the expense of the country’s common people,” one source said. “These elites have abused international aid as they have done nothing to create an education system, a public health system or any meaningful infrastructure.”  Racial politics has always played a significant role in Haiti’s history. Haitian elites “tend to have lighter skin color than their darker-skinned brothers and sisters who make up the vast majority of Haitians,” the source said. At one point in its storied history, Haiti was divided into two sections: the lighter and the darker-skinned citizens. In 1806, Haiti had a black-controlled north and a mulatto-ruled south – merely five years after a former black slave, Toussaint Louverture, became a guerrilla leader and overthrew French rule, abolished slavery and proclaimed himself governor-general of an autonomous government. For decades afterwards, Haiti was crippled by reparations it was forced to pay to former slave owners.    Corruption and selfish interests Another Haiti expert, Prof. Robert Maguire of Trinity College in Washington, said that the history of aid to Haiti has been a complex combination of corruption among the government and business elites of the country and the selfish interests of international investors from the private sector who “wanted to maintain the status quo” and who viewed Haiti as “a low-wage and stable dictatorship” able only to manufacture basic garments and other textile products. He proposes a 700,000-strong national civic service corps made up of Haitian youth who, he calls, the “wellspring of creativity, talent and potential.”  A civic service corps “would get the young and able out of the tent cities in and around Port-au-Prince to work. They could start with the once-iconic centre of the capital, but also could begin planting trees, working the fields and providing services in Haiti’s countryside,” said Maguire, who

In June of this year, from the Basilica of St. Paul-Outside-the-Walls in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI announced his intention to establish a new pontifical council. That council is to focus on the “progressive secularization” of once predominantly Christian cultures and territories. In his speech, in which the new council was announced, Pope Benedict indicated two important themes that are of special concern to those unwilling to automatically conform to the rhetoric of “culture war” or to the “clash of civilizations,” both of which are well-used means clearly implicit in any simplistic division of the world into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ The themes that were inadvertently addressed were that of “powerlessness” and of “desert.” In this short blogpiece, I’d like to explore some of the ramifications of these unintended allusions, and also add a third: that of the ‘stranger,’ a figure so deeply imbedded within our history of spirituality and so deeply challenging to this latest twist of the failed “new evangelization.” Pope Benedict remarked that, in the face of so many historical, social, political and (especially) spiritual changes, all of which overwhelm our human capacities, “it seems sometimes we pastors of the Church (are) reliving the experience of the Apostles, when thousands of needy people followed Jesus, and He asked: What can we do for all these people? They then experienced their powerlessness.” It is worth pausing to listen deeply to the nuances that are swirling under this one sentence, and the content of the speech generally, because here is revealed a primary matter of concern: that of power. For a while now the rhetoric of a siege mentality has dominated the evangelical content of neo-orthodox mission. The declared ‘culture wars’ of the 1980’s have continued unabated within the Church, despite having reached their apotheosis outside of Church circles in the slaughter of the “clash of civilizations.” In harmony with the deeply destructive range of narratives manufactured within a “culture war,” enemies are identified, ever more pure criteria of purity and legalism are enforced, and Gospel and Tradition become malevolently transformed into the weapons by which cruelty is given legitimacy.  In such an atmosphere of manufactured menace and threat, we are led to forget that our faith is based upon the very thing that many now so fear: powerlessness. Our faith is not based upon a triumphant messianic warrior, or upon ritual righteousness and privilege. Our faith is built upon the self-emptying of God, a scandal and a blasphemy to religious respectabilities and self-sufficiencies of the first century. Just as once the small imaginations of humanity created an elaborate divide between matter and spirit, time and eternity, holy and profane, now, it is between ‘Church’ and secular. We live as if Christ has not already healed that breach, as if the Kingdom is not already ahead of us, independent of us, leaven-like and, as the mustard seed, beyond the confines of the Church. The Incarnation itself is the holy ‘yes-saying’ that we, too, narrowly and presumptuously define as alien to God,

The 20th-century Catholic theologian Karl Rahner said that if the Church doesn’t recover its mystical dimension, then it has nothing to offer to the future. We are all called to be mystics. What does that mean? How could a mystic be characterized? Here is my list: The mystic celebrates relationality. The universe and planet from which we come are like woven-together fabrics, made up of interconnections, mutual dependencies and relationships. We exist in the midst of a living web. The mystic knows then the necessity of friendships, of the acceptance of brokenness and loss, of maintaining intimacy with the natural world that can teach important spiritual lessons. The mystic trusts that, since life is indeed a complex web of interconnections, nothing is ever really lost. Ultimately, every difficulty, too, is an opportunity.  The mystic is tough and soft at the same time. Tough in the sense that she/he does not deny pain, suffering and death, never seeks refuge in sentimentality, magic or hooey. The mystic holds a faith in life itself, one that can exist beyond despair. The mystic is soft when she/he nourishes a tender compassion toward all things and continues to love the silence, the dirt under her fingernails, the tangy bite of a fresh apple, the homely wild roses from a pasture, the sweet tiredness of the body after a day’s hard work. The mystic probably goes to some trouble to free a trapped moth in a window, yet is not overly concerned about her/his own comfort and convenience. The mystic lives imaginatively in the tension that exists between opposites.   The mystic cultivates his or her inner life and knows that the interior life exists not for his or her own sake but for the sake of the whole human community, for the planet. “What have you ever traveled toward more than your own safety?” asks Lucille Clifton. The mystic locates those fires inside her/him that burn in outrage for the injustices in the world. The mystic spends time with those passions inside her/him, that lust and thirst to restore beauty, equality and wholeness to a broken world. The mystic knows that spirituality is just a parlor game if it isn’t translated into action. She/he writes her/his congresspeople, volunteers at local soup kitchens. She/he organizes her/his neighborhood to buy from local farmers. She/he tutors high school kids who are having learning difficulties. In short, she/he makes connections between her inner stirrings and shiftings and the work that urgently needs to be done, in her neighborhood, community and bioregion. Her/his life is a wondrous braid.   The mystic believes deep down that it is, after all, okay to be human. We, humans, sin. We’re often afflicted with the most appalling shortsightedness. We are indeed capable of monstrous personal, systemic and societal evils. We are in constant need of redemption and renewal. Yet, at the same time, it is through and by means of the sufferings, deficiencies and limitations of being human that compassion is attained. We are

In a pastoral letter, released in November, Manilla Archbishop Gaudencio B. Cardinal Rosales and his auxiliaries, Bishops Bernardino Cortez and Broderick Pabillo, call on the government to address the “structure of sin” that lies at the root of the housing problems of the poor in the metropolis. The “structure of sin,” they explain, involves land values that are far beyond the reach of the poor and many in the middleclass; low taxes on unused land; and the use of vast amount of land for shopping malls, upscale residential subdivisions and golf courses.    The letter reminds that, to start the rehabilitation and rebuilding that follow the destruction wrought by typhoon Ondoy, a deep restructuring of society is necessary, beginning with the government’s urban land policy. To this end, the three prelates call for the following actions:    Ω Undertake urban land reform so that the poor may have the possibility to have security of tenure in our cities where their livelihood is found.   Ω Issue a moratorium on demolition of the dwellings of the poor if there is no humane relocation for them as our present laws require. Humane relocation would include accessible places of work for them.   Ω Make a follow through of the processes to allot public lands to the poor in the areas that have been given to them by presidential declarations. Let the public lands declared by the President be developed and effectively be made available to the poor.   Ω Enact legislations to raise taxes on properties that are idle, or to altogether expropriate them. The right to private property should not be given priority but be for the common good.   Ω Implement swiftly the Clean Air Act and other environmental laws by disallowing heavy and highly pollutive industries within our cities which are densely residential and commercial. The zoning ordinances of the cities should be reviewed. Heavy industries, and not the poor, should be relocated outside of our cities. If this is done, more people will move out of our cities to work in these industries.   Ω In resettling the poor and rehabilitating our cities, priority should be given to the employment of people. Informal settlers have grown in number because of lack of employment possibilities in places outside the metropolis. The “squatting” problem is not primarily a problem of housing; it is a problem of employment.   Ω Let us not blame the poor in the waterways for the flooding of our cities. Let us look beyond: the unabated logging in Sierra Madre and Mt. Banahaw, mining ventures in our mountains, haphazard collection and unplanned disposal of our garbage, irresponsible city planning and development of subdivisions, just to name a few. Together, let us take a hard look at our present practices and have the political will to reform them. In truth, we can say that the government officials and the rich have more to do with the destruction of our environment that aggravated the recent flood than the