Category: WM Special

I remember being profoundly disturbed by Fr. Eddie T. Panlilio’s announcement of his candidacy for the governorship of Pampanga in the election of 2007. I had known this soft-spoken man as the parish priest of my hometown, and as the founding director of the Archdiocese of Pampanga’s Social Action Center (SACOP). He is not a politician. A priest is the last person I would push into the public square.  But I must concede that drafting a priest to challenge deeply entrenched traditional politicians was a brilliant political move. “Among Ed,” as he is fondly called, was the perfect alternative gubernatorial candidate in a province that had seen the excesses of corruption in public office and the immense clout of organized gambling in the political system. The reasons that made him an attractive political option, however, were the same ones that provoked my misgivings about the wisdom of this move. The principal drawback was his being a priest – a moral agent of established religion who was seeking to take on the functions of a political subject in the secular world of politics. What is at stake here is something that is central to what the philosopher Richard Rorty regarded as the goal of a liberal culture – that human beings be freed from their unexamined dependence on traditional figures of authority and strength, so that they may begin to chart their own lives. Rorty was not opposed to people having religious beliefs. Indeed he saw this as a right that is as important as the right “to write poems or paint pictures that nobody else can make any sense out of.” But he was very emphatic that, in a “democratic and pluralist society, our religion is our own business – something we need not even discuss with others, much less try to justify to them, unless we feel like doing so. Such a society tries to leave as much free space as possible for individuals to develop their own sense of who they are and what their lives are for, asking only that they obey Mill’s precept and extend to others the tolerance they themselves enjoy” (Philosophy as Cultural Politics, p. 25).   To avoid partisan roles I believe that Rorty’s insistence on keeping religion out of the public square was very much shaped by his horror over the fanatical violence that Islamic fundamentalism has unleashed over the years, as well as by the equally ferocious fanaticism of the Christian fundamentalists who once surrounded US President George W. Bush. But its philosophical value goes beyond the concern about rekindling religious wars. Rorty was aware that one cannot presume that there is a single universally valid way of resolving the issues thrown up by religion’s presence in the public square. “Issues like these,” he said, “require different resolutions in different countries and different centuries. It would be absurd to suggest that there are universally valid norms that might be invoked to settle them. But I would urge that debate over such

The Church has always struggled about involvement in politics. For many centuries, in Western Europe, the Church was either the political power or in alliance with the political world. Later on, with the emergence of the French revolution and Illuminism, the Church was asked to take a step back. Some believed that there should be separation between religious beliefs and policy making; others wanted the Church to disappear altogether. With the advent of modern democracy, the tenet of separation of State and Religion has become widely accepted, even within the Church. The issue became very important in the 1980s. Many priests got involved in political parties in Asia, Latin America and Europe. The Vatican intervened in some cases to support their work, in others to forbid.  One such internationally renowned figure is Father Ernesto Cardenal, a Trappist priest who got involved with the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Soon after the fall of Managua, in 1979, he was named Minister of Culture by the new regime, a post he kept until 1987. When Pope John Paul II visited Nicaragua in 1983, he openly scolded Cardenal, on the Managua airport runway, for resisting his order to resign from that government. The Pope admonished Cardenal: “Usted tiene que arreglar sus asuntos con la Iglesia” (You must mend your position with the Church). Yet, in other cases, the Vatican ignored or even supported the involvement of priests in politics. At that time, many criticized the higher officials of the Church claiming that they were involved in political affairs, while asking priests and bishops to stay out of politics. Different is the issue of political commitment for the laity. However, even in this case, the Church has intervened, many times, to clarify how and when a faithful should get involved in politics.   The famous coin One of the most quoted Gospel passages regarding political involvement is Matthew 22:15-22. There, the evangelist says openly that “Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap Him in His words.” They told Jesus that they considered Him a man of integrity and a good teacher. Then, they asked Jesus if it were right to pay taxes to Caesar or not. Jesus responded by accusing them of trying to trap Him, and by asking them to describe a coin: “Whose portrait is this, and whose inscription?” The Pharisees answered “Caesar’s,” and Jesus retorted: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” At first sight, it seems that Jesus declared a clear cut separation between the affairs of the State – Caesar – and those of religion. People should submit to earthly authority – paying a tribute is a way to recognize submission – as much as they do towards God. Yet, at a closer look, this Gospel is much more profound than it seems. Jesus asks for a coin suitable to pay the tax. This was a denarius, a Roman coin. The denarius had a portrait of Augustus Tiberius and the inscription “Ti Caesar Divi

In an online article entitled “Where was God when Haiti happened?” published by the Kenya-based news agency CISA, Henry Makori bluntly and effectively posed a number of questions that came to the minds of many religious people after Haiti was devastated by a massive earthquake in January. Makori wrote: “Is God good all the time? Is God all-loving, compassionate and always acting in the best interest of human beings, the cream of His creation? Is every human being valuable in the eyes of God? Then why did God allow tens of thousands of innocent people to perish in such a dreadful fashion in Haiti? Is God all-powerful and in control of everything that happens in the universe, including the dropping of a leaf from a tree branch? Does God know everything? Why then couldn’t He use such awesome knowledge and power to protect the people of Haiti? “Is everything that happens part of God’s plan? What is the divine purpose of the horrendous carnage? What was the divine purpose of the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people in 2004? What divine purpose had God in mind in Rwanda in 1994 when He let nearly a million people die? And the Holocaust in which six million Jews were killed? And all the suffering that human beings undergo everyday? Where, really is God?” As Makori stressed, these are old questions that resurge with fresh strength every time a “natural” disaster (like an earthquake, a tsunami or a volcanic eruption) or a social catastrophe (like a genocide or persecution) strikes.   He Was Such A Nice Child! I put the word “natural” in brackets because it is becoming more and more difficult to categorize a disaster as such. We now know that human activities, for instance the chain from oil extraction to oil burning, can have numerous unintended and dramatic consequences for our planet.  But “natural” or social aside, the questions remain. A day after reading Makori’s article, I met a group of students in a Nairobi secondary school, and the day’s agenda was swept aside by a question blurted out by one of the students: “Our parish has organized prayers for the victims of the earthquake. But what is the sense of praying to a God who could have intervened before and stopped the disaster? Didn’t He know that the earthquake would cause such incredible devastation and suffering? What kind of God is He – if He is there at all?” In the course of the sharing that followed, a shy girl with trembling lips added: “I also do not understand why God did not save my cousin who was born with a heart defect and died last week. He was only seven years old, and such a nice child.” Other raised their voices: how about the hundreds of African children dying every day from malaria and other preventable diseases, or the Kenyan children who have to attend school in deplorable conditions due to reported corruption in

I share this reflection in the context of three excruciating experiences of suffering over the last few weeks. All of them forced me to engage God in order to find a way to live the three events in a positive way without giving in to despair and utter rebellion. I grow evermore convinced that engaging God in human dramas as Job, several psalms, many saints and numberless human beings did and still do is at the core of an incarnated faith which does not provide prefabricated and ready-made answers to issues of suffering and grief. The Holy Spirit leads us to positive answers only when suffering and the challenges of life bite our flesh and we let ourselves be challenged and enter into a Jacob-and-Job like fight with God.  Mount Sinai, the mount of revelation, is to be climbed, in 40 days; with its winding and steep path drawing out sweat from the climber’s body. Engaging God is the inescapable journey before one finds a personal answer shared by God and by people or the community concerned. We will never find a “good-for-all” and “for-everywhere” answer to the questions: Why Haiti? Why the tsunami of Christmas 2005? Why that fatal accident… or why that grave sickness? God’s answer is never theoretical and abstract, but different from person to person, like suffering is utterly personal and each human being interprets and reacts to suffering in his/her way. Theological reflection on suffering is by all means useful, such as for example Salvifici Doloris on the redeeming value of suffering by John Paul II in the Holy Year of Redemption and extraordinary jubilee of the Church in 1983-84. But over and above a document, there is a process, led by the Holy Spirit, which is utterly personal and unrepeatable such as a grief that one undergoes.   Multifaceted Suffering  Now a few words on the three difficult experiences mentioned above. The first is at cosmic and world level: Haiti, with its more than 230,000 victims, is the latest natural disaster of unprecedented magnitude. Every year, the list grows with more destructions and victims because, every year, there are and there will be calamities of this kind. They are part and parcel of our cosmic history and of our ecosystem. Gradually, we come to better terms with them through forecasting and tentative measures of preventions such as, for example, having anti-seismic buildings; but the process is slow; science and technology are not born out of the blue and human beings are not infallible. God told us: “Grow and multiply and take care of the world.” The journey is far from being accomplished. The mission entrusted to us in Genesis 1 to take care and exert a certain domain on the cosmos (Cf. Gn 1:26-28) in the ongoing process of creation is far from been accomplished; it is still an open-ended pursuit. Every day stars die and others are born in the midst of unimaginable apocalypses. Nothing is static! Our earth, as part of a