First stone
First stone
Posted 11:18pm (Mla time) Feb 08, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 9, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
RONNIE Amorado and Albert Alejo had quite a mouthful to say during the first Jesuit-sponsored anti-graft seminar last week. The seminar was part of the group's ongoing campaign against corruption, called "Ehem!", and was appropriately enough held at the Land Transportation Office, an agency that used to have a reputation, alongside the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Bureau of Customs and Bureau of Immigration, that truly induced coughs of "ehem," or less polite reactions from the public. Amorado is a professor at the Ateneo de Davao and Alejo is a Jesuit and the head of the Mindawan Initiatives for Cultural Dialogue of the same school.
The Catholic Church, which has been fulminating against the corrupt and ungodly, they said, should first look at itself. "The Catholic Church played a big role in corrupting the system," said Amorado. During Spanish times, the Church did little to fight official corruption, and even benefited greatly from it. "Remember, there was no separation then between church and state."
For his part, Alejo pointed out: "The Church teaches generosity and charity, but only in the form of donations to it, not in the form of paying taxes correctly ... (It) has given rise to the mentality that if a Christian has money to spare, he should give it to the Church rather than to the government."
It's good advice, the local Catholic Church learning to practice what it preaches. There's a whole history to show that the Church, though part of the solution, is also part of the problem -- probably more the second than the first. It's a Church, quite incidentally, that is itself cleaved into rich and poor, in part involuntarily -- some parishes are poorer than others, headed by parish priests who do not carry much clout among their superiors -- and in part voluntarily -- some priests (and bishops) believe that the task of Christianity is to build a Church of the Poor (or for the poor) and not a Church of the Rich (or for the rich). As with the society itself, the pocket of wealth and opulence at the top is matched by breathtaking deprivation below, a spectacular divide that doesn't suggest it holds on to values conducive to honesty, or indeed Christianity.
The Church is easily the biggest landowner in this country, and continues to grow so. Though apparently with the application of less duress now than then, even if the importuning remains strident and incessant. I know of a group of Leyteños who built a shrine to their patron, the Sto. Niño, somewhere in the outskirts of Quezon City, and who heard no end of beseeching from the parish priest of the area for them to donate the property to the Church, the better for them presumably to be looked upon with favor by God.
During Spanish times, the friars acquired much land by threatening landowners at their deathbeds, not often subtly, with hellfire in the afterlife if they did not make up for their sins by lavish tokens of charity to God's representatives on earth. The landowners, who had in life lived up to Balzac's famous aphorism that a great crime always underlay a great wealth, and being generally spiritual cowards alongside being physical bullies, were not always loath to buy off God with part of their loot. To the weeping and gnashing of teeth of their prospective heirs who still had a while to go before they got into that state.
Amorado and Alejo's complaint that Church officials slept with the enemy, or kept their silence when resolute crooks were also generous donors, applies as much today as it did in the past. The selective perception was patent in Jaime Cardinal Sin's fulminations against Joseph Estrada -- and remonstrations with the Protestant, and, worse, tightfisted Fidel Ramos -- on one hand, and tolerance of Cory Aquino and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo even in the face of wholesale pillage on the other.
It wasn't Sin who upbraided Cory for replacing Marcos' cronies with her own, it was a newspaperman by the name of Chino Roces. Though much favored by Cory for his role in fighting Marcos, Roces used an occasion held to honor him to speak out stridently against the corruption that arose after Marcos' downfall. It did not endear him to his friends in Malacañang, but if you are a believer you have got to believe it earned him points in heaven. He died shortly afterward.
And it wasn't Sin who upbraided President Arroyo for burning people's money like a drunken sailor to campaign. He endorsed her, in fact, saying she was the moral choice. Patronage runs deep in this country, though it wasn't always clear who was patronizing whom in this case -- Arroyo Cardinal Sin or the other way around. Arroyo was a beneficiary of Edsa 2, and Cardinal Sin often looked like he was merely protecting an investment.
Amorado and Alejo are right to suggest that the Church looks at itself first before it looks at anybody with an eye to spotting malfeasance. But I would go further and extend the advice to all the institutions of this country that propose to exert moral suasion on the public. The advice applies as well to business, which too has been loudly railing against crookedness in public service but which cannot seem to spot its own ungodly practices (investing in power is still the best way to do business in this country) in its reckless pursuit of gain. The same is true of the media which have been exposing perfidy in high places but which too cannot seem to notice the extent to which they collude with the perfidious to advance their own interests. And the same is true of us, the public, as well, who revile public officials who steal but implore them on bended knees to act as “ninong” [godfather] or “ninang” [godmother] in the baptisms of our sons and the marriages of our daughters.
The Church does have something wise to say about all this, taken from the very mouth of its Lord and Master:
"Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."
Posted 11:18pm (Mla time) Feb 08, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 9, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
RONNIE Amorado and Albert Alejo had quite a mouthful to say during the first Jesuit-sponsored anti-graft seminar last week. The seminar was part of the group's ongoing campaign against corruption, called "Ehem!", and was appropriately enough held at the Land Transportation Office, an agency that used to have a reputation, alongside the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Bureau of Customs and Bureau of Immigration, that truly induced coughs of "ehem," or less polite reactions from the public. Amorado is a professor at the Ateneo de Davao and Alejo is a Jesuit and the head of the Mindawan Initiatives for Cultural Dialogue of the same school.
The Catholic Church, which has been fulminating against the corrupt and ungodly, they said, should first look at itself. "The Catholic Church played a big role in corrupting the system," said Amorado. During Spanish times, the Church did little to fight official corruption, and even benefited greatly from it. "Remember, there was no separation then between church and state."
For his part, Alejo pointed out: "The Church teaches generosity and charity, but only in the form of donations to it, not in the form of paying taxes correctly ... (It) has given rise to the mentality that if a Christian has money to spare, he should give it to the Church rather than to the government."
It's good advice, the local Catholic Church learning to practice what it preaches. There's a whole history to show that the Church, though part of the solution, is also part of the problem -- probably more the second than the first. It's a Church, quite incidentally, that is itself cleaved into rich and poor, in part involuntarily -- some parishes are poorer than others, headed by parish priests who do not carry much clout among their superiors -- and in part voluntarily -- some priests (and bishops) believe that the task of Christianity is to build a Church of the Poor (or for the poor) and not a Church of the Rich (or for the rich). As with the society itself, the pocket of wealth and opulence at the top is matched by breathtaking deprivation below, a spectacular divide that doesn't suggest it holds on to values conducive to honesty, or indeed Christianity.
The Church is easily the biggest landowner in this country, and continues to grow so. Though apparently with the application of less duress now than then, even if the importuning remains strident and incessant. I know of a group of Leyteños who built a shrine to their patron, the Sto. Niño, somewhere in the outskirts of Quezon City, and who heard no end of beseeching from the parish priest of the area for them to donate the property to the Church, the better for them presumably to be looked upon with favor by God.
During Spanish times, the friars acquired much land by threatening landowners at their deathbeds, not often subtly, with hellfire in the afterlife if they did not make up for their sins by lavish tokens of charity to God's representatives on earth. The landowners, who had in life lived up to Balzac's famous aphorism that a great crime always underlay a great wealth, and being generally spiritual cowards alongside being physical bullies, were not always loath to buy off God with part of their loot. To the weeping and gnashing of teeth of their prospective heirs who still had a while to go before they got into that state.
Amorado and Alejo's complaint that Church officials slept with the enemy, or kept their silence when resolute crooks were also generous donors, applies as much today as it did in the past. The selective perception was patent in Jaime Cardinal Sin's fulminations against Joseph Estrada -- and remonstrations with the Protestant, and, worse, tightfisted Fidel Ramos -- on one hand, and tolerance of Cory Aquino and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo even in the face of wholesale pillage on the other.
It wasn't Sin who upbraided Cory for replacing Marcos' cronies with her own, it was a newspaperman by the name of Chino Roces. Though much favored by Cory for his role in fighting Marcos, Roces used an occasion held to honor him to speak out stridently against the corruption that arose after Marcos' downfall. It did not endear him to his friends in Malacañang, but if you are a believer you have got to believe it earned him points in heaven. He died shortly afterward.
And it wasn't Sin who upbraided President Arroyo for burning people's money like a drunken sailor to campaign. He endorsed her, in fact, saying she was the moral choice. Patronage runs deep in this country, though it wasn't always clear who was patronizing whom in this case -- Arroyo Cardinal Sin or the other way around. Arroyo was a beneficiary of Edsa 2, and Cardinal Sin often looked like he was merely protecting an investment.
Amorado and Alejo are right to suggest that the Church looks at itself first before it looks at anybody with an eye to spotting malfeasance. But I would go further and extend the advice to all the institutions of this country that propose to exert moral suasion on the public. The advice applies as well to business, which too has been loudly railing against crookedness in public service but which cannot seem to spot its own ungodly practices (investing in power is still the best way to do business in this country) in its reckless pursuit of gain. The same is true of the media which have been exposing perfidy in high places but which too cannot seem to notice the extent to which they collude with the perfidious to advance their own interests. And the same is true of us, the public, as well, who revile public officials who steal but implore them on bended knees to act as “ninong” [godfather] or “ninang” [godmother] in the baptisms of our sons and the marriages of our daughters.
The Church does have something wise to say about all this, taken from the very mouth of its Lord and Master:
"Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."
posted by Dante at 12:00 AM
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