Religious tolerance

THIS is a value we ought to be more aware of and to promote with all our might these days. Our march to progress and development, becoming ever faster and more diversified, is producing a growing variety of beliefs, mentalities and cultures even in the very same societies we live in.

Governments can only do so much. They, together with other institutions, can only cover the more external aspects of this phenomenon of social pluralism. To handle the more internal aspects, we need to develop the appropriate attitudes and virtues.

Among them is religious tolerance. This is to build an atmosphere that fosters cooperation rather than conflict, mutual understanding rather than mutual suspicion.

Religion, to many the bedrock of their identity, should not be a cause of division. Rather, if understood and lived well, it should be a source of tolerance, mutual respect and help.

I believe that for any religion to be properly so called, it should learn to respect the faiths of others. One’s fervency and zeal in his faith should not be allowed to degenerate into fanaticism and bigotry. We’ve got to be clear about this, because the line between them is often thin and shifty.

Thus, we have to be extremely wary of forces that foxily take advantage of
religion. This exploitation often arises in the areas of politics and ideologies. When religion is used in these areas, it often ends up being partisan, divisive and entirely human and temporal in character. The spiritual and divine get lost.

We have to understand that each religion’s pursuit for unity is never marked by domination and coercion. By necessity, given man’s nature and earthly conditions, religion fosters understanding, respect and love for one another.

This is because in spite of our mistakes and differences, in the end we know we are all brothers and sisters.

This is especially shown when disasters happen. We spontaneously help. This instinct should be allowed to develop to its more conscious and deliberate form.

For this religious tolerance to take root in us, we have to learn to truly love one another, a love that always respects people’s freedom and rights, and a love that is shown in deeds and not merely expressed in words.

A certain element of trust, openness and interaction should go into the nurturing of religious tolerance. Other than what our natural prudence and discretion would dictate, we should be completely trusting and open with one another.

And a lot of contact and interaction is definitely a great help. As much as possible or as is prudent, we should always make ourselves available to the others. We even have to seek ways to be together more often. Unless necessary, we have to avoid isolation.

Our relations should always begin and end in the basic human courtesy of,
for example, greeting one another, talking and sharing whatever little things we have with others.

Smiling and taking care of the many other details of good manners will go a
long way to build and keep harmony among ourselves amid our differences.

We should be quick to rectify, even in our thoughts, anything that would undermine this harmony. Thus, we should be charitable in our thoughts, tactful in our speech, and generous in our deeds.

We need to be positive and encouraging in our words. Patience, or the capacity to suffer the defects and mistakes of the others, should be developed. So with being forgiving and asking for forgiveness when we are at fault.

Magnanimity should be cultivated. This is the opposite of what unfortunately is more familiar to many—to rub it in, to add insult to injury, to aggravate things. To be magnanimous is to be generous in forgiving, to avoid resentments, to be unselfish.

When discussing issues, especially those related to faith, the art of dialogue should be mastered. All parties should regard one another with respect. They should listen to each other.

As much as possible they should tackle more the points of convergence rather than those of difference. The latter should be handled with extra care, avoiding violence at all costs. Prayer should be fostered.

Down in Bohol

THIS piece is inspired by Michael Franks’ light and breezy samba song, Down
in Brazil, where, you know…

“It takes a day to walk a mile / Time just stands still / And when the people you meet look at you / they smile…”

The big exception is that Bohol does not conjure some dreamy images of good life and fantasy, especially of petty amorous adventures and sugary infatuations. It does not bewilder you in this way.

It brings you to the real, unvarnished world of its natural and pristine charms that come in sharp transparency. But it also shows all its local warts and cracks quite plainly. It seems unafraid and unashamed to expose itself as it really is.

I just had a blast recently of being asked to spend a week there. The reason was to teach Canon Law—that’s right, Canon Law—to a group of young and enterprising men who, coming from different parts of the country, have decided to hold a seminar in that southern island.

That reason alone already gives me infinite excitement. Imagine, teaching a
highly specialized and cerebral subject in a rural setting, reinforcing my belief that subjects like Canon Law can actually be learned anywhere.

It’s like living out the Latin motto: “Per aspera ad astra” (from the rustic to the stars), the ordinary prose of humble circumstances turned into beautiful verses of human greatness.

Besides, the class was given to men in different fields of earthly affairs—business, politics, academe, etc. They are taking seriously their faith and their duties both in the Church and in the world. This always fascinates me no end.

But all this has to take a back seat to the fact that Bohol is my place of birth and childhood. There I’m no tourist, visitor or stranger. Going there is going home. Spending time there is like returning to the past and to the roots.

You would understand if there I find the coconut trees swaying more beautifully, the wind blowing more refreshingly, the people more of my own with whom I could easily identify myself, etc.

It was nice to see the roads, still dusty though they may be, full of children with happy faces, completely simple and guileless. It gave me the impression life abounded quite naturally there and was swimming in rich potentials.

I’ve heard the province has become a favorite tourist destination of both locals and foreigners. As a kid, I already dreamt of when others would discover our beaches with the white, fine sand, our chocolate hills, our tarsiers…

I enjoyed them tremendously, and spontaneously thought it was a good idea, a supreme act of generosity to share these treasures with as many people as
possible. I’m happy to note this dream is becoming real.

But there’s one thing that I most emphatically recommend. This is to visit churches, and even more, to spend some time there. Many churches are truly and effortlessly beautiful. And they smell a great deal of history.

If you really want to know the soul of the province or the character of the
people, look for it in the churches. There you will see the instant and miniature portrait of the ethos of the place.

There is strong and living faith, in spite of the usual human frailties. Piety seems to be an inborn trait. And this, not only among the women, but also among the men; not only among the old ones, but also among the young ones.

I did some of my prayers seated in a corner of some churches I visited. Praying was made easy for me by just observing people coming in and out. Oh,how they prayed, showing practically their true colors before the Blessed Sacrament and the religious images.

Their actuations simply spoke that there is a caring God. If they could only remain like this forever, I prayed, even if their conditions become better or worse!

Down in Bohol, in dear old Bohol, I think you stand to get your faith reinvigorated if you know what to really see.

Bishops

WE need to have a continuing catechesis about the different elements that make up the Church. How can we as Church get our act together if we are ignorant about these things?

For example, bishops. To my mind, many people do not know what bishops
really are and do in the Church. Some think the bishop is just some old fellow heavily vested with special garments and usually invited as a VIP in town fiestas.

Others see the bishop merely as a manager, some kind of a CEO in an entity called diocese. This is specially so when the bishop is relatively young, exuding a certain dynamism akin to that of business executives.

There are many other misconceptions floating around that appear simply tolerated and hardly rectified, among which are that they are just a political or social force to reckon with in our body politic.

From various Church documents, we learn that:

- Bishops are successors of the apostles by divine institution. Through the
Holy Spirit conferred on them in their episcopal consecration, they are made Pastors of the Church, chosen and sent by Christ himself to continue Christ’s work through time.

- Bishops act in the name and with the authority of Christ, Head of the Church, to teach, sanctify and govern the Church. They are entirely dependent on Christ, and thus are the ministers and “slaves of
Christ.”

- Because the word and the grace of which they are ministers are not their
own, but are given to them by Christ for the sake of others, they must freely become the slaves of all. Everyone should also understand that his way to Christ passes through the bishops.

- It belongs to the sacramental nature of their ministry to have at once both the personal and collegial character. They always act in a personal way. But they also exercise their ministry from within the episcopal college, in communion with the Pope.

On their own, they get separated from Christ and can be like Judas Iscariot, who started doing things on his own and later turned traitor. The mystery of Christ’s choice of Judas as one of his apostles must be linked to the possibility that bishops, if not careful, can become traitors and false prophets.

No bishop acts alone, even if he is assigned to head a particular diocese.
His mentality should be that he is part of a college and is responsible not only for a part of the Church, but for the whole Church, linking the personal with the collegial, the particular with the universal.

And just as he cannot confine his concern to cover only a part of the Church, the bishop should always remember that like Christ, his only purpose should be to bring about man’s true salvation, ultimately a spiritual and supernatural endeavor.

So, he can intervene in political and social issues, but bringing in always the mind of Christ in these issues. The question is not whether a bishop can intervene in these matters or not, but rather in how he is intervening in them.

This is a very tricky matter, and thus, it helps a lot, at least for the sake of prudence, for a bishop to do his interventions with the greatest sense of collegiality with the Pope and other bishops, and following closely the guidelines already clearly enunciated.

Like Christ, he has to know how to deal with all men and with all earthly affairs, but without getting entangled in them. He has to know how to blend the old and the new, the eternal and the temporal, spiritual and material, the sacred and the mundane, etc.

For this reason, bishops need to take care of their own spiritual life first, and their own continuing formation. Because of the sacrament conferred on them, they have to realize that they have a grave obligation to be truly holy.

Pursuing sanctity single-mindedly, they have to go beyond simply having a
façade of holiness. In their heart should burn the love Christ has for everyone.

Let’s pray for our bishops, love and help them in every way we can.

Religion as unifying tool in society

WAS pleasantly surprised to learn that the French president, the newly elected Nicholas Sarkozy, is batting for the inclusion of religion in schools in his vision of a renaissance in the French educational system.

As you know, France, like all other countries in Europe, is a very secularized country, a country that in spite of its Christian roots is drowning in paganism. In these places, any mention of God is likely considered a cause for embarrassment or an intrusion to one’s privacy.

That is to say, it has become a hotbed of religious indifference and skepticism, a nest of agnostics, free thinkers, atheists. It has produced some of our most sophisticated and complicated philosophers. Its history, to say the least, has not been all favorable to the Church nor to things related to religion.

So to hear something like this is like a bolt from the blue, a rather nice, unexpected turn of events. We should be happy and hopeful, for this can start a train of good future developments.

Let’s listen to some of his words. They sound too good to be true: “I am convinced that we should not leave the issue of religion at the school door… The spiritual and the sacred always accompany human experiences. They are the source of all civilization…

“One can open up easily to others and one can dialogue more easily with
people of other religions when one understands their religion.”

There were other beautiful things he said that reflect vintage Christian principles. For example, he said that religion and spirituality are significant to the human person; that teachers should go beyond teaching content and assist the youth in character development.

He also asked teachers to help the youth to appreciate culture and to develop patriotism so they can be responsible citizens. He reminded parents that they are the primary educators of their children and promised to help them fulfill that duty.

There was just one point that I did not quite like. That’s when he said that he was not advocating for proselytizing or teaching within a theological framework.

To me, that statement deserves to be reexamined more closely. It’s true that the word “proselytism” has acquired a largely negative connotation down the ages. It involves coercion and deceit in persuading people to convert to a certain religion.

But “proselytism” originally is not like that. Proselytism is a necessary consequence of religion. If one is consistent to his faith, he necessarily feels the need to invite others to join his faith.

Of course, there are good and bad ways of proselytism. But proselytism need not be exclusively associated with the latter partial ways. Its negative connotation is a clear case of a historical or cultural overreaction resulting to an unfair bias.

As to his reservation about theology, I also feel it is quite sweeping. When one goes deep in religion, he cannot help but engage in theology, because faith necessarily has to be explained, reasoned out and spread, which is what theology does.

What has to be avoided is to caricaturize theology. That is, making theology a purely intellectual affair detached from real piety and charity, thus making it prone to be self-righteous and quarrelsome.

I suspect this unusual move of the French president hides an ulterior motive. The country is facing the danger of moral decadence that has to be arrested and reversed.

Besides, with a rapidly growing Muslim population, the country is experiencing intense social tension that demands to be relieved. And the need for a dialogue of religions and cultures is becoming more sharply felt.

It’s good that the president recognizes the unifying property of religion.
He may be using religion as a social tool, but with this move, he is taking the citizens’ right to religious freedom to the next level by encouraging everyone to take his religion more seriously.

As long as the president respects the natural course of the development of
religion, limiting himself to keeping peace and order where religion is concerned, there’s every reason his action can lead to his envisioned renaissance.

Religion as unifying tool in society

WAS pleasantly surprised to learn that the French president, the newly elected Nicholas Sarkozy, is batting for the inclusion of religion in schools in his vision of a renaissance in the French educational system.

As you know, France, like all other countries in Europe, is a very secularized country, a country that in spite of its Christian roots is drowning in paganism. In these places, any mention of God is likely considered a cause for embarrassment or an intrusion to one’s privacy.

That is to say, it has become a hotbed of religious indifference and skepticism, a nest of agnostics, free thinkers, atheists. It has produced some of our most sophisticated and complicated philosophers. Its history, to say the least, has not been all favorable to the Church nor to things related to religion.

So to hear something like this is like a bolt from the blue, a rather nice, unexpected turn of events. We should be happy and hopeful, for this can start a train of good future developments.

Let’s listen to some of his words. They sound too good to be true: “I am convinced that we should not leave the issue of religion at the school door… The spiritual and the sacred always accompany human experiences. They are the source of all civilization…

“One can open up easily to others and one can dialogue more easily with
people of other religions when one understands their religion.”

There were other beautiful things he said that reflect vintage Christian principles. For example, he said that religion and spirituality are significant to the human person; that teachers should go beyond teaching content and assist the youth in character development.

He also asked teachers to help the youth to appreciate culture and to develop patriotism so they can be responsible citizens. He reminded parents that they are the primary educators of their children and promised to help them fulfill that duty.

There was just one point that I did not quite like. That’s when he said that he was not advocating for proselytizing or teaching within a theological framework.

To me, that statement deserves to be reexamined more closely. It’s true that the word “proselytism” has acquired a largely negative connotation down the ages. It involves coercion and deceit in persuading people to convert to a certain religion.

But “proselytism” originally is not like that. Proselytism is a necessary consequence of religion. If one is consistent to his faith, he necessarily feels the need to invite others to join his faith.

Of course, there are good and bad ways of proselytism. But proselytism need not be exclusively associated with the latter partial ways. Its negative connotation is a clear case of a historical or cultural overreaction resulting to an unfair bias.

As to his reservation about theology, I also feel it is quite sweeping. When one goes deep in religion, he cannot help but engage in theology, because faith necessarily has to be explained, reasoned out and spread, which is what theology does.

What has to be avoided is to caricaturize theology. That is, making theology a purely intellectual affair detached from real piety and charity, thus making it prone to be self-righteous and quarrelsome.

I suspect this unusual move of the French president hides an ulterior motive. The country is facing the danger of moral decadence that has to be arrested and reversed.

Besides, with a rapidly growing Muslim population, the country is experiencing intense social tension that demands to be relieved. And the need for a dialogue of religions and cultures is becoming more sharply felt.

It’s good that the president recognizes the unifying property of religion.
He may be using religion as a social tool, but with this move, he is taking the citizens’ right to religious freedom to the next level by encouraging everyone to take his religion more seriously.

As long as the president respects the natural course of the development of
religion, limiting himself to keeping peace and order where religion is concerned, there’s every reason his action can lead to his envisioned renaissance.

Virtual world

THAT’S the world created by the Internet. It’s a 3-dimensional electronic environment where a user as an avatar can interact with a viewer to change variables. Now you don’t have to go out to socialize. All you need to do is to turn on your Internet.

As of now, it is concentrated on games and, sadly, other not-so-clean fun gimmicks, like dating services and soft-porn. But it need not stop there. Many other useful possibilities exist.

This is definitely something new to me, and to most of my generation, I believe. When someone talked about it recently, I can’t help but feel suddenly old, useless and irrelevant.

I realize I had to double time to catch up with the developments. Interesting things are now happening in this virtual world. I have to break that digital divide. I hope the transition will not be very painful and costly.

In short, at issue here is the challenge today for most of us to acquire media literacy. We can’t get stuck in one place or in one time-frame anymore. While we have our own niches, we need to continually interact with more and more people in the richness of their variety.

This is especially meaningful to me, since only recently did I get reminded that a person grows precisely in being a person to the extent that he is able to develop more and better relationships with God and with others.

We can have our preferences and all that, but at the end of the day what really matters is when we are able to be open to everyone no matter how different one may be from us.

Back to the virtual world, many wonderful uses can be found. You want to browse through new books not yet available locally, you can do so in the virtual bookstore.

Or you want to read books in a library, attend classes on economics, or visit a museum, or pray in a particular chapel, you can do so in the virtual world. You’ll be afforded a certain degree of interaction with other characters there. Your life grows in the virtual world.

I was told that there are now millions actively participating in this community. There is also the possibility of changing your identity, or having different identities. Though the user profile is still elitist in character, it is believed that that will soon change.

As can be readily seen, the possibilities the virtual world offers can be mind-boggling. And thus the need to humanize and Christianize it is becoming urgent. It cannot be allowed to develop mainly through purely economic and social criteria.

That’s why I was happy to know that a group of young men, professionals and experts in this field, are studying the possibility to put heart and soul into this exciting stage of our development.

They’re drumming up a number of activities and conferences to familiarize more and more people about the possibilities of the virtual world. They are inviting those interested to help in any way they can. There’s a lot of work to do.

There’s a need to create a good, healthy culture of the virtual world. It should help people to become better persons, where pursuit of knowledge and widening of network would make them more open to the others.

We have to prevent the virtual world from becoming a center for vices and empty and frivolous, if not sinful, pursuits. Sad to say, this is what we are seeing often these days. With the wrong attitude, people can worsen in selfishness and narrow-mindedness when they use the virtual world.

For sure, a certain level of human and moral maturity is needed here. To distinguish between the essential and non-essential, the prudent and the dangerous is a skill to master if one doesn’t like getting lost in the maze.

We have to learn to be very discriminating, without being discriminatory. Those who will be working in this field should have a good and firm grasp of what really constitutes the good of man and his proper development.

In this regard, we cannot afford to be sophomoric.

Pregnant by whom?

I PRAY that journalists, editors, publishers and other media practitioners give special attention to the finer points of propriety and good taste when doing their work.

Some check-and-balance mechanisms should be put in place to guarantee this ideal. Many media workers seem to work solely on their own, unsupervised, vulnerable to be frivolous, flippant, fetishistic, and end up becoming like loose cannons, especially where morals are concerned.

Everyone, of course, has to be concerned about this. But those in the media, particularly those in the entertainment section, should feel specially referred to when questions of correctness and decorum are raised.

They shape public opinion, they exert tremendous influence on social sentiments. They cannot take refuge in the alibi that no one is forced to read or listen to them if he doesn’t want to.

Truth is whether people want to read them or not, they are on flagrant display. Besides, they do everything to grab attention, screaming and ruthlessly using all the tricks of sensationalism. They can easily victimize and prey on the young and naïve, and on the weak in general.

It’s well-known that nowadays, the right to expression and our need for information are often corrupted by vanity and pride, plus greed. These capital sins usually go together, forming a formidable force, both soft and hard, making it hard to resist.

The other day, I was struck to see on the ear of the front page of a local paper, an item entitled: “Halle Berry pregnant by Gabriel Aubry” I immediately felt something was gravely wrong in that piece of pure gossip.

The first thing that came to my mind is that pregnancy is a very delicate topic that is treated with a lot of discretion. Unless one is a public figure, that condition is usually held from public knowledge.

Of course, Halle Berry is a star of some caliber. We can give her the benefit of the doubt that her pregnancy deserves to be known by people, especially her fans.

But the next information jarred me. She is “pregnant by Gabriel Aubry.” Why should the by-line be made? Is it not automatically understood that a woman
gets pregnant by her husband? There’s an implicit suggestion she can be pregnant next year by another man, if she chooses to.

As I started to read the story, I learned the man is not her husband, but just a boyfriend of two-year standing. Rubbing it in, she is quoted as saying that she “was waiting for this event to happen” and that she’ll never marry him, as if to dismiss any incorrectness of her actuation.

It would seem that nowadays, pregnancy can be detached from marriage. Of course, that’s nothing new. Since time immemorial cases like this abounded. What’s new is to consider it just ok, nothing to worry about really.

Is this the message we want to convey to the people, especially to the young? This clearly violates our natural sense of morality, not to mention, Christian morality, and I think it is still very offensive to our culture.

As chaplain of technical schools for boys and girls, I cannot help but feel disturbed whenever items like this appear in the papers. They clearly contribute to the corruption of young people’s minds.

Through the years my task of teaching about the nature and purpose of human sexuality, marriage, love, family, and virtues like chastity and modesty is
becoming more and more difficult.

I see a lot of ignorance and confusion, where things were not as bad before. The youth then in general knew the fundamental morals on sexuality and love. Now, I notice a more lax and erroneous attitude toward sexual ethics, and justified at that, even among the young girls.

I think we have to acknowledge the problem in its objective condition. It’s
getting to be very terrifying. All of us should try to do something to help solve it.

In this regard, those in media play an important role. For one, media officials can make an audit of the kind of persons manning the entertainment sections. These should be impregnated with the proper values first.

Looking and seeing

I REMEMBER an old song, happily revived in a movie some years ago, that has a line that struck me while I was watching the film. The line was: “I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you.”

Of course, the song had a beautiful, haunting melody. That, in itself, was
enough to enthrall me, a hopeless romantic, especially in my younger years. But the line resurrected my curiosity in probing the difference between looking and seeing.

Both actions involve our eyes. But I think there’s a big difference between
looking and seeing. Looking is the more active and intentional act. While seeing is the more passive and receptive act.

Looking uses the eyes as its door of exit, projecting what is inside a person’s mind and heart. It gives meaning and color to what one sees. Like the mouth spoken of in the gospel—“Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks”—the eyes used in looking practically reveal what’s inside us.

Seeing uses the eyes as its entrance door, apprehending things around and
eliciting instinctive reactions in our inner senses. It discerns qualities like shape, size, color, position and posture crucial for us to start to know and relate things.

It’s good that we learn to distinguish between the two so that we later on would know how to put them together. We may separate them from time to time, for some reasons, but in the end, they go together. As I understand it, the process looks like we first see things, then
we
look at them, then we see them again in a different light. The first seeing is an entirely sensible act. When we start to look, we apply our intelligence to what we see. That’s when we see things differently now.

Again as I understand it, the process is a continuing cycle that can either be an upward spiral toward our development and maturity, or a downward spiral to our regression and perversity.

Thus, a great sense of responsibility has to infuse our seeing and looking. We just cannot be complacent about this duty, simply allowing our instincts and emotions to rule over them. Our intelligence, then our faith, has to guide them. Nothing less than our dignity is at stake here.

I remember that in my teen years, someone close to me advised me to avoid
looking at certain things that I might see. He talked to me about developing a custody of the eyes, which later on developed into a custody of the heart.

I understood the advice, and was mightily thankful for it because it helped
me cruise safely those tricky and turbulent adolescent years. It was not easy, but I managed to survive, thanks be to God.

To a large extent, it’s skills like this, knowing how to distinguish and relate looking and seeing, that help us to maintain purity of eyes and purity of heart, crucial in seeing God, as the beatitude affirms:

“Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.” (Mt. 5,8). And again: “Blessed are your eyes, because they see…” (Mt 13,16)

The proper use of our eyes in the endless cycle of looking and seeing is indispensable if we want to immerse ourselves ultimately in God while still in this world.

With our eyes, we should not just be confined to the physical and natural world. With our eyes, we can enter the world of faith and love, of spiritual and supernatural realities. A living connection is then made between our senses and our soul.

This is actually what those mature Christian souls, the contemplatives, enjoy. These people may look like us, and yet they see things very differently. They can see God in everything.

Even the ugliest things our biological eyes see can occasion the presence and mercy of God when seen with the developed eyes of faith and burning love of God.

We should try to arrive at this condition of our eyes. When you have another eye check with your ophthalmologist, try to check your spiritual vision also.

People power

I THINK the concept of people power has to be redefined, or better said, allowed to grow and develop into its more mature form. It’s been crying for this need. We should give more serious attention to it. It should not be wasted.

As it is now, it looks like it’s a tool exploited by unscrupulous politicians quick to cause mob rule to advance their political views. Often these views are clearly selfish and narrow but cleverly dressed as something good for the people.

For this purpose, many calculating politicians want people power to remain puerile and stunted, that can easily be swayed by any wind of sentiment and doctrine that happen to win popularity at a given moment.

That is, they want the people to be childish: shallow in thinking, rash in judgment, and drastic, even violent in action. They just want the people to hang on the politicians’ skirts, or to stick like a shadow of these men.

This clearly goes against what St. Paul advised: “Brethren, do not become children in sense, but in malice be children, and in sense be perfect.” (1 Cor 14,20)

Or what our Lord himself said: “Behold, I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be therefore wise as serpents and simples as doves.” (Mt 10,16)

People power has to gain more depth and insight, more prudence and active vigilance, better ability to effect change in a more human way. It has to stay away from the volatility and instability of raging passions and mindless mob actions.

This will obviously require continuing education. I hope that everyone helps, as well as realizes that he also has to learn. The families, schools and the Church should spearhead this. But the effort should also be reinforced by the media and by the politicians themselves.

There are basic guidelines to follow. A very fundamental virtue in this regard is prudence. It is the ability to weigh things properly. It involves study, data gathering, consultations and dialogue, then judgment, a plan of action, and action itself. Short of action, prudence would not be authentic prudence.

As a virtue, prudence has to be a permanent feature in our actions, a living element much like our heartbeat. We have to say this, because there are people who think prudence comes only when we are faced with special concerns.

Prudence, being a living virtue, should be open to everything. This does not mean that we assume the attitude of anything goes. It simply means we are willing to begin and begin again, do and redo things, reinvent and renew ourselves as often as necessary.

In this regard, it would be good to understand well the ways of freedom and
charity. This is crucial because in tackling different views and opinions, we have to respect one another’s positions. No need for intrigue-sowing, nor for bickering, judging people’s motives, etc.

No matter how we may disagree from one another, at the end of the day we
are all brothers and sisters who are obliged to love one another. Sooner or later, the best position, the most fair and acceptable, will prevail. We need to be patient and to have good control over our emotions and passions.

With a more prudent people power, we can calmly sift what are essential from what are not in any given issue, we can set proper priorities for our development strategies. We have to be wary of some politician’s diversionary, if not destabilizing tactics.

With a more vigilant people power, we can sooner or later detect moves and initiatives that are not really in step with the demands of the common good. We can discern those clever, manipulative, and self-serving actions of politicians.

We can be good watchdogs, knowledgeable, for example, about the steps projects have to take from start to finish, and able to monitor the flow of responsibility and money involved.

This is crucial to our social life and unity. It’s only in this way that we can hope corruption in government offices high and low can be minimized, if not eliminated and made a thing of the past.

People power

I THINK the concept of people power has to be redefined, or better said, allowed to grow and develop into its more mature form. It’s been crying for this need. We should give more serious attention to it. It should not be wasted.

As it is now, it looks like it’s a tool exploited by unscrupulous politicians quick to cause mob rule to advance their political views. Often these views are clearly selfish and narrow but cleverly dressed as something good for the people.

For this purpose, many calculating politicians want people power to remain puerile and stunted, that can easily be swayed by any wind of sentiment and doctrine that happen to win popularity at a given moment.

That is, they want the people to be childish: shallow in thinking, rash in judgment, and drastic, even violent in action. They just want the people to hang on the politicians’ skirts, or to stick like a shadow of these men.

This clearly goes against what St. Paul advised: “Brethren, do not become children in sense, but in malice be children, and in sense be perfect.” (1 Cor 14,20)

Or what our Lord himself said: “Behold, I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be therefore wise as serpents and simples as doves.” (Mt 10,16)

People power has to gain more depth and insight, more prudence and active vigilance, better ability to effect change in a more human way. It has to stay away from the volatility and instability of raging passions and mindless mob actions.

This will obviously require continuing education. I hope that everyone helps, as well as realizes that he also has to learn. The families, schools and the Church should spearhead this. But the effort should also be reinforced by the media and by the politicians themselves.

There are basic guidelines to follow. A very fundamental virtue in this regard is prudence. It is the ability to weigh things properly. It involves study, data gathering, consultations and dialogue, then judgment, a plan of action, and action itself. Short of action, prudence would not be authentic prudence.

As a virtue, prudence has to be a permanent feature in our actions, a living element much like our heartbeat. We have to say this, because there are people who think prudence comes only when we are faced with special concerns.

Prudence, being a living virtue, should be open to everything. This does not mean that we assume the attitude of anything goes. It simply means we are willing to begin and begin again, do and redo things, reinvent and renew ourselves as often as necessary.

In this regard, it would be good to understand well the ways of freedom and
charity. This is crucial because in tackling different views and opinions, we have to respect one another’s positions. No need for intrigue-sowing, nor for bickering, judging people’s motives, etc.

No matter how we may disagree from one another, at the end of the day we
are all brothers and sisters who are obliged to love one another. Sooner or later, the best position, the most fair and acceptable, will prevail. We need to be patient and to have good control over our emotions and passions.

With a more prudent people power, we can calmly sift what are essential from what are not in any given issue, we can set proper priorities for our development strategies. We have to be wary of some politician’s diversionary, if not destabilizing tactics.

With a more vigilant people power, we can sooner or later detect moves and initiatives that are not really in step with the demands of the common good. We can discern those clever, manipulative, and self-serving actions of politicians.

We can be good watchdogs, knowledgeable, for example, about the steps projects have to take from start to finish, and able to monitor the flow of responsibility and money involved.

This is crucial to our social life and unity. It’s only in this way that we can hope corruption in government offices high and low can be minimized, if not eliminated and made a thing of the past.