Purification

AS we begin a new year, let’s remind ourselves about our need for purification. Let’s not fool ourselves and remain in a state of denial with respect to this need.

Even without doing anything scandalous, just the passage of time and the exposure to the daily usual things would be enough for us to accumulate dirt not so much on the physical side as on the spiritual and moral aspect.

Our heart, the center and engine of our life, cannot help but gather some dust, in amounts big or small, as we go along in life. We need to clean it up, tune it up and hopefully put it in tiptop condition for another year of living and struggling.

We cannot actually be casual about this issue anymore. We are living in very complicated times and environment. Gone now are the pristine air of our grandparents in the provinces. The pollution upon us today is much more harmful, much more treacherous, much more inescapable.

The media, the Internet, the billboards, etc., seem to produce a lot more of moral dirt and smog collateral to their legitimate purposes. We need to study this issue more thoroughly and systematically and act accordingly.

Consider the following observations that indicate the extreme of impurity we in general have fallen into:

- For example, the number of vocations to the priesthood and the religious and consecrated life has plummeted drastically;

- Of those who enter, a high percentage do not persevere. There are a lot of defections;

- And of those who persevere so far, a noticeable number are into some trouble and irregular situations, as in having illegitimate affairs with corresponding problematic fruits as a result.

That’s only speaking of the clerical population. The situation is, of course, far worse in the general populace.

There can be many causes and factors for these phenomena, but one of them that figure prominently is the problem in purity. Many are badly handicapped by it, their situation already so compromised that sorting it out to order or to some acceptable terms would require heroic effort.

At the moment, we can safely presume that an average young guy today has already seen if not participated in far worse sexual experiences compared to his peers in the previous generation. One would be naïve to think otherwise. Even the so-called “good guy” already has quite a load in this department.

Pornography is just a click away in the Internet, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Sexual deviancy has become more rampant. The other day, I read that in the States, it’s not only the men who are having affairs. The women are doing it also at a rate that can be considered as widespread and common.

Impurity makes quite a mess in our life. It threatens our spiritual life. It weakens our faith and turns charity into self-indulgence. It dashes simplicity to the ground and spawns deceit and hypocrisy, leading us to lead double lives that can deteriorate into Jekyll-and-Hyde syndrome. It distorts our vision of things.

This is our world today. We cannot stop at lamenting. We have to do the slow and agonizing process of cleaning the environment spiritually and morally, and of helping persons affected one by one. There’s always hope. God is always merciful, and where sin abounds, his grace abounds even more.

For this, we can get some inspiration from the Blessed Virgin. She, who was immaculate from conception to death, submitted herself to purification even if she had to no need for it. She’s more than willing to help us. We all need to go through purification ourselves. Today, this need is urgent.

We have to know how to handle and protect our heart. We have to help one another in finding ways, both practicable and accessible, of filling our heart with true love for God and souls. This love should be immediately felt. It should not remain in the theoretical level.

Personal spiritual direction and confession are a must, but have to be done with utmost respect for personal freedom. Clear doctrine has to be constantly given. Pious acts of prayer, mortification and self-discipline have to be learned and spread.

We need to foster an atmosphere of sincerity and transparency, precisely because these are the first victims of impurity. We have to discover the right mix of things that would make these virtues attractive again and easy and enjoyable to live.

This crusade for purification has to be pursued without stop. Without purity, we cannot go far in life.

Holy Innocents and collateral victims

WE have just celebrated the feast of the Holy Innocents. Those were the male infants, 2 years old and under, ordered eliminated by King Herod in his madness to kill the child Jesus.

In the Gospel narrative, tears flow whenever I read the lines: “A cry was heard at Ramah, sobbing and loud lamentation: Rachel bewailing her children; no comfort for her, since they are no more.” (Lk 2,18)

What instantly came to mind as I went through the celebration was the idea of collateral damage, collateral targets and collateral victims. In this life, we have to be ready to end up like the Holy Innocents, who were the collateral targets and victims together with the child Jesus.

We can suffer and even die anytime because we happen to be beside someone at a certain moment, or we happen to be associated with someone or something, etc. We may not have done anything wrong, and yet we suffer the consequences of what another person has done.

Just think of the 56 Maguindanao massacre victims. Most of them were collateral victims. Just a few were the real targets.

A number of times I had to explain this concept slowly and patiently to people who come with complaints about why they are suffering the consequences of the mistakes or inadequacies of others, like their parents or brothers and sisters, or their friends and colleagues at work, etc.

Of course, we suffer not only because of the mistakes of others, but also because of the good done by others, those good things that have fallen unpopular or hateful in the eyes of many people.

Thus, we can be collateral victims because of both the good and the evil done by others. If we have to convert this into some statistical expression, we can say that the probability of us becoming collateral victims is quite high, and we just have to be ready.

We have to be ready to suffer anytime, to lose all of a sudden our possession, our reputation and, why not, even our life. All these can happen in an instant. You may just be having a good time at home enjoying things with the family, and a stray bullet from nowhere can just hit you and snuff your life off.
So we have to be sporty in this life. Yes, we need to be serious and very responsible, but our human condition is such that in spite of our prayers and efforts, our virtues and best behavior, things can just end up the opposite of what we expected. We have to learn to be open to this possibility.

That’s what being sporty is. We kind of treat our life like a game. We play hard, eager to win, of course. But we can still lose, and if we do, we just have to know to move on. Even if losing means losing our life, it’s not the end of everything, because in fact we have life eternal waiting for us after death.

We can still move on, but we have to move on with grace, not with bitterness and rancor. In fact, we have to learn how to move on with humor that springs from a cheerfulness rooted in our faith and love of God.

St. Thomas More, for example, just before his head was chopped off by the executioner, asked that his beard be moved out of the chopping board, because according to him it had no part of his “crime.”

God is, of course, a judge, but he is a most just judge who knows how to blend justice with charity and mercy. We just have to do our best, with the full force of our mind and heart, of our whole self.

That is what he will look at, and not so much at what we achieved or failed to achieve. He is more interested in our heart than in the products. Is there real faith, hope and love in our heart? That’s what he wants to know more.

Some of us can ask why does God who is supposed to be all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful allow evil to come to us? To that, we can only say that God respects our nature, our freedom, our concrete human condition, but also knows how to derive good from evil.

Even if our capacity to do evil is infinite, his capacity to show mercy is even more infinite. His mercy limits our evil. So we should not worry too much. Rather we have to worry about the real state of our heart.

Updating the family

CHRISTMAS time is obviously family time. Let’s thank God that in our country we still see this equation largely lived happily. Let’s pray that in other places, especially in developed countries, the same ideal can also take place. We cannot deny that it is not quite so in many of them, including parts of ours.

We see rising cases of dysfunctional families, with marriages defaced by infidelities and unrefreshed love and a sense of commitment unable to “Reset” when needed, children’s neglect, family life reduced to a minimum, etc.

The family always deserves our utmost attention. We should not be naïve to think that we can take our duties and responsibilities toward it for granted. Especially now, tricky and openly difficult challenges confront it. We have to be aware of them and try to do something about them.

We need to repair the damages, heal the wounds and plot out the paths to make the family healthy, vibrant and capable to do its sacred duty of nurturing persons and citizens.

Let’s remember that we can never outgrow the need for the family, no matter how old, mature and independent we can be. Even those who lead a prominently spiritual and celibate life need it.

It’s a requirement of our nature, given by God and not by some human consensus. The family is a divine creation, before it is a human institution.

With family life given a boost during this Christmas holidays, let’s take the time to see what we can do to reinforce the family, both in general and in individual cases. Let’s not waste the opportunity by spending it solely on having fun. It’s a time for discerning, anticipating, planning things for the family.

May it be that in every level of our life, this concern for the family is taken up seriously. For the Church, for example, there should be abiding diocesan and parochial efforts to help the family in some concrete way, an effort translated into continuing prayers, sacrifices and timely reminders.

For example, the preparation for couples for marriage should be attended to well. Effective programs to nourish couple’s conjugal love should be developed.

Prompters about the evil of contraception, the RH bill, etc. should be frequently made since this now constitutes clear and present danger to marriages.

The government and NGOs should also do the same, trying to figure out the issues families in general are now facing and tackling. There are many of them. It’s good to have a systematic and massive approach to this, monitoring the relevant developments closely and ever presenting solutions.

For one, it pains me to see some workers pressured to do overtime work at the expense of their family life. Stories I hear about inhuman pressures suffered by call center agents are really depressing. The problems involved should be addressed.

Also the environment, especially that part known also as the human ecology, should be continually cleaned and renewed to foster family life among the people. This area is often ignored, its challenges not taken up adequately.

There are situations that undermine the family’s vitality. Pornography, unregulated means of amusement and recreation, etc., are now going viral. People get unduly absorbed by new technologies at the expense of family life.

Obviously, the spouses and the other members of the family should do their part to enrich their family life. Quality time together should be fostered, planned and defended against factors that tend to undermine it. Affection, good manners should be shown in any weather.

Everyone should try his best to be generous in this area, always thinking of details that can brighten the home and warm the relationships among all the family members, heroically fighting against tiredness, attachments, personal preferences, selfishness, etc.

In this regard, the little things of everyday count a lot and are, in fact, the main ingredient to strengthen the bonds of the family. We need to take advantage of these little things in our family life to culture our love for God and for others. There’s actually no other way as basic as this one.

For this purpose, it might be good to realize the need for us to develop a devotion to the Holy Family. Our families should be a reflection, if not a participation in that family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, where everything good for us was lived to the max and continues to be lived.

We should never fail to realize the need to use spiritual and supernatural means, without neglecting the human instruments, to develop our families.

Mary and our sense of sin

WE need to recover our sense of sin. It’s vanishing and subjected to severe attacks. And for this we need to go to Mary. Let me explain.

Just recently, right in the capitol of a US state, and supposedly in the spirit of democracy, together with Christmas decors was a poster saying there is no God, nothing spiritual and supernatural. It’s only the workings of nature. It’s a sentiment echoed actually, and sadly, in many places.

Christmas is nothing other than winter, it said. Thus, there’s no sin as we have been made to understand for years. Of course, in Australia Christmas must be nothing other than summer too. It’s just a season of nature. Nothing more.

Of course, we have to respect freedom. Anyone can say anything he wants. As long as there must be basis, and the process of assessing the veracity of our assertions is not aborted. That would be against freedom too, right?

I would say that there, of course, is God. There also are spiritual and supernatural realities. Even those who deny these truths already betray their beliefs, since their very denials are already an expression of something spiritual that can lead them, if they want, to the supernatural and ultimately to God.

We do not depend entirely on our senses that can capture only the natural and material or sensible things. We are made also to believe, to have faith and beliefs. Our spiritual faculties just cannot get engaged ultimately in something material. They have to be engaged in something spiritual.

Thus, if there is God, there also must be sin. That’s precisely because we, with our spiritual faculties of intelligence and will, with our reason and freedom, can choose to go against God. That’s what sin is.

For Christians, this sense of sin is already highlighted right at the dawn of human history, at the time Adam and Eve in Eden. This was first alluded to when God told the serpent who tempted Eve, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed.” (Gen 3,15)

This passage is called the proto-evangelium, since it contains the seed of the future good news of the coming of the Redeemer, the son of God who became man in the virginal womb of Mary, the second Eve, our new Mother.

For us now to keep and properly reinforce this sense of sin we need to look more closely at Mary. Untouched by sin though exposed to it, she distills the final reality of our life as a choice between good and evil, between God and the devil.

She shows us that our battle with evil will never cease in this life. This is shown in those passages in the Book of Revelations where Satan tried to devour the Son about to be born of her (cfr Rev 12,4), relentlessly pursued her (cfr Rev 12,13), and powerless against her, now makes war with the rest of her children (cfr. Rev. 12,17)

Thus, we should not be surprised if our life will always be a struggle. It’s a 24/7 affair, involving everything, material and spiritual, outside and inside us, personal and social, etc.

But with Mary, it will be a war of peace and love. She will help us, giving us tips and the weapons to use. These mainly would first of all be the virtue of humility, indispensable since the devil, full of pride, can never outwit the ways of humility. He cannot understand it. He is helpless before it.

Humility enables us to be simple, melting away our tendency to get complicated, to build our own world outside of the one objectively meant for us by God himself. It’s brings us to God, instead of burying us in our own selves.

Our Lady’s humility is shown in her life fully spent in the little things, telling us that we don’t need big and extraordinary things to be in touch with Christ and enter into the dynamics of our human redemption.

This realization should embolden us, since it will rescue us from a vicious slavery afflicting the present world that gives little value to little things of everyday. With humility, we see these little things as the capillaries that bring God’s grace to the farthest and minutest corner of our life.

It’s what makes us children of God through and through, and not only externally or formalistically. Mary enlivens our sense of God and our sense of sin. Let’s be very Marian!

Indivisible and not absolutized

THESE were two ideas that got stuck in my mind as I read Pope Benedict’s advanced message for the 2010 World Day of Peace, to be given on New Year’s Day.

It’s a message dedicated to our duty to protect the whole of creation, and not just our physical or climatic environment. The title of the message is precisely, “If you want to cultivate peace, protect creation.”

I think the distinction between creation and environment is worth noting. Precisely these two ideas spring from such distinction and clarify it.

The first idea is when the Pope said: “The quest for peace by people of good will surely would become easier if all acknowledge the indivisible relationship between God, human beings and the whole of creation.”

This is a crucial point. Without this, our basic attitude toward any talk about environmental issues would be congenitally flawed and compromised.

The second is when he said: “A correct understanding of the relationship between man and the environment will not end by absolutizing nature or by considering it more important than the human person.”

With all these talks about global warming, climate change, some impending global disaster, etc., these words of the Holy Father give us some comfort amid the increasingly alarmist tone of this issue.

The problem with much of the arguments put forward so far is that God is put out of the picture. And there’s almost an exclusive focus on the material (mainly economic and financial) and the technical aspects of the issue. The ethical and moral aspects are considered taboo.

It’s as if we would just be concerned about the material environment, without considering the whole of creation in its integrity that would intrinsically involve God, the Creator, man as its chief steward, and the rest of the world.

We seem to be framed and corralled within a Godless system when we talk about global warming and climate change. We dare to tackle these issues through pure reason alone, as if they are just a matter of human and natural sciences.

No matter how important and indispensable these sciences are in knowing more about our climatic conditions, they cannot go far and deep enough without the light of faith.

More than that, the sciences alone cannot claim to have all the means to resolve the problem. Faith and religion play a prominent role here, since this problem definitely needs spiritual and supernatural solutions as well.

We need to overcome that bias that cuts a split between reason and faith, science and theology, in talking about such big issues as global warming or climate change. The Pope reminds us that there is an indivisible unity between our earthly affairs and God.

Obviously, we have to respect the distinctive natures of reason and faith. But we also have to learn how to relate them to each other. This is now an urgent need as we begin to grapple with big issues, and they surely will become bigger as we get into a more complicated world.

Besides, now the debate is entering a very disturbing stage since there are well-grounded claims that many of the data presented to support the alarming view of global warming are not exactly accurate. They have been tweaked and massaged, and have ceased to be factual. They are tendentious.

Because of this basic handicap, nature is reduced now to its climatic dimension and seems to be made absolute or more important than the human person. It’s seen more as mere physical environment whose innate relationship to God and to us is ignored if not practically denied.

Thus nature is now given a more independent status, it has become God-like, to which we have to be subordinated. It’s the new God, the new religion, a recycling of an old heresy. Science is its theology and there is no other.

It’s precisely this attitude that generates a kind of tyrannical, authoritarian approach in imposing its position. They are ironically falling into holy war tactics in dealing with skeptics and unbelievers.

The requirements of charity, understanding, patience, prudence, the effort to explain and clarify things without recourse to threats and violence, all necessary in our human dealings, are ignored.

It’s because of this that whatever goodness and truth they have can get in the end distorted and nullified. This would be a pity, since in issues like global warming, it is imperative that we listen to all sides.

Evangelization of culture

THAT´S the pastoral thrust of the Cebu Archdiocese for 2010. In its icon, Jesus in his usual appearance and robes talks to a man and a woman of today, of course dressed in today´s fashion. A fig tree stands in the middle to remind us of that Gospel message that we as trees should produce fruits and not just leaves, alluding to the need for our faith to bear fruit in our culture.

The whole point is that our faith and culture should meld in some way. Christian faith needs to be inculturated, otherwise it becomes a foreign body to us. Of course, being transcendent to any human culture, the faith can never be made an exclusive property of a given culture. Other cultures, different from ours, can as well be Christian-inspired.

Our culture should continue to be open and receptive to our Christian faith, going from stage to stage until it reaches a certain maturity that needs to be renewed and deepened endlessly. Our culture should feel the need for faith for it to properly develop. The faith-and-culture relation is a living affair. It cannot and should not freeze at a certain point.

The theological basis was explained during its launching recently. It was good and expertly done. The fine distinctions between faith and culture were made, as well as their relation. Already at this point, I think the project will accomplish much, since it will familiarize the faithful, including the clergy, with the fundamentals about faith and culture.

I have reason to believe that these fundamentals are hardly known by many people. And so, this yearly programming of pastoral activity contributes greatly in educating the faithful of our duties.

The ardent prayer is that the whole project finally takes off and can show some tangible results. That´s the challenge now. The pastoral thrust can only give some general directions and orientations that need to be fleshed out by all of us. I hope that some kind of office or body oversees the fleshing out of the general principles.

I was happy to note, for example, that with respect to the specific aspect of culture regarding the restoration and preservation of Church heritage, an office is now formed to check on any plans to renovate churches or to make an inventory of heritage items, etc.

This is a good and most welcome development. For years, I have been in agony to see old, beautiful churches left to rot, or otherwise given a make-over that causes cardiac arrest even to simple people who use common sense to distinguish between continuity and incongruity in what´s being done.

This is because no functioning office gave criteria, standards and supervision to these changes and renovations. Everyone seems to have the right to do anything to churches and other church properties. And the result can only be called horrible.

One time, I entered a church (not in Cebu) and I was shocked that an old image of our Lady, very beautiful and precious, was replaced by a cheap-looking, plastic-like copy. The sight broke my heart.

But the problem in this area is nothing compared to the challenges posed by the other aspects of our culture. Think of our business and political life, our sports, fashion and entertainment worlds, our academes and the different professional fields, and we surely will be bewildered by the enormity of the task ahead of us.

Still, to be practical about this project we need to identify specific areas of our culture where we can focus the infusion of faith.

Culture is actually everything about our life. Whatever we do toward it, no matter how small as long as it produces a kind of consensus among the people, ends up being part of our culture. It needs to be evangelized, since things just can´t be left to develop in a purely natural way. We have a supernatural life, and our culture also has to reflect this character of our life.

We now have to be wary of the secularizing and dechristianizing trends that are subtly looming in our midst. With globalization already entrenched in our lifestyle, we should be very discerning to know what is good and bad, what is safe and dangerous, etc. We cannot afford to be naïve anymore. Our church leaders should give strong and clear leadership in this regard.

More than that, we need to know the skills of struggle and combat, since some give and take, some cut and thrust will be involved in the process of evangelizing culture.

A willful Christmas

WITH all the layers of elements accompanying the celebration of Christmas, we need to be willful in entering the proper spirit of the season. Otherwise we would get lost, most likely deadened and insulated in a very sweet and hallucinatory manner.

Not all the glittery and sentimental elements surrounding Christmas are good, and not all of them are bad either. Christmas should be Christmas, not just Christmassy. We need to be truly discerning, driven by a deliberate effort to live Christmas' essence, and not just enjoy its peripherals.

In its core, Christmas is the birth of Jesus Christ, the son of God, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, who became man in the virginal womb of Mary to be with us, to re-create our damaged nature, to reconcile us with our Father and Creator. He offers himself to the truth, way and life for that.

Christmas is God becoming man so that we can also become like God, as we originally are meant to be. Christmas is God wanting to be born in us so that we can be born again in him.

Its mainly religious character should never get lost in the din and frenzy of the festivities. It is not meant to be a wet blanket to the fun of Christmas. Rather, it is meant to purify and raise that joy to a higher and proper level, while grounding it to its proper root.

As recorded in the Gospel and handed down faithfully through Tradition within the Church, Christ’s nativity took a radically simple form, giving credence to what St. Paul said in his letter to Philippians:

“He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men,… He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross.” (2,7-8)

This self-emptying of Christ is the proper attitude to have in celebrating Christmas. If we are to enter the true spirit of Christmas, we too, like Christ, should go through this process of self-emptying. There’s no other way.

We need to learn how to achieve this self-emptying even in the midst of the understandable atmosphere of joy and gift-giving characteristic of Christmas also. This will require of us certain skills and competence, derived from the very example of Christ himself.

We need to continually examine ourselves to see if we still have the proper outlook and bearing. We have to be good in promptly rejecting the many temptations to spoil the Christmas spirit through the many gimmicks of consumerism, frivolity, gluttony, materialism, hedonism, etc.

By this time, we should already have acquired a good amount of experience in detecting the tricks of these isms and in dealing with them accordingly. We have to help one another in safely navigating the now treacherous waters of our Christmas celebrations.

We need to continually rectify our intentions, and to keep a good hold of our instincts and impulses, our emotions and passions. These tend to go wild, daring to go on their own outside the orbit of reason, let alone faith and charity.

We need to learn how to be reflective and contemplative even in the middle of parties and merry-making, because that is how we ought to behave. That conduct distinguishes us from the animals. We should resist the strong and constant temptation to act merely as consumers or entertainers, etc.

In short, we need to live temperance even as we also try to practice generosity and magnificence in our celebration. This blend will take place more in the heart than in the externals. It happens when the heart is truly in vital contact with God.

This temperance can only be lived well if paired with the virtues of justice and solidarity. Justice enables us to think always of others, of what we owe to them. There’s always something that we owe to them, since we all form one communion.

Solidarity complements justice in that it leads us to think always in terms of the common good. It checks on our tendency to get stuck with self-interest and narrow-mindedness.

These three virtues—temperance, justice, solidarity—while governing our attitude toward material and earthly things, will eventually lead us to God precisely through the use of these earthly things. It should be the template of our lifestyle.

Thus, our earthly and temporal affairs are in theory no hindrance in our relation with God. Handled properly, they can strengthen and enrich the father-and-son relationship we have with God and the brotherhood among ourselves.

Pastoral work requires vibrant interior life

I JUST attended a clergy gathering where they presented the pastoral thrust of a local church for the year 2010. I was immediately excited with the theme. It’s a big, ambitious plan, and there’s no doubt about its importance and relevance. I hope we the clergy can truly deliver.

There’s the rub. Let’s pray that the whole thing translates into a living, palpable reality, and not just a beautiful project with brilliant ideas, fiery slogans and catchy sound bites, well-crafted modules, all sound and fury that sadly do not go deep enough as to generate life and effect clear transformations of people.

They need to be given life. And for that, a lot depends on the vitality of the spiritual life and the depth of doctrinal orthodoxy of the clergy involved.

I think that unless everything given and received in this plan is done in the context of sincere prayer, unless both the givers and recipients realize they are doing God’s will, many misimpressions can arise, sowing the seeds of failure of this otherwise most worthwhile effort.

We need to overcome the misimpression, for example, that this annual effort is just a yearly routine of programming the clergy. That, for sure, is never intended, but no one can deny that a good number of those involved understand it that way.

Thus there are many signs of resistance, if not open, then passive and disguised. There are even those who succumb to that psychological anomaly, passive-aggressive. That´s when one is friendly in front of you, but hostile at your back.

The point is while it is indispensable to come out with a well-defined strategy, a lot more effort, often arduous, tricky and thankless, should be given to make sure the personal spiritual life and formation of each priest is in good shape.

The latter concern is many times taken for granted or presumed to be taken care of by each priest. Or again given an officious treatment with more congresses, modules, slogans and sound bites.

But there seems to be no vital system of really knowing the state of a cleric’s spiritual life and pastoral competence, and of giving prompt help. Many of the spiritual exercises given to the priests fail to achieve their real purpose, since they remain in the external and official aspects. They hardly touch the interior life.

Certainly, this problem is already quite well known to everyone, especially those in authority. For sure, solutions and remedies have been pursued and applied. I like to think that they continue to be given up to now.

But a lot more is needed, and the reminder to all priests that they—we—should really take care of our spiritual life and our continuing formation should never be stopped. It should, in fact, be always given, and in a prominent and explicit way, and not implicit.

This is because no one can doubt the inalienable link between a priest’s interior life and his pastoral work. And the challenges, problems, pressures that face any priest today are not only growing in number but also in complexity. The means to help us should understandably be continually refined, modified and adapted to reality.

It’s for this reason that the continuing formation of the clergy is most often done in silence, hidden, face to face with God and a spiritual guide, never anonymous. It can not be mainly done in some public forum. It has to be personally given and received. The collective means are only subsidiary to the personal means.

When this on-going formation is understood by many as done mainly in the collective means, we are lost. Nourishing the interior life, internalizing the doctrine of Christ and the Church requires the hidden, spiritual processes proper of gestation and growth.

It is done mainly through prayer, through a personal encounter with God. Unless this is achieved, all the other means would be useless. Prayer unites one with God. With it the doctrine he knows acquires a certain life that can vitally impact with any situation one finds himself in.

Though there will always be resistance, the priest would know how to handle things, his words becoming not only his, but those of God himself, with the same power to transform and convert people. Again, even if there will always be those who refuse to believe, just like what Christ experienced!

Pollution of the spirit

WHAT a beautiful message Pope Benedict gave on the occasion of the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception last December 8! It was truly prophetic because it hit bull´s eye one of the nagging problems we are facing these days.

He talked about what he called the ¨pollution of the spirit.¨ We need to be aware of it, and learn how to deal with it effectively. We need to develop the appropriate attitudes, virtues and discipline. These were his pertinent words:

¨We often lament the pollution of the air, which in certain places of the city is unbreathable...And yet, there is nother pollution, less perceptible to the senses, but just as dangerous.

¨It is the pollution of the spirit. It is what renders our faces less smiling, more gloomy, what leads us not to greet one another, to not look at one another in the face.¨

This is the immediate description of this pollution of the spirit. But it has graver implications. Again the Pope´s words:

¨The city is made up of faces, but unfortunately the collective dynamics can make the perception of their depth disappear. We see everything on the surface. Persons become bodies, and these bodies lose the soul, become things, objects without a face, to be exchanged and consumed.¨

The Pope tried to explain how this pollution of the spirit came about. A good deal of the blame, according to him, would fall on the media. These were his words:

¨Every day, in fact, through newspapers, the television and the radio, evil is recounted, repeated, amplified, accustoming us to the most horrible things, making us become insensitive and, in some way, intoxicating us, because the negative is not fully disposed of and accumulated day after day. The heart hardens and thoughts become dark.¨

How true! Sometimes I wonder if the media are truly serving the common good, since many times they just seem to focus on the negative side of life, without giving due attention to the positive and redeeming side. We seem to be educated into a new normal in our life. The Pope had this to say about this point:

¨In the city live -- or survive -- invisible persons, who every now and then leap onto the front page or on television screens, and are exploited to the end, so that the news and the image attract attention.

¨It is a perverse mechanism, to which unfortunately one finds it hard to resist. The city first hides and then exhibits to the public, without pity, or with false pity.¨

Think of the present predicament of Tiger Woods or our very own Manny Pacquiao. Their sins or ¨trangressions,¨ the word favored more by Tiger, are feasted by the press, now behaving like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

Scandals now appear to be normal fare in the press. The more scandalous the item is, the better for the media. Imagine if the protagonists were clerics!

Another interesting observation of the Holy Father is that the media tend to ¨make us feel always as spectators, as if evil refers only to others, and certain things could never happen to us.¨ He said that in reality, we are all ´actors´ and, both in evil and in good, our behavior can influence others.

We need to be more sensitive to the fact that our actions, no matter hidden and unknown to the public, will always have an effect on others. This is precisely because of what our Christian faith terms as ¨communion of saints.¨ Our humanity binds us together with many invisible ties into one living organism. What happens to one, what one does, will have an effect on others.

To this predicament, the Holy Father offers the image and message of Mary. To him, our Lady highlights that Pauline insight that ¨where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.¨ He wants us not to get entangled with the sin side, but to focus more on the grace side. This is, in fact, the more challenging and exciting part of life in general and of media´s work in particular.

¨Her presence speaks to us of God, reminds us of the victory of grace over sin, and induces us to hope,¨ he said. In the Philippine setting, we are very lucky because the devotion to Mary is quite widespread. What´s needed perhaps is to make it deeper and more abiding. It should leap from the field of the simple people to that of the more sophisticated ones.

Let´s see if we can grow some more in our Marian devotion.

Our standard, our reference

WE celebrated the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Mary last December 8. We had a school-wide Mass at the gym, and we said it in Latin. Everyone had the English-Latin missalette so they can follow and participate in the Mass more actively.

On my way to the Mass, a student approached me to ask what the Mass was for. It turned out that he did not know about the Immaculate Conception. In the minute that took me to reach the place, I tried to explain to him the nature and significance of the feast. But I can’t help but feel flabbergasted that he was practically ignorant of it.

Of course, I knew that the fellow came from a public high school. But he was already one of our top freshman students. I wondered how many young people were like him, knowledgeable about computers but a “tabula rasa” in religion.

That experience gave me the idea that I needed to talk a lot about the Immaculate Conception. The feast is in fact a very important feast in the liturgical calendar, one of the holydays of obligation together with Sundays and Christmas and the New Year which is actually the Solemnity of Mary’s Divine Motherhood.

That underscores the importance of the Marian solemnity. And rightly so, since it reminds us of who we really are, what kind of dignity we have. The Immaculate Conception of the Mary shows us the standard we should never lose sight of as we go through this world of sin, temptation, problems, etc.

Some lines of the feast’s Eucharistic preface point to this truth: “Full of grace, she was to be a worthy mother of your Son, your sign of favor to the Church at its beginning, and the promise of its perfection as the bride of Christ…You chose her from all women to be our advocate with you and our pattern of holiness.”

Our predicament is that with all the problems, pressures and difficulties we face everyday, not to mention the temptations and sins, we tend to think that the usual state of our life is all that there is to it. So we are tempted to lower our standard, not realizing that doing so can trigger a freefall to worse conditions.

With this feast we are reminded of how we were at the beginning and how we ought to be in the end. That is, as masterpiece of God’s creation, we are made in his image and likeness, elevated through grace to be children of his, meant to participate in his very own life, and not just creatures who simply come and belong to him.

We are supposed to be like God, holy and perfect like him, sinless like him and also like our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary. God chose her to be the mother of his son who became man to save us, Jesus Christ.

The Solemnity of Mary’s Immaculate Conception means that this woman was given the rare privilege of being exempted from original sin, that is, her conception was not accompanied by the handicap of not being in the state of grace as we originally were meant to be. In fact, she was filled with grace.

Original sin precisely means that what was meant to be our state at conception, that is, to be in grace, is missing because that state was lost with the sin of Adam and Eve in paradise. It is not a sin we commit. It is one we inherit. We fall heir to a wounded and handicapped state at our very conception.

Mary’s privilege did not however remove her freedom to commit sin, if she wanted to. To her credit was her total correspondence to the grace given her. She was sinless all throughout her life.

Her example certainly is most worthy to be emulated. At least it gives us a clear idea of the standard we should never forget as we go through our daily life. We may not be like her now, but we can want to be like her, and that’s already a big thing.

She stands as a bright light that leads to our true destination in a world filled with darkness or false lights. Thus it is all worthwhile to deliberately develop a devotion to her, looking at her, knowing her more, loving her, bringing her with us wherever we go, involving her in everything in our life.

She loves to play that role with us, because she was given to us by Christ himself to be our mother too, and not only his.

Quest for beauty, quest for God

IT’S truly nice to hear Pope Benedict regularly talk about beauty. I notice that since he became Pope, he makes it a point to give some incisive thoughts about this reality that we often miss.

Recently, he had a wonderful get-together with some 260 artists from different fields—painting, acting, architecture, literature, music, etc.—where again he told them not only of the elements of beauty—its essence, source, purpose—but also of their—our—duties towards it.

Ever since I got bitten by the beauty bug, I have been into some kind of adventure in search of it. I remember some verses of a poem we studied in first year high school—quit the naughty thought of when it was—that got stuck with me through the years.

They gave me my first taste of what I call the irresistible charm and mystique of beauty and launched me to its quest, sometimes bumpy, sometimes smooth and sweet. I now don’t remember the title and the author, but they went this way:

“Rhodora / if sages ask thee why / thy beauty is wasted on the earth and sky / Tell them, dear / that if eyes were made for seeing, / then beauty is its own excuse for being.

From then on, I had that lingering idea that whatever it is that we consider true and good, whatever it is that can give us happiness, can be summarized under one category—beauty. It was the catchall for all these ideals that somehow satisfy or at least pacify the unutterable yearnings in our heart.

Pope Benedict’s meeting with the artists had that beautiful tone of being both cordial and frank, sublime and challenging. He welcomed them and invited them to “friendship, dialogue and cooperation” with the Church, even if they may still be quite remote from the practice of religion.

What was important, the Pope pointed out, was that there was that common interest in the pursuit of beauty, extricating it from the usual pitfall of “reducing the horizons of existence to mere material realities, or to a reductive and trivializing vision.”

Or even to worse things, like the erupting firework of a wide range of human depravity. We seem to have a carpet bombing of that ugly aspect lately. With the election fever rising, we are witnessing the dark side of humanity, as ad hominem attacks, rash judgments, demonizing arguments, etc. fill the media.

Mere opinions are made into dogmas, suspicions and biases are turned into facts and made the explosives of their mutual accusations. The air is poisoned, the place becomes a war zone and everyone suffers. Really ugly! The Maguindanao massacre now looks puny.

Still, there’s hope. We should refuse to be dragged down to hell by these demonic gimmicks done by a few so-called clever guys we have around. Let’s use these black spots as illuminating contrast to the real beauty meant for us.

But we have to know what authentic beauty is. There had been false but subtle pictures of it, ridiculous caricatures and outright direct assaults on it. We need to be very discerning and prudent, because truths and falsehoods are often mixed up nowadays and found in opposite camps.

Thus, the work of artists is pivotal. They are expected to provoke in others and to sustain the sense of beauty that leads to its true origin and essence, that is, to God. The search for beauty is a pilgrimage toward God.

Pope Benedict quotes Hermann Hesse who said: “Art means revealing God in everything that exists.” I agree with this completely. At the end of the day, that’s what art really is.

With their talent to touch and enter the heart of humanity, the artists in their respective field now face the challenge and bear the duty to captivate all in the appreciation of real beauty, freeing them from a beauty that is reduced, entangled and stifled.

Let’s hope that they manage to pursue their artistic creativity and originality along the lines of fidelity to God and continuity with his will and ways. This is the trickiest part of the artists’ life. They have to resolve the apparent contradiction.

Rightly calling artists the “custodians of beauty,” the Pope cited some words of Pope John Paul II in asking, “To communicate the message entrusted to her by Christ, the Church needs art. But does art need the Church?”

Let’s pray that they get to see the point.

Don’t’ be afraid to junk RH bill

DEMOCRACY is freedom in search of inspiration. It waits to be given substance, meaning, orientation and direction. By itself, it simply is a mold, a system that requires a lifeblood to warm up and start functioning. It needs to be given life.

So it depends on the vital elements of the citizens that have it—how they are as a people, their culture, their history, their beliefs and aspirations, their sense of life and purpose, etc. These get factored in and eventually get integrated into one workable whole through the democratic processes.

It can only be perfect to the extent that the people involved in it are. It reflects and mirrors them. But it can also project and mold them. It collects the sentiments of the people, but it can also cause other sentiments too, generating a kind of spiral that is open-ended.

That is why we have to take care of it. Democracy needs to be guided, and we the people involved, especially our leaders, should keenly feel the responsibility for it.

Relevant to all this, let me quote some lines from John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus, kind of dense but I must say all worth it. Let’s bear with it. Here it goes:

“Authentic democracy is possible only in a State ruled by law, and on the basis of a correct conception of the human person.

“It requires that the necessary conditions be present for the advancement both of the individual through education and formation in true ideals, and of the ‘subjectivity’ of society through the creation of structures of participation and shared responsibility.”

Then it warns us of a clever attitude that actually undermines authentic democracy.

“Nowadays there is a tendency to claim that agnosticism and skeptical relativism are the philosophy and the basic attitude which correspond to democratic forms of political life.

“Those who are convinced that they know the truth and firmly adhere to it are considered unreliable from a democratic point of view, since they do not accept that truth is a determined by the majority, or that it is subject to variation according to different political trends.

“It must be observed in this regard that if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power.

“As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.” (46)

In the current debate for the RH bill that now exposes a few Catholic leaders not quite in step with Church teaching and discipline, this subtle anomaly of democracy distorted by agnosticism, relativism and the mere majority rule emerges.

It is argued that one just cannot be completely for or against it, since there are many good things about it and a few questionable elements, and that the Catholic Church just cannot have its “Humanae vitae” legislated because of the separation of Church and state.

There are a lot of misrepresentations in these claims, gratuitous short-cuts to favor precisely the questionable elements in the bill. This bill has already been scrutinized by many bishops and leaders in the Church and the consensus has been that it is a dangerous bill.

Of course, the bill is crafted to appeal to democratic sentiments—nothing wrong about that—but given the context in which it was created and developed, it will require complete naivete and an almost invincible ideological bias not to see the danger it poses on people’s morals as understood from Church doctrine.

At the very least, that bill is highly divisive. And so if only for that reason alone, it should be dumped. It’s actually not needed.

The good things it contains can continue to be done without the law. And the bad things it contains can also be done. No one can stop anybody from doing it. Just don’t make it a law.

Let’s conclude with some words of St. Paul addressed to those who tend to make exceptions from Church teachings. From his letter to Titus, we have some relevant points:

“Speak the things that become sound doctrine….In all things show good fidelity, that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in all things.” (2,1ff.)

After all, democracy, while respecting pluralism, should also carry the bedrock foundations of a people’s beliefs. Dialogue and consensus-making are no excuse to sideline the faith. One’s faith is nothing to be ashamed about in public fora.

This is not a call for fanaticism. Rather, it’s for democracy to be properly inspired.

Science should go with faith

THE Bible is always a source of truths—of faith and morals—meant to guide us for all times and all the way to heaven. It can contain prophetic words that predict and describe how things can to be in the future.

All this, if it is handled properly. Our problem is that many times it has been mishandled, and thus we have the understandable human reaction of some people who have come to disregard and discredit the Bible in their thinking and considerations. But that’s another story. We’ll go into that some other time.

For now, let’s focus on how it guides us and gives us glimpses of how things can be as we run along in time. Some words of St. Paul can come to mind. In his second letter to Timothy, there are some lines which I think are relevant to what we are witnessing these days.

“Know this also, that in the last days shall come dangerous times,” St. Paul starts. “Men shall be lovers of themselves, covetous, haughty, proud, blasphemers, wicked, without affection, without peace, slanderers, incontinent, unmerciful, without kindness…” (3,1-3)

Every time I read these words and look at least at what we see in the media that mirror the temper of our times, I can’t help but notice the connection between the warning and the reality around us. I can only gasp, “How true!”

Many people don’t pray anymore. They have made God a thing of the past, or at best, considered merely as a museum piece or an ornament. They now proudly talk about how the present is now a post-religion era.

Obviously, with this mindset detached from God, the source and measure of truth, we should not be surprised when we can witness a lot of delusions and sophisms or circular, closed-circuit reasoning.

But there’s one point farther down that has caught my attention these days. It’s when St. Paul says that these proud people who can be “traitors, stubborn, puffed up and lovers of pleasures more than of God” are “ever learning yet never attaining to the knowledge of the truth.” (3,7)

Yes, we are now swimming in a large ocean of data and information, we are now inventing new things at a rate that has gone ballistic, thanks to our new technologies, and yet we can ask whether we are getting any nearer to God, to truth, to goodness, to loving each other better, etc.

What’s more obvious is that we are getting more controversies, more animosities. Many people are getting more self-absorbed in their own world, practically stonewalling themselves from others.

Other worse things come. Relations among people get corrupted by all forms of greed, and then deceit and hypocrisy. Gossips, lies, detractions, calumnies develop and thicken. Hatred grows and when unchecked it can lead to murders and even to terrorism.

As St. Paul says: “Evil men and seducers shall grow worse and worse—erring and driving others into error.” (3,13) Nowadays, global networking is not only to advertise products, but also to promote evil and error.

The media have to be warned about this. They can easily be used and prostituted by some subtle forces masquerading as forces of progress. We cannot anymore deny that there had been instances when this anomaly has been committed.

Still St. Paul warns us of another terrible scenario. In that same letter, he says that “there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears, and will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables.” (4,3-4)

When I think of what is now known as Climategate, the unraveling scandal of a science-based superstition spinning around global warming and climate change hysteria, these Pauline words make a bull’s-eye hit.

Cutting-edge sciences are now made into tools of post-religion ideologies to weave a vast complex of fables generously spiced with plot points to entertain people.

What to do? Go back to God, of course. Revitalize religion. Strengthen the faith. Thus, St. Paul says: “Preach the word, be instant in season, out of season, reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine.” (4,2)

Reason and science cannot go alone without faith, without God. They’d be flying in dangerous circles.

From primitive to sophisticated barbarianism

WE seem to be swinging from one outrage to another these days. In the local scene, we just had that shocking massacre in Maguindanao. Everything in it was just unspeakable. Is it still possible to have such brutality at this stage of our national life?

This looks like our version of America’s 9/11 carnage. The deliberate malice put into it, the conscience-less killing of everyone in the group irrespective of whatever, in short, barbarianism in its distilled form, is simply too much for an average heart to bear.

I normally don’t like to talk about this kind of events. Silence is a preferable option if only to lighten the ugly scenario. Talking adds fuel rather than douses water to the sickening situation. But this one grates at the guts and one simply has to instinctively react.

Let’s pray that this incident will yield us tremendous lessons we need to learn quickly and permanently. Let’s remain positive and hopeful! Let’s do everything to make this a thing of the past, never to happen again in the future.

But as if this black-eye to humanity is not yet enough, we also are now witnessing another form of barbarianism in the world stage, perpetrated by highly educated people, the elite of the world of sciences and technology, the cutting-edge in human knowledge, but, sadly, not much more.

Lately it has been discovered by hacking the computer of the Climate Research Unit of Britain’s University of East Anglia that many of the data made to support all this hysterics about global warming and climate change are not all true.

Some important data, significant to the issue but contrary to their position, have been dumped, and there appears a massive and systematic effort to manipulate the public to believe in their assertions. More and more shenanigans are now exposed. What the hell is this!

Though there are many global warming skeptics who also are scientists, these have been effectively sidelined and projected as obstructionists to what they call as obvious pieces of evidence of global warming.

Al Gore, the self-appointed patriarch of this group, managed to make the film, “The Inconvenient Truth,” that mesmerized a lot of people and won him a Nobel Prize. I heard that he is raking in a lot of moolah!

But the first time I heard about global warming, I checked the relevant write-ups in the Internet, and while I followed the arguments of the supporters, I was also aware that there were dissenters who sounded to me also serious.

I was amazed that the doubters and deniers were not given a fair chance to present their ideas to the public. Dialogue and discussion between the two camps were discouraged. That’s when I started to look deeper into the issue and to probe into who the people, pro and con, involved are.

I just wanted to have glimpses of whether they are competent scientists who also are believers, or just scientists but not men of faith and vulnerable to play politics or to ideological biases.

Sorry, I have to use these criteria in this increasingly maddening world driven by all sorts of man-made inventions but putting God aside. That’s my basic guiding principle. Science has to go with faith. Any attempt to separate the two is immediately suspicious to me.

This issue cannot be resolved by science alone, especially if it’s a science already prostituted by politics and ideologies. Faith has to come in. Our human condition demands it.

And I found out that while all sorts of people can be found in both camps, the supporters tend to be non-believers and just contented with being “pure” scientists, while the doubters and deniers are at least open to the faith.

Of course, there are many who are neither strong supporters nor strong deniers, but are just swept away by the bandwagon effect of the controversy. They like mouthing hand-me-down clichés just to be with the flow.

Among these are clerics and other religious people whose pronouncements peppered with global warming terms sound really funny and ridiculous. I just pray for them and hope their embarrassment will not be too biting.

Of course, many public officials like to play Pied Piper mostly for the fund of it. I often wonder whether they really know what they are talking about.

This is now the modern, very sophisticated barbarianism that seems to be committed flagrantly and with impunity against the whole of humanity, and not just Maguindanao.

Let’s pray, learn our precious lessons and move on!

Time for refocusing

WE have just started the season of Advent. And with it, we begin another liturgical year, a specific aspect of time that reminds us we are in union with Christ in his person and his redemptive work in spite of our weaknesses and sins, through the sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist.

No, we have not been left orphans because of the death of Christ. He resurrected and ascended into heaven. He now sits at the right hand of his Father, and yet he is also with us here. It’s a mystery, a truth we cannot fully understand or explain. It’s God’s love that makes all this a wonderful reality.

Our life here on earth is a continuing cycle of beginning and ending. And if we follow by our Christian faith, these cycles are meant to catapult us to eternal life, in heaven, where...

“God shall wipe away all tears from their (our) eyes, and death shall be no more, nor mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more, for the former things are passed away,” (Rev 21,4) and where “the gates shall not be shut by day, for there shall be no night there.” (Rev 21,23)

On the more human level, Advent is the preparation for Christmas that, thank God, still holds a palpable mystique over us. God knows that whatever crisis we may be in, we manage to feel different and special when it comes.

It’s just that we have to make Advent not merely a time for worrying about the material aspects of the preparation. We need to enter into its true spirit, a deeply meaningful one that gives us the sensation we are being brought home again, regaining our true bearings as God’s children.

Advent should be a time of longing for Christ. Truth is as we go through the years, we often lose our Christian footing for endless reasons and factors. We get distracted, we get tempted and many times fall into sin. We can succumb to spiritual lukewarmness, and other worse things can follow.

In fact, we can even say that in spite of the over-all world progress in the sciences and technology, we still remain Jurassic in the field of the spiritual and supernatural realities of our life. It’s an unbalanced, monstrous picture of our human development.

We feel awkward at praying. We don’t understand why we need to make sacrifices. Oceanic loopholes and gaps clutter between what we profess and what we do. We’re good at intentions. But many times we are failures in deeds.

Advent is appropriate for correcting these anomalies. It’s a time for self-corrections, atonement and reparation. It’s also a time to strengthen our spiritual life and tighten our focus on what is absolutely necessary.

I think that’s the main challenge most of us have these days. With an explosion of things coming our way and asking our attention, we need to be most discerning, prudent and competent in integrating all the elements in their proper hierarchy.

For this, we can take comfort in the example of Christ. He came to save us by re-creating us. He came to put back everything to where it truly belongs—God. He was and continues to be involved in everything, I suppose, including our business and politics and all our earthly affairs.

Yet in the Gospel, it is clear that he refused to have to anything to do with certain things though they are good in themselves. He only rejected temptation and sin outright.

He did not get involved in politics. He did not like to be made king. He declined to be a judge in a dispute between brothers concerning family inheritance.

He made that distinction between what is Caesar’s and what is God’s, and though he rendered his duties towards both, he definitely focused on the things of his Father.

Clearly, he observed a certain scheme of priorities that made him refuse to do certain things though they are good. This is what we need to develop in ourselves—a sense of priority that would guide us everyday in organizing all our activities and concerns, seeing to it that we really do God’s will.

For this, we need to train ourselves to be discriminating in the many options presented to us daily. We have to learn how to say “no” to certain things if only to focus on what is truly necessary.

I feel this is the character Advent these days is proposing to us.

Call for civil disobedience?

THERE’S an intriguing manifesto issued recently by some 150 American religious leaders who threaten to call for civil disobedience if US laws compel them to do what is against their beliefs and consciences.

The coalition includes some Catholic bishops and cardinals, Orthodox and evangelical leaders who react strongly to the drift in American laws that pressure their faithful to participate or get involved in activities like abortion, same-sex marriage and others that violate their Christian faith and morals.

It was released only last November 20 though the draft was made a month earlier after, I suppose, a long period of consultation among the religious leaders. It’s entitled “The Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience.” It’s 4,700 words long.

It laments the proliferation of social ills that undermine the culture of life, marriage and the family in American society. Divorces, the group’s spokesmen say, have risen dramatically, marital infidelity is becoming more acceptable, and marriage is detached from childbearing.

They also say that the statement is meant to educate their faithful, especially the young ones, that there is a hierarchy of issues that they have to identify clearly and react accordingly. And the most important ones, they say, are those about abortion, marriage and religious freedom.

The manifesto, however, has not specified exactly what actions to take to carry out this possibility of civil disobedience. But it reassured all that civil disobedience is a legitimate and a moral option to resort to when proper conditions are present.

“Throughout the centuries, Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required,” says the document, citing the example of Martin Luther King, a civil rights hero who was willing to go to jail for his beliefs.

To me, this new American development, thank God, may not be immediately applicable to the situation to our country, but it certainly can serve as a great learning opportunity regarding our duties towards our faith and beliefs.

Very often, we seem to take our religion lightly, easily entering into compromises with hardly any effort to determine if a concrete planned action is good or bad to it, or to know the good side as well as the dangers of such action, so we can be properly guided.

A case in point is the Reproductive Health Bill now pending approval in our Congress. Many of us Christian believers give scant attention to it, even dismissing it as unimportant.

Truth is, just like what that American manifesto said, the issue of the reproductive health possesses far greater significance than many of the so-called raging political, economic and social issues we have. Without disparaging these latter issues, the reproductive health belongs to a higher category.

There is indeed a hierarchy of issues, and we have to admit that the one of reproductive health has potentials to harm us more deeply than any mistake committed in the other issues, because it affects us in our soul more than in our material and bodily dimensions.

But since it requires more introspection and discernment, the objective importance of the reproductive health issue can escape many of us. That’s why, religious leaders are there to remind, clarify and explain things to everyone.

Sometimes though, we have this saddening development when religious leader are remiss of their duties, and instead of giving clear and prudent indications, issue confusing directions. That’s when they can actually cause unspeakable damage to the spiritual and moral lives of the people.

They handle their prophetic office badly since instead of teaching what the Church says, they prefer to peddle their own ideas. Instead of stating the clear doctrine, they would rather have opinions and other casuistic arguments. Their words and actions often are not in tune with official teaching.

Sometimes, they want to mainstream what is actually meant to be an exception. Thus, with respect to the reproductive health, the morality of natural family planning method is diluted sometimes to a fatal degree such that the method becomes a tool of contraception rather than of true conjugal love.

We need to be aware and be alerted to these developments in our midst. We should avoid being alarmists, but neither should we take our little daily duties of living and defending our faith for granted.

Let’s remember that big catastrophes are often caused by little neglects we commit everyday, much like the unstopped drip or unattended leakage that can eventually collapse a large edifice.

Overpopulation alibi revived

AFTER being caught for not being earnest in their surveys by withholding the ugly penal provisions of the Reproductive Health Bill in Congress, the supporters of the bill are now calling for a compromise, insisting that the bill is still necessary. Really?

Again their ultimate reason is, hold your breath, that there is overpopulation and that it is the main culprit for the poverty we see around. Some of our politicians are mouthing that mantra. We have to be careful with these simpletons passing for our most concerned leaders, as if they have the exclusive rights to compassion.

The overpopulation argument is a myth. In the first place, who among us can really say that beyond a certain number or level of population of our country, we are already too many?

Who among us can really say that such-and-such a person, for being old or handicapped or poor or whatever, should not have been born? And worse, who among us can really say that such couple or such family should only have so many in their household?

But thatś what this overpopulation alibi in the end amounts to, already shorn of its beautiful adornments. It tells us, nay, it dictates to us how many we should be. Crazy! The congenital infirmity of this approach is that it reduces the population issue into a numbers game mainly. And that is always wrong.

We are not dealing here with animals, plants or some products. We are dealing here with persons whose exercise of their reason and freedom, no matter how improperly done, just cannot be confined to a math exercise.

We need to deal with this population issue in a more humane way. And while the economic aspect is important, and even indispensable, we have to recognize the more important aspect of the morality involved in crafting any policy related to population or reproductive health.

Granted that there is some relation between the incidence of poverty measured in economic terms and population, this is no absolute, ultimate reason why we have to stop our considerations there. Our dignity requires a lot more.

Morality probes far deeper into human dignity and propriety than what the best economics can hope to cover. It should always be considered and in fact given priority over other criteria when dealing with delicate matters like the population and reproductive health issues.

Obviously, there are those who are quick to produce a morality to suit the numbers bias. They can talk about freedom of choice, cafeteria approach, etc., as if morality is just at these primitive or infantile levels.

Sorry to be blunt about that. But if all this talk about freedom and rights are not based on an absolute law, on God, but rather on oneś ¨best” ideas, I don´t think we will see the end of that talk. We´ll all be wrangling all the way to our tombs.

There had been so much playing around in this field itś no wonder we continue to remain precisely in those levels. To somehow resolve the issues, attempts at dialogue had been aplenty, as well as efforts to conclude everything in the level of legality alone, never mind morality. Fine.

But unless the dialogues and the legal efforts are based on the solid foundation of a moral law, one coming from an absolute source, we would just be shadow boxing and not really taking the bull by the horns.

Besides, some dialogues with a very questionable character had been made. They were dialogues meant to delay things, or worse, as in the case of some Church people dialoguing with population controllers, to undermine morals again.

In their desire to find some common ground, they have entered into unacceptable compromises with immorality. Their eagerness for unity and harmony is pursued without clearly drawing the line as to where white that becomes gray now has gone really black.

Pope Benedict in his encyclical, Caritas in veritate (Charity in Truth), has some relevant words to say: ¨Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way.

¨In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word ´love´ is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite.¨ (3)

The population and the reproductive health issues just cannot be handled by economics and our human laws. Morality should their primary criterion.

Bubbles, cocoons and the handicapped

GERMANY recently warned the US that its current economic policies might be creating a market bubble. Germany reiterated the same warning issued earlier by China on the once powerful American country that seems to be sinking in quicksand.

Of course, this is financial talk, and I have long ago abandoned that field. As priest, I talk about something else, though I must confess that with my economics background, I still follow market developments around the world. It’s my form of rest.

But I’m more interested in talking about “bubbles” as they relate to our spiritual and moral life. They are something to be avoided at all costs, and we always have to be on guard since they can come to us in a most subtle and deceitful way given our present conditions.

Bubbles are, of course, fantasy worlds that we create. They are an artificial, false reality that we spin in our head and that can afflict many people and even societies, because of our weaknesses plus, not to forget it, the tricks of the devil. He exists!

They are a very vicious phenomenon since they have that uncanny quality of convincing us precisely that with them we are most tightly in touch with reality. That’s their specialty. But the objective reality cannot be fooled for long. Bubbles are meant to burst sooner than later.

They emerge as soon as we disengage our mind, will and heart from their proper source and goal, none other than God’s will and providence. That’s the blunt truth about this whole affair, though people might want to question or discuss it further. We don’t have space for that now.

Suffice it to say that our mind, will and heart, the most precious treasures we have, did not just come to exist spontaneously. They come from a source, and no matter how we look at it, that origin can only be traced ultimately to God.

Coming from a source, God, they also are meant to have God as their object. They need to be vitally connected to him for them to function properly. Our problem is that we get intoxicated with the powers of these endowments and we tend to use them as if we are our own Gods, our own source and goal.

We need to do all to be in touch with God always, strengthening it along the way as we encounter all sorts of challenges and temptations that can weaken such grounding proper to us. And these challenges and temptations are many.

We need to pray always, rectify our intentions, deepen our knowledge of things by going beyond what our senses and reason show us and plunging deeper into the world of faith, the spiritual and the supernatural, and all the time doing all this with a lot of naturalness, never losing our basic humanity.

At the same, while trying to avoid creating bubbles and given some bad elements in our environments, we need to find some refuge, a kind of cocoon where we can be protected and can pursue the process of growth and transformation, much like the worm into the butterfly.

This cocoon can be in the form of a strongly established and clearly defined plan of life, consisting of practices of piety and other elements that remind us and encourage us to develop virtues in an abiding way.

Different schools of spirituality offer such plans of life. All we need to do is to choose the one that suits us best and start to live it.

Linking with God, the source and goal of our reality, is not easy. But all the effort we need to make is all worth it. Let’s just remember the wonderful stories of some handicapped people who managed to overcome their difficulty to blend with the world beautifully and contribute a lot to it.

We have Hellen Keller, deaf and blind, who with the help of her teacher Anne Sullivan, found a way to know the outside world and to offer her wonderful contributions to it.

We also have the blind Louis Braille, responsible for giving the blind a way to read and to get connected with the rest of us. Then there’s that Irish Christy Brown, sick with cerebral palsy who hardly moved. He discovered that his left foot can still move, and with it he learned to write and paint and other things.

It’s all worth it. God is around. He never abandons us, though he may want to play with us, sometimes easy, sometimes tough.

Hot!

JUST like in some aspects and affairs in our life, in our spiritual life we also need to be hot. If we truly are to be spiritually alive, thatś what is necessary. Otherwise, weĺl just be wasting our time and exposing ourselves to danger.

In the Book of Revelation itself, the exhortation to be hot (or cold) is made. ¨I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I would that you were cold or hot. But because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to vomit you out of my mouth.¨ (3,15-16)

In the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, though marked with a certain calmness and restraint, what is clear is the determination and single-mindedness to carry out this mission. When it was time for him to go to Jerusalem to finish his work by offering his life on the Cross, he could not be stopped.

Peter tried to, and he received a stinging rebuke: ¨Get behind me, Satan. You are a scandal to me, because you savor not the things of God, but only the things of men.¨ (Mt 16,23)

In another part of the Gospel, our Lord showed that determination by saying: ¨No man takes my life away from me. I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.¨(Jn 10,18)

A closer scrutiny of our Lordś life reveals that he was always doing the will of his Father. ¨Not my will, but yours be done,¨ (Lk 22,42) goes that famous line showing how united his will was to his Fatherś will, in spite of all the suffering.

It might be good for all of us to examine how we use our own will, and in what condition it is found. Is our will simply our own, completely possessed and used by us as if it did not come from somewhere and meant to be engaged somewhere? Is that will hot in pursuit of something, or is it simply taking it easy, waiting for things to happen?

Very often we take this matter for granted, in the thought that our will is simply our own, our most precious treasure where no one is supposed to enter or to influence, except what we want to do with it.

This attitude, to my mind, is the very basic anomaly that can come to us. Itś the unfaithful spouse and parent who begets all the other disorders in our life. Unless we realize this, I don´t think we can start to really understand the nature, purpose and meaning of our life here on earth.

Our will is a gift from God. Together with our intelligence, itś what makes us image and likeness of God. With grace, it makes us children of his, meant not only to come from him and to belong to him like all other creatures, but also to participate in Godś very own life.

We need to engage our will with the will of God always. We cannot use it just by ourselves, hooking it up with just anything. That would be unfaithful to its origin and objective. That would hold it captive merely to our own designs and detached from the very mighty source of its life and energy.

We need to continually reinforce this union and consonance between Godś will and ours, given the fragile human condition we are in, what with all our weaknesses of the flesh and of the spirit, not to mention the confusing allurements of the world and the snares of the devil.

Thatś why thereś always need for it to be revved up and made hot frequently. Itś actually a bad sign when that will is idle and quite empty of the good stuff it is supposed to feed on, that is, the things of God and things of the others that should always occupy our mind and heart. This is what true love, our will’s best use, is.

This is our main problem. We do not know how to plug our will on God, and make it hot all the time.

For this, of course, we need to be trained. This should be our first and constant concern. This is possible. The means are there. In the first place, this is Godś will for us.

Otherwise, we will receive the reproach of Christ: ¨What does it profit a man, if he gains the whole world, and suffers the loss of his own soul?¨ (Mt 16,26)

From one bigotry to another

POPE Benedict recently reminded the academic world to do its task of educating students properly. He zeroed in on the need for solid, clear ethical grounding that the youth need if they have to be properly equipped to face the multi-challenges of the present and the future.

“University communities cannot be satisfied with merely imparting knowledge. They must also teach students values and profound motivations,” the Pope said.

This is, plainly speaking, a tall order. The task of imparting knowledge alone is already a gigantic job, what with all the explosion of data that are now almost literally floating in space, waiting to be known and utilized.

At the moment, many people are at a loss as to what to make of the profusion of information glutting our media and other places. In this kind of situation itś very easy to appear knowledgeable without being truly educated.

But the task of teaching “values and profound motivations,” which is actually the real McCoy in the business of education and formation, is simply beyond description.

It involves nothing less than entering into the minds and hearts of the students, and forming them in the truth and in charity in all their aspects and levels. This is mainly a spiritual affair, to which many of us are still very much uncomfortable.

And mind you, this cannot be done simply by giving classes and dishing out lessons plans and modules of data and information, no matter how indispensable they also are.

Our problem is that we are often stuck with the collective means of formation, remaining most of the time on the surface only, on the formal and external levels. Thereś a crucial gap that is not effectively addressed by us. We are still averse to the idea of getting into peopleś interior life.

This is not to mention that many teachers and educators are in the dark about what to say and teach about values formation and motivating students. In many instances, deformation is made rather than formation, because of ignorance and incompetence in this area.

My experience is that every time I get to talk to a student individually, especially when I look at their eyes, I see an abyss, a veritable whole new world and universe that needs to be explored, understood and tutored.

It’s a delicate world out there that needs to be handled properly. A lot of patience is required, plus a great capacity for understanding and compassion, for creativity, flexibility and optimism.

Of course, one has to be well grounded on the clear if not correct anthropology, on a good understanding of the true nature of man, in all his aspects. He too has to learn the art and skill of dispensing pieces of advice in a timely manner.

I don’t think it’s an impossible task. But definitely it’s a very difficult and most trying job. Just the same, if the will is set on it, and that will is translated into action stretched in perseverance and is made to develop into a kind of system, things can be a lot easier and even enjoyable, gratifying and enlightening.

What we have to avoid is to allow the process of education to stay in the external level. It has to go all the way to touching the very mind and heart of the student, conforming them ultimately to the mind and heart of God.

A stunted kind of formation will produce the anomaly known as bigotry or narrow-mindedness. In time, its ill-effects on the persons and society will appear, leaving a mess of one kind or another.

In the past, when the religious kind of formation was dominant, this disorder of religious and clerical bigotry came about, precisely because the education froze in the formalistic aspect without touching base with the hearts of people.

This bigotry produced people who could not apply their professed faith into their work and other earthly affairs like business and politics. There’s inconsistency. And it breeds all forms of deceit and hypocrisy.

Nowadays, when education is dominated by a secular approach, a swing to the other extreme takes place. When the same neglect is also committed, we get the phenomenon of secularist bigotry, intolerant of things spiritual and supernatural.

What we have to aim at is an education and formation that is ongoing and abiding, that goes all the way both to its foundations and to its real goals, and is holistic since it blends all the aspects of man, material and spiritual, natural and supernatural, temporal and eternal.

The gap between morality and legality

THESE are two different realities. Itś good to know each of them—their nature and properties—and how they are related to each other. Thereś a lot to gain from this knowledge, especially the light we need to cruise through our increasingly complicated times.

Morality is the objective quality of our human acts, starting with the internal ones like our thoughts and intentions, insofar as these bring us or not to our proper end. Thus, our human acts can be either morally good or bad.

Morality covers everything that can be called as a human act, one that is done knowingly and freely, and thus one for which we are responsible. The morality of our actions, good or bad, is most clear to the extent that our knowledge, consent and responsibility for such actions are also at their fullest.

Thatś in theory and in principle. In practice and in real life, things are a lot messier, since assessing oneś knowledge, consent and responsibility for his actions is a very dynamic affair, often shrouded in mystery and beset by ignorance and confusion by the persons concerned.

In the end, morality depends on oneś self-knowledge and on God, who is the Creator of all things and continues to govern everything with his Providence. Thus, we can readily see how important it is to have good self-knowledge and clear and deep convictions about religion, our relation to God.

Weak and vague in this fundamental aspect, we may as well set off a course that later will turn to pure chaos and anarchy.

Thus, morality is based on our nature and dignity as persons and ultimately as children of God. It depends on our core ideas and beliefs about who and what we really are. These will ultimately define what our nature and dignity is, who we really are.

Legality, on the other hand, is a human construct made to promulgate and determine the content of morality. Its purpose is to regulate our life in society so that we can attain our common good.

Since our common good always include not only the material, social and political, but also the spiritual and personal, legality cannot get away from morality.
Legality can only have a very limited scope compared to the one of morality It cannot promulgate, determine and regulate everything in the moral law. But it cannot stay away from morality. It has to be the moon to morality’s sun. It can only reflect and work for morality, never against.

Thus, we can have the following principle to follow: no act morally bad can be sanctioned by civil law, and no act morally necessary can be prohibited. But not all morally good acts can be regulated civilly, nor can all morally bad acts be coercively prohibited, Only the morally bad relevant to our social or political common good can be prohibited.

It’s this gap between morality and legality that we have to most cautious about these days. At the moment, many pieces of evidence all over the world point to how this gap is cleverly manipulated to pursue questionable objectives.

A case in point is the Reproductive Health Bill. Its good intentions are patent, but its means are immoral. Our local version may not yet include the clearly immoral abortion, but it promotes contraception and other things that are also clearly immoral, though not in the same category as abortion.

This is an example of how legality is made to go against morality. Of course, many justifications and rationalizations are now made, including rewriting Christian morality by those who claim to be Catholics but do not follow Christian moral doctrine. They look like mongrel Christians.

Of course, those who are not Christians or Catholics, not to mention, the professed atheists and non-believers, make their own version of morality derived from their own understanding of the natural moral law that highly favors what they want: contraception, sterilization, etc.

Fortunately, there are also many non-Christian people who follow the correct morality based on their own religion and their own efforts to know the contents of the natural moral law. This only shows that the natural moral can transcend religious differences.

Whatever the situation may be, we need to raise everyone’s awareness to work for an increasingly harmonious relation between morality and legality. Our leaders, especially Church and civil leaders and politicians and other people of influence, should be in the forefront of this effort.

How we behave in this gap will show the kind of persons we are!

Self-pity

WE have been warned amply in the Gospel about this anomaly. The story of the master who came home and expected his servant to serve him even if the servant was working the whole day, had the following conclusion that drives home the point—

“When you have done all you have been commanded to do, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants. We have done no more than what we ought to do.’” (Lk 17,10)

We should be repeating these lines often to keep us from playing into the hands of self-pity!

Truth is our tendency to fall into self-pity because of reasons like tiredness, big and heavy load of work, persistent problems and miseries personal and otherwise, etc., is quite deep and pronounced. We need to be very aware of this weakness and do all to avoid succumbing into it.

Self-pity comes about when we make ourselves, not God and the others in God, as the ultimate arbiter of what we are supposed to do. It’s this basic mistake that curtails and truncates our sense of duty.

With it, our knowledge of our duties can easily be held hostage by our personal weaknesses, without mentioning the other consequences of our sins that can greatly impair it. It becomes shallow, narrow-minded and Pavlovian in its behavior.

We would not know the real reasons for our actions and obligations. We become prone to improper motives that ultimately zero in on ourselves—our advantage, comfort, pride and vanity, etc.

Of course, we can also go to the other extreme, as in exaggerating our capabilities to the point that we can think we have no limits in our powers. Many politicians have this kind of sickness. They can be so soaked with ambition that they can fail to acknowledge their limitations. But this is another story.

Self-pity is a more common disease, especially when in a poor society beset with all sorts of problems, like ours and many others, there is also inadequate and improper human and Christian formation.

Situations like this can make people’s attitude towards their problems and difficulties to become very negative, steeped in easy discouragement, despair, sadness and depression, finding no value in them.

Self-pity can also be a cover for laziness, complacency, envy, greed, self-centeredness, and a number of psychological aberrations like low self-esteem, etc. It can also trigger a slippery slope toward graver disorders like insanity.

As Shakespeare would say, “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.” St. Josemaria Escriva used to call sadness the ally of the enemy, the devil.

Self-pity isolates people from others, leading them to build their own worlds and hampering their capacity to work with others in solidarity. It shrinks their sense of the common good. It detaches them from reality. One can be in a crowd, yet he would still feel lonely.

It simply lends credence to the poetic insight, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone.”

We should develop the knack to detect the beginnings of self-pity in ourselves and in others. Better still, we should do all to protect ourselves from it, by developing the proper attitudes and virtues.

First, we should always trust in God and enliven our relation with him. This can always be done, and in fact should be done, since this is fundamental. Without this, other human resources and measures, no matter how brilliant and impressive, will just come to grief.

We need to refer everything we do to God, offering it to him and trying to figure out how it fits in God’s plan, a difficult but not impossible task. Let’s remember that Christ gives meaning to everything in our life, including our pains, sufferings, problems, difficulties, failures and tragedies, and even death itself.

We have to develop the relevant virtues: patience, fortitude, joy, prudence, optimism, openness to anything, since in life, anything can happen to us, but God would still be in control.

For this, we have to be familiar with his doctrine and start to assimilate them into our life. Our life, let’s remember, is always a life with him. It’s not simply one by ourselves completely. It’s a participation in his, but we need to do our part to cooperate with him.

Let’s not forget what he said: “Come to me, all you that labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take up my yoke upon you and learn of me, because I am meek and humble of heart, and you shall find rest to your souls.” (Mt 11,28-29)

Preaching from the heart

PREACHING the Word of God is a task entrusted to his apostles and shared by all of us in different ways. The clergy take a leading role in this affair. It’s a serious business that involves our whole being, and not just our talents and powers.

First we need to examine our understanding and attitude toward God’s word, especially the Gospel. On this basic understanding depend what we do with the Gospel and how we handle it.

Do we really know the true nature of the Gospel? Or do we take it as one more book, perhaps with certain importance, but definitely not as the living word of God, in spite of its human dimensions?

The Gospel is actually the proclamation of Christ as the Emmanuel, that is, God with us. This is an on-going affair that did not stop with the death of Christ. Christ lives with us up to now, and continues to do things with us.

All these affirmations are captured in the last lines of the Gospel of St. Matthew where our Lord said:

“Go, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them…. And behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.” (28,19-20)

Our Catechism tells us that “We must continue to accomplish in ourselves the stages of Jesus’ life and his mysteries and often to beg him to perfect and realize them in us and in his whole Church” (521)

Obviously, to carry out this mission, we need to know our Lord and his teachings. We have to go to him and read the Gospel. Reading and meditating on it should be regular practice for us, a habit meant to keep us in touch with him.

Thus, every time we read the Gospel, we have to understand by our faith that we are engaging with our Lord in an actual and living way. We are listening to him, and somehow seeing him. We can use our imagination to make ourselves as one more character in any scene depicted by the Gospel.

For this, we need to look for the appropriate time and place. We have to be wary of our tendency to be dominated by a lifestyle of activism and pragmatism that take away our need for recollection and immersion in the life of Christ.

The drama of Christ’s life here on earth has to continue in our own life. Thus, we need to continually conform our mind and heart to the Gospel, an affair that demands everything from us.

Our problem is that the Gospel has ceased to be what it ought to be to many people. It has been downgraded as one more book among many others that we have. And worse, since it does not give us immediate practical knowledge, many of us give it low priority.

For us priests, especially, we need to internalize it, not in the way an actor internalizes his script. We internalize it by making it the very life of our mind and heart, the very impulse of our emotion and passions. It should be the soul of our whole life.

Thus, when we preach we cannot help but somehow showcase the drama inside our heart, giving others a glimpse of how our heart is actually taking, handling and delivering the word of God.

Preaching should reflect the condition of our heart as it grapples with the living word of God. It should not just be a matter of declaiming or orating, reduced to the art of speaking and stage performing, a mere play of our talents.

Neither should it be just a display of our intellectual prowess or our cultural wealth. It should manage to show the actual living faith and love our heart has for God’s word, how our heart is receiving it and reacting to it.

Thus, preaching is a matter of how effectively we manage to show and teach Christ to the others. It’s never about us, the preachers. Rather, it can be about us in our effort to bring Christ to the others. Its success or failure depends solely on this.

St. John Mary Vianney, patron for priests, is an example of an excellent preacher. Though not very gifted intellectually and humanly, he managed to preach well because his heart burned with great love for Christ.

That love led him to an amazing eloquence, full of common and supernatural sense, that attracted all kinds of people, even the most sophisticated and complicated ones.

We need to learn to preach from a heart immersed in Christ!