WHEN I started column-writing in newspapers, trying to explain certain truths of faith as they impact on certain issues, I also started receiving both thank-you letters and hate mails. Both of them, of course, gave me some food for thought and material for further writing.
After a while, the hate mails stopped coming, sort of validating my belief that the good things in life have a longer life span than the bad ones. I suppose their senders must have grown tired at this hopeless case that I am.
I largely would ignore them, since how else can you handle impertinence and insolence, and would just pray for their writers. But frankly I managed to profit something from them—insights, words and expressions, flourish and style, etc.
Lately though, with this RH Bill controversy, some of these letters resurrect. They now come much more politely, at least in the beginning, because after two or three lines, the venom starts to spurt.
It’s amazing that they come not sporadically, but in big numbers, as if they are orchestrated. And they bear more or less the same attitude and style, more or less the same arguments and drift of reasoning.
They normally begin by saying that they are “proud Catholics” or “devout Catholics,” schooled in the best Catholic schools from kinder to college. But whenever I read these words, I would immediately feel uneasy and suspicious.
I always think a good Catholic is not a proud Catholic. He knows his Catholicism is something on loan which he should take care of. Anything can happen to lose it. He has neither time nor reason to flaunt his Catholicism or his devoutness.
Then comes the opening salvo. They almost uniformly say that they have also been taught how to think critically, and from there they start sounding like people more with an axe to grind than with a point to clarify. This, to me, is where the real problem unravels, where the seeds of the crisis we’re in take root.
One’s thinking, one’s reasoning is considered the last arbiter of what is true and false, what is good and bad. It’s a thinking that largely ignores the faith, and is mainly engaged in purely earthly realities—physical, economic, social, political, etc. The faith is acknowledged only when it is convenient to these earthly and temporal considerations.
In this RH Bill controversy, for example, the definition of what is moral is not anymore derived from God’s will and commandments, as also written and manifested in our nature, but in a subjective understanding, personal or consensual, of what is practical, popular, economical, etc.
That’s why it is a thinking that cannot understand the wisdom of the cross, of self-denial and sacrifice, of the value of humility and simplicity, obedience and loyalty, and the many other spiritual and supernatural realities that have clear moral consequences.
It judges things using earthly criteria alone, and increasingly imprisons itself in its own world, a world of its own making, and not anymore the one given to us by God to take care of. It becomes so self-possessed that it can conclude that nothing can exist outside of what he can think and understand.
It can end up suspecting and then hating faith. It can lose faith, and can make itself its own guide, its own God, misusing freedom which is a gift from God to choose whatever he wants to think about.
It can accuse faith of being anti-reason, when in fact faith always uses reason up to the point when reason itself recognizes its limitations and allows itself to be taken up by faith. Faith never stops using reason, though reason at a certain point finds it already reasonable to be assumed by faith, since it cannot go any further on its own.
This kind of predicament underlies the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, the parable of the prodigal son, and in many others where man tries to cut his relation from God to be on his own. Trouble and disaster can only be expected from this situation.
We need to find a systematic way to extricate ourselves from this crisis where we give our own reason excess power at the expense of faith. Faith and reason should be together always. Our critical thinking should not be at odds with our faith, as revealed by God in Christ and now taught by the Church.
But for reason to accept faith, great humility is needed. A proud Catholic is a contradiction.
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