Abusing religion

WE are already familiar with the problem of secularization. That’s
when God is set aside not only in society—as in business and
politics—but also in one’s personal life. This is the anomaly
besetting many developed Western countries that are entering what
is known as post-Christian or post-religion era.

That means religion is already considered as passé and obsolete. Any
mention of God is likely met with a laugh, a derision if not an open
hostility. In these places, men are convinced there’s no other source
of light, wisdom and guidance than their own selves, their own ideas
and devices.

Under this category, we can cite isms like atheism, agnosticism,
relativism, skepticism, deism, etc.

But another anomaly can also be found in the other end, precisely
happening in places known for religious zeal. Our country falls
largely under this classification. Here, religion tends to be abused
and exploited. In the end, religion is used to deform, emasculate and
even kill religion itself.

This happens when religion is detached from a living relationship
with God, with his Church, his doctrine and sacraments, and personal
struggle. It is driven more by one’s ideas and efforts. Faith becomes
mere philosophizing and theologizing, full of form without substance.

Spiritual life freezes into mere external appearances, reduced to a
lifeless set of pietistic practices. Sanctity deteriorates into
sanctimony. Hypocrisy, calculation, pretension, treachery abound.
There’s bigotry instead of broad-mindedness, rigidity and intolerance
instead of respect for freedom and variety.

This irregularity has many faces. To mention a few, we can cite
religious fanaticism and bitter zeal, fundamentalism, clericalism,
superstitious beliefs and practices, simony or commercialization of
sacred things, pietism and quietism, fideism and a string of other
heresies.

I suppose we can cite our Lord’s own experience at the hands of those
who crucified him as the extreme form of religious abuse. Imagine,
they were convinced they were doing it out of a keen sense of
religious duty itself.


Our Lord himself said: “The hour comes when whoever kills you will
think that he does a service to God.” (Jn 16,2) This is the ultimate
in religious abuse.

One can readily suspect religion is abused when all those calls for
goodness and holiness are full of sound and fury and bombast, but
lacking in charity, patience, mercy, humility, meekness, etc. It drips
with self-righteousness, ever eager to flaunt itself and have its
authority felt.

There is clear bias and prejudice in the understanding and
application of the doctrine. Unfair and discriminatory selectiveness
marks the study and practice of the faith.

A holistic approach to religion and freedom of consciences are often
compromised in the pursuit of holiness. There’s an absence of balance
and openness. Even the elementary norms of naturalness are violated.

Of course, religion will always involve a specific way of life,
marked even by a special charism. But it’s a uniqueness that does not
annul religion’s universal and common end, but rather enriches it in
an original way.

In abuse of religion, coercion is subtly made and can lead to
brainwashing and to manipulative isolation of people from others.
People are made to do religious practices without fully understanding
them.

They do these practices more out of fear than of love, more for some
ulterior motives than out of a sincere desire to know, love and serve
God and others.

The virtues are pursued mechanically, not organically in the sense
that they are vitally motivated by charity as they ought to be.
Sincerity, for example, can be understood as simply telling the truth,
the whole truth, but without any mention about charity, prudence and
discretion. Truth is divorced from charity.

When religion is abused, prayer turns into a soliloquy rather than a
loving dialogue with God. Love for sacrifice does not spring from the
spirit, but is merely a put-on.

When religion is abused, priesthood is less an office for a total
holocaust of self-giving, and more an occasion for privileges. The
scandals that black-eyed the Church these past years involving some
clerics arise from this disorder.

We need to be wary of these tendencies and possibilities that are
open to all of us. We can even fall into them without noticing it,
since the decline to religious abuse can mimic the process of osmosis.

We have to ask our Lady to teach us how to truly deal with God
without being deluded by the wily ways of religious abuse. Like her,
we need to be always simple and humble to be able to stick to what is
authentic religion.

Getting our act together politically

WE have just finished our elections. Most of our elected officials
have been proclaimed. They now wait for their inauguration. Only a few
things need to be cleaned up. What we have before us now is the
continuing duty to get our act together politically as one people with
one common goal under one God.

This is not, of course, an easy and simple task. It is complex,
dynamic, endless. This is where politics enters, the art of organizing
ourselves as one nation, the different views and positions made to
blend into an operative unity so we attain true progress and
development, and avoid unproductive quarreling.

This duty involves everyone of us, each one playing his own part
well, the one proper to each one but open to everyone and everything
else in a healthy spirit of solidarity that is working for the common
good.

For this to take off well, we first have to learn to accept the
officials voted by the majority of the people in spite of some serious
differences we may have with them.

They may be the very personification of the devil, or just a bunch of
incompetent movie stars and mere dynastic heirs, but we have to recognize them as our duly elected leaders and follow and help them as best as we can.

Then as much as possible also, we should study the issues thoroughly,
giving priority consideration to their basic and essential aspects
before we choose the different alternatives offered from the angles of ideology, political parties and agenda, and many other socio-economic and cultural options.

We will always have differences, and we just have to learn how to
grapple with them without unduly compromising the peace and public
order since these are basic in social life.

This is, of course, easier said than done. When to assert and when to
acquiesce, when to push and when to lay back, etc., are acts that need
a deeper principle than what common sense or mere human prudence can offer.

This is where everyone of us would realize that we need to have
recourse to a higher source of wisdom and prudence, and this can be no
other than our sense of faith and religion, our relation with God.

That’s why, I was happy to read recently a speech of the Holy Father
reminding us of this crucial point. These were his words:

“Religion is decisive in this, especially when it teaches fraternity
and peace, and when, in a society marked by secularization, it
instructs the faithful to give space to God and to be open to the
transcendent.

“With the exclusion of religion from the public realm, as well as
religious fundamentalism, the encounter and collaboration for the
progress of humanity between peoples is impeded, the life of a society
is void of motivation, and politics assumes an oppressive and
aggressive face.”

I hope everyone of us, especially our political leaders, profoundly
feel the real import of these words. Politics simply cannot be a
function of practical reasoning, no matter how indispensable it also
is.

Politics has to touch base and remain in living contact with God and
his providence. As Popes have been teaching for generations, politics
is a very important realm for the exercise of charity, true charity in
its ever-widening social implications, from the parochial to the
international to the cosmic.

For this purpose, a lot of education is needed. Genuinely Christian
politicians have to be formed who are not only popular, but are also
competent, grounded on the Church’s social doctrine and convinced that
politics can and should be a path for no less than sanctity to them.

They have to learn to read minds and signs of the times so as to know
the real needs of the people at a given time. They need the virtue of
prudence in a rather advanced development state, so they would know
how to act, given the changing circumstances.

The skills of communication, dialogue and other practical qualities
should always be honed. They have to understand that their mission is
to serve, their authority is for service. All the perks and privileges
of their position are subordinate to this principle.

We need to be broken in into this kind of thinking. What is more
common nowadays is a political culture that is deprived of its
ultimately religious dimension. It is trapped in the peripherals,
making a lot of noise but hardly performing as it should be, pursuing
its real goal. We need to change.

Virgin and mother

THIS is the appellation proper to Mary, our Lady, the virgin mother
of Christ, and because of that, she too is the Mother of God and our
mother, “Mater Dei, mater nostra.”

She is not the mother of God in the sense that she begot God
directly. No, that cannot be. No one is prior to God who is eternal,
no beginning, no end.

She is mother of God in the sense that her son, Jesus Christ, though
with two natures, human and divine, is a divine person, the Son of
God, the second person of the Blessed Trinity.

It is from this angle that she can rightly be called, Mother of God.
Though she only “contributed” to the humanity of Christ, the fact is
that the child born of her is a divine person, is God. It is God, not
she nor we, who made her the Mother of God.

This is, of course, a theological reasoning that surpasses human
reason itself, but does not contradict it. It involves a reality so
rich that our reason goes haywire, and simply has to admit its
inadequacy so as to open itself to a higher, richer reality. We need
to do this kind of adjustments in our thinking.

What challenges us more is that aside from being Mother of God, the
maternity of Mary is achieved in the virginal way, with no
intervention of any man. The Holy Spirit overshadowed her, and the Son
of the Most High was conceived in her womb.

This was a privilege given to her which she accepted when she said
“Fiat” (Be it done to me) after the archangel Gabriel told her she was
going to be the Mother of the Son of God, and explained how it was
going to be.

This is strictly a truth of faith, since if we approach this with our
human reasoning and natural sciences, our only conclusion is that a
man must have been involved.

St. Joseph, who acted as the husband, initially wanted to separate
from her once he knew she was with child. But it was explained to him
in a dream that the child was of the Spirit. He knew the conception
was virginal. So, Mary was both a virgin and a mother.

Our difficulty does not end here. In a document written by Pope John
Paul II entitled, Redemptoris mater (Mother of the Redeemer), we are
practically told that all of us should also be both a virgin and a
mother.

The reasoning goes like this: after saying that Mary is both virgin
and mother, the Church also has to be like Mary, and therefore should
also be a virgin and a mother. Since we comprise the Church with Jesus
as head, then we should also be a virgin and a mother.

These are the words of the document: “As Virgin and Mother, Mary
remains for the Church a ‘permanent model.’ It can therefore be said
that especially under this aspect, namely as a model…Mary, present in
the mystery of Christ, remains constantly present also in the mystery
of the Church.

“For the Church too is ‘called mother and virgin,’ and these names
have a profound biblical and theological justification.” (42)

The document then proceeds to describe how the Church, and as a
consequence, each one of us, can be both a virgin and a mother like
Mary—by accepting the word of God in fidelity, by having a spousal
mentality that leads us always think of the spouse, by being
apostolically fruitful, etc.

What is clear here is that we need to expand our understanding of
virginity and motherhood. We cannot get stuck in the level of the
sexual, biological and hormonal, social and cultural.

We have to put in the very crucial element of the Christian faith. In
short, to have a theological understanding of these aspects of our
life, without rejecting the other human and natural considerations,
which are actually basic.

This is capital since with the faith-deprived understanding of
virginity and motherhood, keying them more on the sexual, biological
and cultural aspects, the current debate and discussion about
sexuality, gender, parenthood, etc. has gone twisted and has led to
some absurd conclusions.

Like, people nowadays have a common belief that with present
conditions, it is now impossible to be a virgin, and motherhood now
suffers great depreciation with many women avoiding it by means of
contraception and abortion.

These and other incomplete understanding of virginity and motherhood
are due to an improper frame in which they are learned.