Pushing out the pushover

THE lines are drawn. The flashpoints are building up. We need to shed off our pushover type of Christianity to effectively grapple with the intensifying challenges we have at hand.

The world is drifting to uncharted waters of secularism, each time deepening and worsening. Faith and religion are put on the back burner. Ideologies, full of so-called practical and get-real guts, take over.

Local and world leaders are increasingly showing atheistic or agnostic visions of life. Systems and structures are patterned after these worldviews. The effects are now conspicuous in people’s mentalities, cultures and lifestyles.

We are actually being pushed to make a radical choice. Are we still with God or against God? Do we believe in the spiritual and supernatural world, or there are just material and temporal realities around? We cannot remain undecided, unsure which way to go or jump.

Christian believers are now asked to be consistent all the way in their spiritual and moral life. All aspects, all levels, fronts and fields in life have to be covered. A certain kind of Christian militancy, different from the political and social one, whether leftist or rightist, is desired.

We need to put more range and depth in our Christian life, overcoming a two-dimensional mindset that has been dragging us down to complacency, inaction, flippancy, superficiality, isolationism and the like.

Now is the time to clearly see the indivisible link of faith and religion with all our other concerns. In fact, now is the time to deepen our conviction about the leading and inspiring role of our religious beliefs in all our earthly affairs.

We just cannot remain in the practical or commonsensible level. While always good, that level cannot cope with the over-all reality upon us. It tends to follow a sense of prudence that is more of the flesh than of the spirit, more of the world than of God.

We have been stagnating in that attitude, and it has led us nowhere but growing worldliness and vanishing spirituality. The mistakes and excesses of the past religious extremism are no excuse to ignore the objective need for faith in our life. We just have to find the proper balance.

We should not be afraid that a faith-based orientation in life can lead us to become rigid and out of step with other people having different or opposite viewpoints. A genuinely understood faith would know how to blend with everyone and with everything while keeping its consistency intact.

Obviously, there will be mistakes along the way. But corrections will always be available. With God, even the humanly impossible will become possible.

By the way, the current Church predicament involving sex scandals of some members of the clergy needs to be put in its proper perspective. It has been twisted along the lines of a secularist, antagonistic mentality.

A study made by a certain American professor Philip Jenkins yields the following findings that can be helpful in this regard:

- Priestly celibacy is not the issue. Married men are more likely to abuse children than unmarried.

- All religious groups have pedophile scandals, and the Catholics are at the bottom of the list.

- Child abuse in prevalent in all areas of society—schools, youth organizations.

- Doctors, farmers and teachers are professions most likely to abuse children—not clergy.

- Catholic cases of pedophilia make more headlines because of anti-Catholic prejudice and because the Catholic Church is bigger and more lucrative to sue.

- Most cases of child abuse are homosexual in nature. But this aspect is downplayed in the press to be politically correct, to avoid associating it with the ongoing gay agenda in the world today.

- What we now call ‘cover up’ was often done in a different cultural context, when the problem was not fully understood and when all organizations hushed scandals. It is unfair to judge events thirty years ago by today’s standards.

- We must be wary of false accusations. The accused must be given fair hearing.

- When guilt is established the offender must be punished, not sheltered.

- Distinctions must be made between different types of abuse. Some offenses are more serious than others.

- Number of offenses must be considered. One lapse is not as serious as repeated, persistent and premeditated offenses.

Church history tells us the Church emerged from worse past problems chastened, purified and made stronger. Let’s face this present crisis courageously. In the meantime let’s work on that Christian militancy expected of us. We have to push out the pushover Christianity.

Predatory

WE have to be wary of some dangerous ideas spilling out from decadent Western countries these days. The latest casualty, to my mind, is Kenya whose Parliament just legalized abortion on demand, a clear caving-in to US pressures under the Obama-Clinton administration.

We have been practically bullied by the same group and we just have to find a way to resist the tremendous pressures. The ideas and practices they espouse are clearly predatory.

Not only are they harmful. They also are aggressive in promoting their rotten causes. They’re good at preying on the weak and helpless, using every trick in the book to market their ideologically-driven projects.

What are some of these dangerous ideas? Aside from abortion, we have condoms and contraception, same-sex union, divorce, mercy-killing, sex education, reproductive health, family planning, population control, etc. Someone banded them together under the umbrella of ¨culture of death.¨

They come to us beautifully packaged, complete with icing and colorful designs, with a lot of moolah besides and all sorts of benefits. Their promises of good life soar stratospheric. Gratification is guaranteed and instant. No need to think much, no need to worry much.

I have seen a long list of powerful and moneyed foreign foundations and NGOs giving enormous amounts of grants even to local Catholic universities in order to promote some of these dangerous ideas.

Appealing, for example, to tolerance since we are now living in a culturally diverse world, suggestions are made to put a shelf-life on marriage, renewable every 10 years, or make any kind of union and coupling, be it temporary or gay, equivalent to marriage, to be given the same legal recognition and treatment.

To pursue these goals, they resort to making tendentious surveys, courting political and social leaders, even teachers, dangling externally benevolent projects but with noxious strings attached. They politicize the issues and start defining their new concept of morality and the like.

Truly tempting. But they are clearly against God’s will and law, screamingly immoral and definitely toxic. The devastation they have caused is truly disgusting. In Spain right now, for example, the government is promoting masturbation for children. That´s part of their sex education.

But then again, talking about God and morality is now tagged as politically incorrect these days. The intriguing part of all this is that when you get one of these dangerous ideas, you’re likely to get the others as well. That´s because they all spring from the same source, from the same spirit. Let´s not play dumb.

We can term such devious spirit as liberalism or relativism or secularism or materialism, etc. What’s common is their disbelief in God, formally professed or not. It has many variants—agnosticism, deism, even pantheism, etc.

These days, we need to be adept in discerning spirits, reading signs of the times, identifying ideological machinations, since there are many forces, both good and evil, at play not only in the world stage, but also in every corner, thanks to our advanced technologies. In short, we have to learn to smell a rat from a mile.

We cannot afford to be naïve, and to react to threats and possible problems with baby steps. A lot of things are needed—massive education and formation, a certain inoculation given our increasingly polluted world, intensification of spiritual and moral life.

Sorry to bring these terms in public. I know they´re supposed to be spoken in restricted circles. But given present circumstances, these abstruse terms need to be made popular, if not, household words. And besides, with the growing technical lingo we are exposed everyday, why should we not develop a taste for finer moral concepts also?

Thing is we need to be ready to grapple with these challenges today. Everyone has to be involved. Let´s stop wasting our time trying to figure out whom to assign these duties: the Church or the State, parents or teachers, etc.?

These responsibilities are for all, whatever sector of society one may belong. It´s not an either/or proposition. It´s both/and, all, everyone! It´s not exclusive to a certain group. It´s inclusive of everyone.

We have to get our act together. For this, one basic requirement is to overcome our deep-seated biases that relegate our faith to the background, giving rise to a schizophrenic type of Christianity.

We have to be more Christian. And not to be afraid that such trend would make us rigid, fanatical or fundamentalist. If we are truly Christian, we will have an openness and firmness to truth and charity like the one of Christ even to death.

Confession and inner healing

WE need to recover the true face of confession. Very often this sacrament is wrapped in negative images. This is unfortunate because confession actually plays an indispensable role in a believer’s life. It’s where Christian life is restored, or at least strengthened.

Of course, confession has to be understood as a doctrine of faith. One misses the truth right at the source if he considers it as just one more practice, religious but mainly social, its nature determined more by its practical aspects than by that it was instituted by Christ and taught and promoted by the Church.

This is actually our main problem these days. Many believers have a watered down attitude toward faith and religion, and of course toward the Church. They allow their reason instead of faith to lead them in their Christian life. They believe and they follow only when they understand things and see them useful in some way.

For example, in this now fading episode of the Church, especially the Pope, being unfairly accused of misdemeanor regarding some sex scandals involving members of the clergy in the past, this dubious attitude is exposed.

Some media people who are known to be Christians and even Catholics took a secularist attitude towards the matter. Of course, as journalists they have to do their job in the strictest norms of their profession.

But then again they should not take their professional standards as the absolute law. There is a law higher than theirs, to which they should also follow. And that is the law of God where charity and mercy blend well with the requirements of truth and justice.

Now that this crisis is unraveling in a way favoring the Church, these media people are found to have been rash in their views. They failed to take the bigger picture. Their biases and inconsistencies in their Christian life were simply bared.

Again, we have to take our faith seriously and live it as consistently as possible. We don’t flaunt it when it is politically correct, and junk it when it is inconvenient. And this seriousness in our faith should also be shown in our attitude toward confession.

As sacrament, it is not just a human institution. Though it uses human instruments, it is Christ to whom one approaches and from whom one asks forgiveness in confession.

Though it takes only a few minutes, the truth is that the whole drama of Christ assuming our sins, dying to them and rising from them, victorious over sin and death, and expressing the most exquisite version of love in his mercy for us, takes place there.

This is what happens in confession if understood and done well. We need to expand our mind and heart to accommodate this tremendous reality of confession as taught to us by our Christian faith.

If we today pride ourselves of having gone nuclear, of having covered a vast area of worldly knowledge, then we should do something similar with respect to truths of faith. We cannot remain in the kindergarten level in our appreciation and practice of confession, for example.

Of course, all parties should do their best here. The priests and the penitents should play their respective parts well. Pope Benedict recently said that confession is where that intimate and life-changing “dialogue of salvation” transpires.

Priests should realize that as confessors they lend their faculties to Christ who is the one who forgives sins. They should be truly identified with him, effectively and affectively. Thus, they—we—should be competent and truly holy, because only in this way can we dispense God’s mercy and effect inner healing in the penitents.

This is, of course, a very dynamic, never-ending effort, with its ups and downs, twists and turns. But as long as there is determined effort to be faithful to Christ, the sacrament can be done as it should be in spite of our defects and miseries.

Hearing confessions is a very privileged moment for any priest. That’s where he enters into the inmost part of a person, that part where one is supposed to face Christ to ask for the most important thing in life—God’s mercy. We can need many and endless things, but in the end what we most need is none other than God’s mercy.

Priests should do their part really well. They have to know how to be at one time a father, a friend, a judge and doctor. They must know how to advise as well as the intricacies of the internal forum.