Damn the bishops for taking it lying down Source:
http://www.businessmirror.com.ph/home/opinion/13826-damn-the-bishops-for-taking-it-lying-downFREE FIRE by Teddy Locsin, Jr.
The issue of the bishops’ Pajeros was from the start an obvious demolition job directed at the Catholic Church so as to weaken its resistance to the birth-control bill which is immorally premised on the hope and proposition that only the select few (who can afford it) deserve to be born into the next generation.
I have elsewhere conclusively proved, in an article of Tolstoyan proportions and Kantian acuity, that the bill has only slimmest relevance to reproductive health and women’s empowerment, while Nobel laureate Amartya Sen proved that educating women better empowers them to say “no†to more children than their mates can pay to maintain.
The real and only purpose of the misleadingly labeled reproductive-health bill is to enforce artificial birth control on a rampantly randy colored race through the free distribution of expensive contraceptives (not covered by the Cheaper Medicine Act) to be sold by the giant pharmaceutical firms that are bankrolling the RH bill. There is no birth-control program anywhere in the white world.
To start with, the amount involved in the bishops’ Pajero scandal was picayune: P6 million.
To continue, the vehicles purchased by the bishops with money given by the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office were not Pajeros but second- even thirdhand utility vehicles for social work. None of the vehicles could be described—as the PCSO and government spokesmen repeatedly lied—as luxury or even remotely midrange.
The government’s aim in exposing the donations was to make the bishops look like crooks, the Catholic Church like a den of thieves, and Aquino like Jesus driving the moneychangers from the Temple.
Not surprisingly, the main attack made by the administration and its senatorial allies against the Catholic Church involved the separation of church and state.
The Church has argued that that principle prevents the state from imposing a birth-control program that violates a genuine Catholic conscience, which is shaped not by superficial opinion fed by a superficial press but by Catholic instruction. Some may not believe this but Catholics must. It is the same with the Iglesia ni Cristo which none dare defame because its bishops are made of sterner stuff than their Catholic counterparts.
The Aquino administration has argued that the same principle forbids the Catholic Church from asserting politically its most cherished belief—in the priceless sanctity of life—against the secular conviction that life is only for those who can afford it and not for those who cannot.
The Aquino administration accused the Catholic Church of violating the separation of church-and-state principle, as much by accepting the PCSO’s money to purchase utility vehicles for social work, as by politically asserting its most cherished belief in the priceless sanctity of human life against the Aquino administration’s opposed view that life is only as good as its economic contribution and drops in value when supply outstrips demand. The Aquino administration believes that religious belief can only find private expression and never political action—a view that would have denied Cory Aquino the faith-based political power to liberate her people.
In this battle of beliefs (neither one nor the other has hard science to back it) between an old religion and a new secular faith, the government has fired lies, insults and paid crowds, led by a harlot and a Chinese clown in a cardboard miter with a papier-mâché Pajero around his waist. The government-sponsored Bantay Bishops rallied around the Calvary of the Senate where it was hoped that the bishops, after the scourging at the pillar of the press, would be crucified. The bishops’ accusers and their senatorial backers were crucified instead by Miriam Defensor Santiago, defensor fidei. She gave a piece of her mind to those who don’t have any.
With machine-gun staccato of alliterative and penetrating invectives, Miriam mowed down the moral pretensions of her Senate colleagues who each take home, no questions asked, P200 million a year just in salaries and allowances paid only nominally to nonexistent staff, plus hundreds of millions in kickbacks from billions in pork barrel. Miriam accused the accuser, the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office, of smothering the bishops in ordure to cover up its odious practices like privately placing billions in PCSO funds in private banks for a margin of the interest.
Miriam did what the pathetic bishops had failed to do for themselves, for their Church, and for her dismayed children. She defamed but with utter accuracy the defamers of the Catholic religion and exposed them as what the Church was too afraid to call them: enemies of the Catholic faith. She left the Commission on Audit in shambles for wasting the time of the Senate on constitutional issues it had no authority to raise. The COA may question whether appropriated sums were spent or stolen but not whether, after being properly accounted for, it was constitutionally dispensed as well. New minted COA Commissioner Heidi Mendoza looks more fetching in office than she did out of it. Power may be an aphrodisiac, as Henry Kissinger said, but public office will definitely give you a makeover.
But the Aquino administration, though its credibility is now shattered, did succeed in arousing Catholic contempt for the Catholic Church, especially among its stoutest defenders.
All right-thinking and right-feeling Catholics now despise the Church for allowing our religion to be insulted, traduced, shamed and dragged in the mud with no more resistance than a Jew in a ghetto in a pogrom. Christ counseled humility but not shame; forgiveness but not submission.
The history of the Catholic Church is one of proud assertion and militancy born of the conviction of its infallibility. The timidity of the Filipino Catholic Church strongly suggests that its bishops no longer believe in the truth of the Church or in its imperishability despite Christ’s promise that he had built her on unyielding rock and not on the rolling pebbles of public opinion.
(Continued...)
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