WHILE surfing the Net, I came across a post seeking “100 people who are not ashamed to say, ‘I am blessed to be Catholic.’” Of course, I shared it but while doing so I asked myself why we have reached this point. Citizens of the only predominantly Catholic nation in Asia asked to say they are not ashamed of their faith?
And then you look at the current landscape in the Philippines and you understand the worries. Three priests killed in separate attacks and one wounded. President Rodrigo Duterte mocking the faith to the point of saying Catholics make God look stupid. Yes, he did say in a speech God is stupid. But I think it was more of him failing to phrase his words well.
Before I got enamored with Marxist thought I was in the process of tightening my embrace of the faith. I taught Catechism during summer guided by social workers of the Redemptorist Church. I got assigned to read verses from the Bible during mass. I made sure I would go to mass every Sunday even if the church was a couple of kilometers from our house.
In sum, I was reconnecting with my faith when I came across dialectical and historical materialism. I felt awkward preaching the theory that God didn’t create man; rather, it was man who created God.
But one cannot throw away in a flash a belief inculcated on you since you were born. I told myself that once the revolution triumphs, I would once more be open to preach the religious beliefs I grew up with.
But I got arrested not only once but twice and was forcibly divorced from the revolutionary movement. In the camp where I stayed after my captors decided to “rehabilitate” me, I ended up voluntarily reconnecting with my faith. When my captors became lenient with me, I went back to going to masses every Sunday in the churches within and outside the camp.
I never thought then that we would reach this point when our leaders would denigrate the religious belief of their very own constituents, when the Catholic Church in the Philippines would be the target of ridicule by our very own president. What is sad is that these political leaders and their supporters (called diehard Duterte supporters or DDS) are even baptized Catholics.
Admittedly, it is not difficult to subject the Catholic Church to ridicule. A big religion has its imperfections and faults. It does not help that the indiscretions of church leaders worldwide have been exposed and the punishment imposed on them has often been inconsistent with the crime committed. That allowed Catholic Church bashers to focus on the bad, tainting its image.
I don’t know why the president seems determined to shake the foundation of the Catholic Church in the Philippines under his regime. Perhaps he sees the church as an obstacle to the intention to rule the country with an iron fist. In a way, this has been what the president has done to his critics. Consider what happened to Sen. Leila de Lima and former Supreme Court chief justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno.
I am a Catholic and I am saddened by this development. But the attacks will only embolden me to say, “I am not ashamed of my faith. I am blessed to be a Catholic.”