Lethal secularization

LUCIFER was enraged.

Mel Libre

Free Verse

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Someone was caught violating the dress code in Hell. An alert demon reported that a staff had carried a pocket Bible along with her as she conducted her assigned work.

For her misconduct, she was to be given the stiff penalty of serving as coal in Hell’s fire generation room.

Tuni Parata, a Sky Tower host who worked for years in the Auckland gambling casino, was cited for misconduct for carrying a pocket Bible at work. This incident figured in the front page of the national newspaper.

The woman didn’t end up in the fire generation room of the casino (it doesn’t have one anyway). Instead the company, due to public pressure, simply reminded her that she should not display the Bible openly while at work, and that she could read this during breaks.

In the Philippines, party-list legislator Raymond Palatino had proposed the banning of religious images in public offices.

Under the bill, the conduct of religious ceremonies such as prayers, masses and other liturgical celebrations as well as the display of religious symbols would be prohibited within the premises and perimeter of offices, departments and bureaus, including publicly-owned spaces and corridors within such places. (I understand that Palatino has since withdrawn the proposed bill.)

Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas strongly reacted to the proposed law.

“There’s separation of church and state but there’s no separation of God and man. It’s crazy because if you separate the body from the soul, what do you create? A dead man.

If you separate the soul of the nation from the nation, what do you have? A dead nation.”

He further stated that losing our soul as a nation would be “the real downfall.”

Mgr. Anthony Figueirdo, addressing US Catholics said, "The Holy Father spoke of the challenges in marriage, in family life, in growing secularization, in education, but I think there was a common theme amidst all the challenges: that where God does not exist, where he is taken out of culture, civilization itself begins to disintegrate."

Christians must at all times be vanguards of the world. As much as we are at war against sin, so must we be at war against the low-intensity, yet lethal secularization.