|
Friday, August 23, 2002
OBENIETA: Black animals, white ash
By Myke U. Obenieta
Unlike a prayer, most intense when done with a blind man’s faith, the church is something I devoutly wish to get intimate with. But only if I were wide awake.
With the spotlight casting its lurid glare on the blight festering on the underbelly of the Catholic Church, the danger flies in the face of the beholder either in the manner of a speck of dust or a log in the eyes. Writing this, in fact, is all it takes for me to blink along with the cursor while I’m tapping away at the word processor. Outright, I confess: Bless me, father, for I have seen, myopic I may have been.
Recently, something twitched itchy under my eyelids after I read a statement from a newly formed group in Cebu called the Catholic Solidarity for the Clergy in the Philippines (CSCP). Led by Dr. Joseph Bullecer, renowned for his manic drive to rid our streets of smut, CSCP is aflame with good intentions. If its members have wings, puhleez, blow its ashes in my eyes.
I blink again, and remember what a character in Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” pointed out: “Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
Blame it perhaps on my smudgy eyeglasses, but all I see so far in its objective “to support the Filipino clergy’ efforts for their renewal” is but a blur. I may not be a French-kisser to my Catholic faith, but I say amen to CSCP’s avowals to “work for the restoration of the respect that should be given to priests.” I can’t hold candles, however, to CSCP’s penchant at playing shadows on the church’s walls.
Complex, that’s the basic adjective we can tack on the thorny issue presently crowning the heads of the Catholics. Thus, simplistic solutions would just be as substantial as smoke, as it is when confronting the conflict of good and evil gets narrowed down to the penchant of perceiving as either black or white.
“They should be models without blemish in conduct and character,” said Bullecer with whom I have no quarrel over the wisdom in asking all priests “to live a more dedicated and more prayerful life so that people can look up to them.” But to suggest, as CSCP does, that the problem can be scratched by adhering to skin-deep shifts of behavior, like forswearing vices and wearing clerical finery to curry the respect of the flock, there goes the rub.
No, I don’t mind sharing beer with my priest and picking the nits of merit or the lack thereof of “Biglang Liko.” So much the better, in fact, if he can wear his choice pick from the ukay-ukay bargain on his sleeve.
What I mind, however, is the capacity of CSCP to fortify the flock—and make it more puissant in lifting the Church out of the moral chasm, by goading it to go along the lines of the “Voice of the Faithful,” a movement created in February by a small group in Boston, Massachusetts that has “snowballed into a global militia of 19,000.” Bent on empowering parishioners, it’s their credo to “actively participate in the governance and the guidance” of the church.
Thus they seek ways to allow the laity more elbowroom in policy-making, including giving parishioners a hand in the appointments of pastors and bishops. Scandals, they reckon, wouldn’t have come to pass if the laity disabused themselves of the delusion that the clergy are “somehow above the rest.” Where hierarchy looms like a high horse, there goes the “unbridled addiction to power.”
|
|
[return to top]
[home]
[network page]
|
LOCAL NEWS
BUSINESS
OPINION
SPORTS
LIFESTYLE
FEATURE
SUPERBALITA
WEEKEND
|
