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Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Roperos: Father Lape’s homily
By Godofredo M. Roperos
Last Sunday, I attended the first mass in my hometown with my brother Nerius, retired plant industry director, and his wife Carmen, who were in Balamban to attend our town fiesta.
They now reside in Davao, but they just arrived from Los Angeles after a six-month visit to their daughter Joanne and their first and still only grandchild, three-year-old Gabriella. But it is not really about them that I write this. It is about the subject of Father Expedito Lape’s homily about information-giving.
Father Ditdit Lape, a native of Balamban, is one of our 30 or so priests. There was an interesting bit of down-to-earth commentary in the homily about many of our people’s propensity to pass on information immersed in varied motives, a good number of which are destructive rather than instructive.
Mentioning the just concluded Cebu Press Freedom Week and the right-to-reply bill pending in Congress, he feels both are expressions of the importance of information in our lives at this point in our history.
However, he made quite a distinction between wholesome and enriching information as against an ill-motivated information that tends to destroy or generate ill-will.
He cited the number of incidents that came to his attention about breakups of couples, where the wife or husband is working in the Middle East, Taiwan, Hong Kong or Singapore. The cause, he said, is the passing on of derogatory information by relatives or friends who have hidden motives.
When one is in a foreign land working his heart out to earn a living, any information that alludes to the unfaithfulness of the spouse left behind, tends to bloom in unexpected ways, nourished by the imagination that could become violent and murderous.
Father Ditdit said this is how destructive some information passed on unthinkingly or intentionally could be. He cited an instance where the parents wanted to have a bigger share of what their daughter working abroad was sending to her husband.
“The husband worked hard on his own to support his family, and saved his wife’s money so they could put it to better use when she comes home. But his in-laws’ greed made them send information to their daughter that her husband was squandering her money and playing around.
Of course, the daughter lost her trust and love for her husband. She stopped sending him money and sent it to her parents instead. Result: a broken family, and all because of the greed of her parents which the daughter did not know…”
Of course, it was not the first time that I heard such sort of tragic tale. It betrays a human weakness that defies even kinship in blood, truly man’s inhumanity to man. It is something we could not expect to come from a parent. But who was it who said that one’s greed could twist the mind’s focus and upset the sense of moral balance?
Thus, whatever reasons one has for doing certain things, it is what he has in his heart that really matters. One may be a genius at doing things, but it is his goal, his purpose that matters.
People, according to the priest, who I believe is in his 30s, can be vicious without really being violent. Just by merely spreading untrue information about innocent targets already projects a viciousness that goes beyond the bounds of kinship.
Sometimes, it comes in the form of complaints about changes in the status quo of certain circumstances and takes the form of discontent over the changes. Often, this kind of complaint is a result of lack of information or of misinformation.
In an age of heightening sophistication of communications technology, the capability of people to improve the quality of information served to “consumers,” especially in the matter of truth, as substance of the information, appears to have lagged very far behind the tools or the technology.
While the infrastructure has moved forward with unusual speed, for some reason quite difficult to fathom or explain, the skill and finesse of the “human” information producers have remained the same—captive of human weakness.
(September 30, 2003 issue)
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