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Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Malilong: A voice in the killing wilderness
By Frank Malilong Jr.
The Other Side
Two weeks ago, Cebu Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal told an audience of lay people at the Sacred Heart Chapel that he will always stand up for what is true even if it means standing up alone. The way of truth may be narrow, he told members of the Alay sa Diyos, “but it is straight.”
The cardinal’s denunciation of summary executions in Cebu has become increasingly strident during the last few days but the unresolved killings continue. Whoever gave the order to shoot chosen criminal suspects on sight is obviously not listening to His Eminence. What is worse is that the public continues to play a deaf ear, too. Is he standing up alone? Is his a voice in the wilderness?
In a short talk that preceded his dialog with Alay members, Vidal said he liked to think that the lay faithful in Cebu “are already mature enough to feel with the Church.” “Or am I presuming too much?” he asked rhetorically.
He could have been. Until now, there has been no organized effort to pressure the authorities to stop the murders or, assuming that they do not have a hand in them, to solve them. About the only support that the cardinal has gotten so far came only in the form of newspaper editorials and half-hearted calls from some quarters for a congressional investigation. The business community has been strangely silent.
Indeed, there had been suspicions that the death squads have the support of certain influential businessmen who have grown tired of the inefficacy of the criminal justice system. It took no less than the cardinal to publicly voice out these suspicions, criticizing these businessmen in his homily last Sunday for their lack of respect for human life.
In the same talk to the Alay members, Vidal said he is short not only in stature but also in statements, trying to make them simple and straight to the point. “And when I say for example, that “nakakahiya that the cradle of Christianity is now known as ‘Murder City’, I mean it.”
He made no further allusion to the “Murder City” tag last Sunday but he was just as blunt, asking if human life has become so cheap here so that people are simply gunned down. That, I think, was an indictment not just against the brains behind the killing or the hand that pulled the trigger or even the businessmen who provide the wherewithal but also against all of us who continue to be indifferent to the summary killings.
Lay people, he told his audience two Wednesdays ago, are bound by a “double obligation of promoting social justice by which the systemic injustices in society are addressed and of meeting the practical needs of the poor.” You don’t promote social justice by taking the law into your own hands.
Bert Sanchez, a Cebuano who now lives in the U.S., wrote in an e-mail to me that the more than a hundred summary executions so far are a testament to how badly-run and how terribly-managed law enforcement is in this part of the world. Could anybody have said it any better?
(November 22, 2005 issue)
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(fmmalilong@yahoo.com)
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