Saturday, February 16, 2008 Businesswoman defends Arroyo By NANCY R. CUDIS Sun.Star Staff Reporter
BARELY two years after a brief confrontation with a priest during a mass in Mabolo, Cebu City, a parishioner urged fellow Catholics to look at the bright side of the current government.
“Don’t tell me that everything President Arroyo is doing is bad for us? She is doing her best. Let us look at the bright side that is happening in her administration,” said Carmen Campbell, citing the improvement of the economy and the President’s housing projects as her examples.
Campbell caught media attention when she interrupted the homily of Mabolo Parish Church assistant priest Fr. Antonio Mansueto during the first Friday mass in March 2006, telling the priest not to talk about politics in the house of prayer.
In an interview with Sun.Star Cebu, she recalled the priest talking about vigilantes and poverty in the Arroyo administration.
“The act infuriated me because I was praying so hard. I was sitting in the middle row of the pews before I went up to Fr. Mansueto and told him, ‘Excuse me, Father. Don’t you know that this is the house of God? You have no business talking about the government,’ or something to that effect,” Campbell said.
Mansueto denied this, saying he was concentrating on the significance of fasting. He talked of changes, the country’s problems and the Arroyo government during the celebration of Ash Wednesday that year, but stressed that he never attacked President Arroyo on a personal level.
Campbell stood firm. However, she denied having grabbed the priest’s microphone, saying she politely uttered her rebuke.
But it is not for the priest, she said, to talk about the problems of the government using the pulpit because the Catholic faithful go to church to pray.
Word of that incident reached Malacañang. One night in April 2006, she received a call from President Arroyo, thanking her for her act.
“The President was so nice. She thanked me for what I did at the church and agreed that the church is the house of God. She said that she takes courage from people like me who believe in her. She even expressed a desire to meet me,” said Campbell.
She met President Arroyo at the Malacañang sa Sugbo after that. Later, there were a series of more meetings, and once, the President “embraced me,” she said.
Campbell has since framed and displayed at home a “beautiful” letter she received from the President.
When she arrived from a short trip abroad last Monday, she was immediately glued to the television and watched the testimony of the Senate inquiry’s key witness Rodolfo Lozada, Jr. on the national broadband network controversy.
“I pitied him. What happened made me think that he was being grilled so that the people will be aroused to bring the President down. It’s a pity. Our country is so beautiful with so many nice and hospitable people and the people I met abroad love us and our nurses and doctors,” she said.
As she urged all whistleblowers to be responsible, she reiterated her call to look at the bright side of the present administration and added that there is a silent majority in the country who is not always in agreement with what the opposition claims.
