Saturday, July 26, 2008 Editorials: Global moral bankruptcy
TRUE to his role guardian of the ethical values of God’s people, Pope Benedict XVI used euphemism to express his concern over the state of moral bankruptcy among people of many nations. Media reports said the Pope’s talk the other day before “some 350,000 Roman Catholic pilgrims” in Australia, pointed to a spreading global “spiritual desert.”
For the Philippines, the only Catholic nation in this part of the globe, the Pope’s reference to a spreading spiritual desert should carry much deeper meaning and place an even heavier weight on the shoulders of our church and political leaders to whom the people entrust their survival.
Survival as challenge
“In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair.” This state of affair is not unlike a traveling people who drifted into a desert where the physical and spiritual survival suddenly becomes a challenge. To the Pope, it is up to the new generation of Christians to pick up the challenge and build a world “in which God’s gift of life is welcomed, respected and cherished, not rejected, feared as a threat and destroyed.”
When we consider the Pontiff’s words against our condition as a country, there is sharpness in their edge because they speak about our own sad realities. Over the years, our youth has gone through what church and social scientists describe as a social degradation that resulted in the weakening of their moral foundation. A recent survey of high school students showed that many of them have to deal with unplanned pregnancies. This lends credence to the belief of moral bankruptcy.
The continuing controversy over multi-million projects that hound the Arroyo administration, the long-standing charge of election fraud, the overpriced government contracts and other issues could be what the Pope has euphemistically called as a “spreading spiritual desert.” The Pope made a perceptive commentary of the global spiritual dilemma when he urged the youth to embrace the power of God, and “let it break through the curse of our indifference, our spiritual weariness, our blind conformity to the spirit of this age.”
