“I hate all your show and pretense – the hypocrisy of your religious festivals and solemn assemblies. I will not accept your burnt offerings and grain offerings. I won’t even notice all your choice peace offerings. Away with your noisy hymns of praise! I will not listen to the music of your harps. Instead I want to see a mighty flood of justice, and endless river of righteous living.” Amos 5:21-24
Amos, an unschooled shepherd and sycamore-fig farmer, wrote his prophecies between 760 and 750 BC. But if we changed the musical instruments, hymns, and offerings to today’s equivalents, the passage above might as well apply to our situation of hypocrisy in the Philippines. Philippine society lives another big lie, that of corruption which most social analysts put at the very roots of the poverty of millions of Filipinos.
This is not about the more than 20 billion pesos worth of confidential and pork barrel funds that high government officials spirit away from the budget yearly. That too and especially so, but more than that, I am talking of the millions, maybe billions more that line the corrupt pockets of government agency workers such as in the Bureau of Customs and the BIR. Just about every agency of the national, provincial, city, town, and barangay government has bureaucrats engaged in corrupt practices.
Among ordinary folks, there is the day-to-day corruption of the traffic enforcer and the traffic violator. For some lunch money from a corrupt driver the corrupt enforcer lets the latter go. Then there is the market vendor that uses dishonest scales. Not to be outdone are police personnel that demand (extort?) transportation and lunch money to investigate a case. Big businesses for their part underpay workers and siphon all profits exclusively to the owners as if capital alone is responsible for the profits.
Massive vote-buying in our election system perpetuates corruption in government. Those who buy votes might be guiltier because they are taking advantage of the poverty of the electorate. But those who sell their votes are also but maybe to a lesser degree guilty of corruption since no buying is possible when nobody is selling.
And yes, what about the Philippine Catholic Church that puts a price tag on sacraments, grossly misinterpreting Jesus’ injunction to his disciples to ”bring no bag for the journey or extra shirt or sandals or a staff, for the worker is worth his keep.” (Matthew: 10:10b) God doesn’t distinguish between rich and poor, so why are there pricier weddings, baptisms, burials, etc. for the rich. If any institution should treat people equally, it has to be the Church.
The painful truth is that we are a corrupt society, not because others (politicians, bureaucrats, the police, businessmen, etc.) are corrupt but because we allow it, do nothing more than complain but yet accept it as the normal way of getting things done.
When will “a mighty flood of justice and an endless river of righteous living”