There is so much judgment, condemnation, and prejudice among the “saints.” There is so much frozen anger among the people who are so concerned about avoiding “sin.’’ Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son.
In the Philippine setting, I can see two things wrong with being “so concerned about avoiding sin.” Filipino Catholicism, still mostly pre-Vatican II in both form and substance, continues to perpetuate two moral mindsets Spanish friars of old suffused the nation’s psyche. These now underpin the prevalence of acts of injustice in the country.
One is the mindset that avoiding sin in this life is all that is needed to avoid hell-fire in the after-life. This, instead of striving for the positive good of becoming a true human being and productive member of society. Yet we admit to being sorry at the start of every Mass for having committed the sin of omitting to do good.
Two, and this is the bigger wrong, is the concept Catholic Spain left with us and which today’s Philippine Catholic Church does not bother to correct. I am talking about the concept of sin that makes society more sensitive to sins of the flesh (adultery, fornication, etc.) than to sins of the spirit or sins against humanity like oppression of the poor, maltreatment of workers, in short injustice to fellow humans.
In mainly Catholic Philippines if you are guilty of adultery, live-in marriage or, in general, lewd conduct, you are considered a public sinner and barred by the Catholic Church from receiving communion. But where is the Philippine Catholic Church when people openly commit sins against the spirit of man such as injustice and cruelty towards fellow humans?
Where is the Catholic community when househelps are maltreated by their Church-going masters, when workers are underpaid by their Church-donating employers, when houses of the poor are demolished without compensation and/or relocation by elected government officials who launch their election campaigns with a Eucharistic celebration? Nowhere near condemning these sins against the spirit.
I grew up being told how cruel our Catholic Spanish colonial masters, including friars, were to us Indios. Is this why we are not sensitized against injustice to small people, because all we were taught to confess, be sorry and go to Church for are sins of the flesh?
Look at how sin-of-the-flesh-sensitive people are jumping at Pura Luka Vega’s art form, in fact at his/her sexuality as if being an LGBTQ is a sin. What sin of inhumanity to fellow humans has he/she done to deserve condemnation by sin-avoiders who are not necessarily do-gooders?
Art imitates life. Thus I refuse to judge Pura Luka Vega. I see her art form as exposing Catholic Philippine society’s hypocrisy that jumps at people who sin against the flesh but hardly notices much less does something to keep people from committing the bigger sin against the spirit of inhumanity to other humans.