Religions are dividing instead of uniting humankind. Their default practice is to guide followers not in the universal way of being a good human being but in their respective ways of being a good Catholic, a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Protestant, etc. Yet, religious differences have historically occasioned wars and persecutions, which ironically are totally inhuman behaviors.
I can’t speak for other religions, but in the Philippines, a devout Catholic is defined as one who accepts Catholic dogma, abides by Catholic Canon Law (?) and performs prescribed Catholic rituals. The Catholic Church’s most divisive behavior, however, is to insist on being the only true Church of Christ. (How can God be perfect if Catholics are his favorites? How can Christ save all of humankind when less than half the humans in the world are Catholic and more are leaving than joining?)
By his life and death, Jesus Christ taught us the rudiments of a truly and fully human life. He defined no doctrine, prescribed no ritual and promulgated no law except to love the neighbor as oneself. This should tell us that not so much the worship of his divinity as the imitation of his life will establish his kingdom of justice, love and peace in the world.
Yet, the Catholic Church today is no longer the spirited movement Christ started and more like the official religion Emperor Constantine adopted for the Roman Empire. The Catholic hierarchy behaves like it has fallen in love with its privileged position as the religion of the majority. By inaction it supports status-quo politics, forgetting that society’s lack of integrity and sense of justice is chargeable mainly to the Catholic Church’s failure to provide Philippine society with a moral compass.
Both people and nature are now victims of an unjust social structure. Yet Catholic Church leaders are not doing much of anything beyond sermons, exhortations and prayers. They need to do something radical and dramatic the way Christ had to defy the religious and political establishment of his time in order to heal the sick, feed the hungry and give rest to the least of his people.
Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) president Pablo Virgilio S. Cardinal David’s recent call for defiance through collective action is welcome. But how about initiating it with a collective action of defiance by CBCP? That should stop corrupt officials dead in their tracks. I doubt if they would dare red tag bishops, much less arrest them and detain them for questioning, the way they treat ordinary mortals who dare defy them.
The world would be a much better place if we imitated Jesus Christ’s life of love and compassion for the least, the marginalized. World peace comes when we learn how to relate to one another primarily as human beings not as Catholics or Protestants or Muslims or Jews and certainly not as white or black or brown or yellow.
Religion’s core is love and justice to all of God’s creatures. Dogma, law and ritual are peripheral. (Like what is the relevance of dogmas to a poor worker that is not given a living wage by a church-going Catholic employer?) Why then can’t religions teach us how to be truly and fully human so we can all relate accordingly to fellow humans and all of creation?
Come to think of it, why not?