STASIS (EDITORIAL PDI 11/27/07)

EDITORIAL
Stasis

Inquirer
Last updated 09:49pm (Mla time) 11/27/2007
The president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), Archbishop Angel Lagdameo of Jaro, has called for a “moral revolution” in the face of social ills besetting the nation. “If only to stop our country from continuing to become a ‘social volcano,’ we support the idea of a moral revolution,” he said. The statement was made amid what Lagdameo called the unremitting piling up of “social concerns and nagging issues that are crying for solution and closure.”
Lagdameo said a moral revolution is needed to ease the sociopolitical turmoil and pave the way for genuine national reconciliation. “[It’s] nothing new,” he said, “but the resolve may be.”
Perhaps that’s the problem. The call for moral revolution has been made so often by Lagdameo and his brothers in the CBCP that it has become a tired refrain, spectacular in its pulpit-fire-and-brimstone, but signifying nothing. The bishops often make calls for moral change when they have nothing new to say or they have been boxed into stasis by their own moral confusion and uncertainty. Moral revolution has become a euphemism for lack of moral will, which presupposes a lack of moral vision.
Lagdameo perhaps betrayed this lack of moral vision when, along with his call for moral conversion, he also urged government officials “to do a Zacchaeus” and give their ill-gotten possessions to the poor. While the call is Gospel-inspired, it is not morally wise; it sounds like a sly condonation of plunder. It seems to tell plunderers that it’s all right to steal from the public coffers and amass ill-gotten wealth so long as they give part of it later to the poor. Any rogue or thief might romanticize his plunder by doing a Robin Hood -- or a Zacchaeus.
But to be fair to the CBCP president, he has also criticized the presidential pardon extended to Joseph Estrada, a convicted plunderer. “But where is restorative justice?” he asked. “Where is the justice capable of restoring harmony in social relations disrupted by the criminal act committed?”
But then his brother-bishops sang a different tune. Cebu Archbishop Ricardo Vidal welcomed the pardon. So did Nueva Vizcaya Bishop Ramon Villena and former Novaliches Bishop Teodoro Bacani. While all three cited the Church’s teaching on mercy with justice, they glossed over the fact that Estrada did not even acknowledge his sin, much less seek forgiveness.
The striking clash of views betrays either the political expedience or moral bankruptcy of the bishops. Either way, it encapsulates what Pope Benedict XVI in another context has called the “dictatorship of relativism” that characterizes the globalizing world. More importantly, it shows the inability of bishops to provide moral guidance to a nation that is in a terrible moral muddle.
Part of the reason the bishops add to the moral confusion of the nation is that just about every one of them seems to have jettisoned the cardinal virtue of prudence and acquired a taste for loquaciousness, offering his opinion on just about every issue under the sun. Gone are the days when bishops would convoke a council and labor over a document or a position behind which they would stand solidly, their erudition and unity a fortress of moral conviction and power. Since the death of Jaime Cardinal Sin, the bishops have gone about their merry ways of individualism and division, leaking developments to the press in a shadow game of brinkmanship and one-upmanship, or casually shooting off their mouths before the media. Perhaps they are only being human; in their divisions, they actually constitute the Philippine Church, or what’s left of it, which in turn embodies the ugly divisions of the whole nation.
But the bishops cannot afford to be human in this manner. First, because as successors to the apostles, they have the prophetic mission to read the signs of the times and provide spiritual direction to the people. Second, as the teaching authorities of the Church, they are expected to draw from the Gospel and the social and moral teachings of the Church to provide moral direction to the people. And third, because the Philippine Church, through the bishops, remains the linchpin of the nation, holding it together. If the nation is in a moral drift, it is in a large way because of the Church. If the social volcano explodes, it is because the Church has come unhinged.