In fact the bishops need not do a Cardinal Sin – by way of taking the political lead and directly calling for either the resignation or the ouster of GMA – in order to fulfill their mandates as shepherds of their flock. All that the faithful asks of the church leadership is to provide the moral compass, the parameters and guidelines of what constitutes right and wrong, good and evil.
For example, is it all right for Mrs. Arroyo to admit to improperly calling Commission on Elections (Comelec) Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano in 2004 to discuss how her votes as a presidential candidate can be assured and then obstruct all attempts to investigate such impropriety including Congressional moves to determine whether she had engaged in wholesale electoral fraud to win a new six-year term?
Is it all right for Mrs. Arroyo to invoke executive privilege and prevent a thoroughgoing investigation into allegations of multi-billion peso corrupt deals involving members of her Cabinet, her husband and political supporters cum business cronies?
Is it morally correct that all the people, many of whom are barely surviving, are paying indirect taxes in the form of a 12-percent value-added tax on goods and services, while the Arroyo administration uses the money for debt servicing, gargantuan military and police budgets and for bribing congressmen and local government officials into tolerating the regime’s wrongdoings and partaking of the orgy of graft and corruption?
Is it acceptable for Mrs. Arroyo to praise a notorious human rights violator, Gen. Jovito Palparan, as a champion of democracy and protect him from prosecution long after innumerable international bodies and even her own Melo Commission had identified his culpability for ordering extrajudicial killings, abductions and torture as well as the displacement of entire civilian communities? Is it all right to turn a blind eye to such gross human rights violations in the name of counter-insurgency?
The crisis of political legitimacy of the Arroyo regime has become a crisis of a morally bankrupt leadership as proven by its own sins of commission and omission. In survey after survey, it is seen by a majority to be consistent in lying to the people, in protecting plunderers, murderers and torturers and in aggravating the economic plight of the people despite glowing economic reports and empty promises of ending hunger, poverty and inequality.
The bishops and the CBCP are not being asked to do the impossible. It is their duty and responsibility as spiritual and moral leaders to denounce evil whenever and wherever they see it and to accompany and guide the faithful as they battle such evil – in whatever arena, including the political.
They must show the example lest the Church, the laity in particular, construe that faith and religion are divorced from the real world, or worse, irrelevant to the life-and-death struggles and everyday concerns of ordinary people. Business World / Posted by (Bulatlat.com)
*Published in Business World
25-26 January 2008
