Easter imperatives for a Church

Lost in the cacophony of views as to what ails our country is an ethical

principle honored by the convictions of religious faith and the sciences of
political reason, namely the “common good”. In the discourse of the Catholic
Church it means the sum of all the conditions of social living by which every
member of a community or society is empowered to more fully and readily
achieve his or her total human development. What these conditions are and
how to secure them require, as Manolo Quezon III puts it (PDI,, 3-20-2008, p.
A11), “a common ground in shared values based on shared belief in how the
system ought to work”.

The problem is we do not yet have such a “common ground.” By that I mean a
democratic polity that allows for a more collective and participatory
envisioning of the common good, much more a truly democratic culture that
nourishes a commitment for the good we envision in common. Corruption
may be endemic and debilitating, as almost all are quick to say, but isn’t it a
symptom of a more lingering and deeply rooted political and, more
importantly, ethical malaise?

The socio-cultural habitat

Not too long ago the UP Third World Studies Center confirm that the
appalling lack of a sense of common good is very alive in a socio-cultural-
historical habitat fed by, among others, extreme familism, hierarchical patterns
of relations, and dependency due to poverty. Success in business depends
much on habits of seeking favors for one’s family or friends from political
patrons. People in extreme poverty are prone to decide and act on public issues
not on the basis of evidence or responsible deliberation but connections with
those who can attend to their immediate and survival needs. The right to
express one’s views without duress and be consulted will not survive in a
culture where those in roles of low status are almost always expected to defer
to the opinions of those above them.

The historical frustration

What is more worrisome is the ever deepening and widening frustration if not
cynicism. For the majority of our people, according to a social ethicist, “the
common good usually refers to somebody else’s good” because “they have so
rarely seen the sacrifices they have made in its name as in any way benefiting
them.”
Remember how we were coerced to accept restrictions on our civil liberties in
the name of the Bagong Lipunan, only to suffer at the hands of a conjugal
dictatorship. Not too long ago, the banner of “charter change” tried several
times to seduce us into believing that to tinker with our Constitution is in
keeping with the nation’s common good. And every time we seek for long-
term economic recovery those at the lowest rung of the social ladder are
required to modify or mitigate their legitimate needs and demands while those
on top had simply to moderate their greed if not profit-making.

A predatory oligarchy
Nowhere has the lack of commitment to the common good been more visible
than on the way our oligarchy has misbehaved. Among other political
scientists, P. Hutchcroft, in his book Booty Capitalism, rightly observes that the
“major preoccupation” of our powerful oligarchic class “is the need to gain or
maintain favorable proximity to the political machinery. Even those oligarchs
temporarily on the outs with the regime exert far more effort in trying to get
back into favor than in demanding profound structural change.”

A dysfunctional bureaucracy
Because of the absence of a “shared belief in how the system ought to work”
time and again the rule of law and the predictability of the regulatory
functions in the bureaucracy can not deliver the desired effects of governance.
When “the primary loyalty of government employees often remains with the
patrons who got them the job” the “formal lines of demarcation among
agencies are greatly undercut by the informal – yet powerful – ties of loyalty
between political patrons and their clients in the bureaucracy,” adds
Hutchcroft.

Non-programmatic political party system

What makes it easy for a predatory oligarchy to prey on a weak and incoherent
bureaucracy is “the highly non-programmatic, weakly institutionalized nature
of Philippines political parties.” Political scientists call it “elite democracy”
inasmuch as legislative agenda and public policy are continuously vulnerable to
the requirements of traditional elite and power. An electoral exercise in this
context would degenerate into a fanatical appropriation of power. No wonder
elections as means of holding public officials accountable and effecting
necessary changes at the helm are losing credibility.

If this assessment is correct what then are the imperatives for a church, as a
community of faith informed by reason, so that the nation can empty out of
this tomb and start rising into new life? Certainly beyond the search for truth
and probity! While the call for change certainly requires a “discipline of the
desert” as advocated by the bishops of the ecclesiastical province of Manila, it
should not stop there. It appears to me that the more urgent call rests on
developing powerful “habits of prophecy.”

Ethical scrutiny of Church-Oligarchy/Elite relations

The letter has it right when it calls for all to be purified and converted from
sinful patterns of behavior as we go through our desert experience. But
unfortunately it did not call for the entire church leadership to engage in a
thorough examination of conscience concerning the moral quality of its
traditional alliances with our elite and oligarchy.

“What type of church must we be to meet the challenges of our society as we

turn into the third millennium?” the Philippines Church asked in 1991. The
answer has eluded our bishops and priests. They have yet to see it in Gaudium et
Spes, the 43-year-old constitution of the universal church in the modern world,
when it courageously said that the church “does not lodge its hope in privileges
conferred by civil authority” and must stand “ready to renounce the exercise
of certain legitimately acquired rights if it becomes clear that their use raises
doubt about the sincerity of her witness or that new conditions of life demand
some other arrangement” (GS, 76).

More than purification and beyond the call “Thou shall not steal”, the moral
scandals that cry up to the heavens need a prophetic cutting off of relations
from oligarchs and elite that have preyed and continue to prey on the nation.
In that way the bishops themselves shall have led the whole Filipino church in
restituting for the evil consequences of such harmful relations.

Advocacy for a pro-poor public agenda and policy

The present church has a preferential option to moralize if not sermonize, and
this it carries out as reaction, hardly a response, to crisis moments. Calling
simply for new attitudes and lifestyles may be correct but impotent. Thus far
the desire to be “church of the poor” has yet to translate into a wide-ranging
ecclesial mechanism or structure that makes the poor real participants in
shaping a national agenda and public policy that truly gives preferential option
to their legitimate needs.

Instead of a calculated balancing of interests, why can’t the church leadership

opt for the poor, and new social agents who advocate for them, as new
partners in carrying out its mission in the temporal sphere? Given the growing
evidence how effective a broad social coalition is in re-shaping public agenda,
the church can do the nation a big favor if it helps create a “countervailing
social force” that can arrest the dominance of non-programmatic political
party system and the elite features of our democracy in envisioning the good
that we must hold in common.

An ecclesial strategy for the common good

While many have faulted the Catholic bishops for being vague if not disunited
in their position, there is however wisdom to their refusal to dance to the
music of being a power-broker. To have the ultimate say to depose or not a
corrupt president and install a new one does not seem to be a good political
pedagogy for a nation that does not yet have a strong democratic polity and
culture. Be that as it may, the weakest link seems that, there is as yet no clear,
wide-ranging, consensus-driven ecclesial strategy to substitute for its refusal to
be power-broker. Except for a veiled hint at “support structures”, as said by
the Manila bishops’ pastoral letter, what people get are religious exhortations
and moral admonitions, albeit accompanied by a sprinkling of communal
actions in a few dioceses.

It is sad and surprising because not too long ago the Filipino Church enshrined
the socio-religious movement of “grassroots communities” (or “basic ecclesial
communities”) as “a significant expression of church renewal” in the direction
of “communion, participation, and mission” (Second Plenary Council of the
Philippines, 1991). This shift in priority means, among others, that value-
formation is no longer just in catholic schools for in them majority of the
grassroots poor cannot come in. A cluster of families where rich and poor are
equal members will enable people to overcome their extreme familism and
hierachized patterns of relations. The hopes then were alive that a church of
the grassroots will be a leaven of renewal of church and society.

What has happened to the grassroots initiative is too long for this paper to
discuss, but suffice it to say that these grassroots movements hold the strategic
key for the church’s relevance to Philippine society. Why?

The BECs hold the strategic key

If the church leadership shall transform BECs into a public space of sustained
and participatory deliberation and decision-making about the public good
where the voices of the systematically excluded from democratic processes are
listened to and valued, then, as the Institute of Church and Social Issues puts
it, we shall have numerous “centers of dialogue and discussion on local and
national issues among various social classes, leading to better understanding
and effective action” (Intersect, 1-20-01, p. 6).

What if BECs are transformed into milieus where convictions and impulses,
habits and virtues conducive to the envisioning of and commitment to the
common good are cultivated and rewarded? What if in these communities the
values of public service (e.g., honesty, accountability, selflessness, etc.) and
democratic habits (e.g., participation, freedom, respect of rights, etc.) are
promoted as Christian virtues integral to, not an after-thought of, Christian
moral life? What if these communities are inserted into the broad
countervailing social force and, through them, the church engages in dialogue
and common action with those who also genuinely desire to be agents of
national renewal?

What if church leaders themselves commit the church’s human, financial and
institutional resources to a program on political education so that we shall have
developed a people truly empowered to resist the rapacious manipulations of
elite democracy, knowledgeable on how democratic institutions work yet
persevering in promoting freedom and participation despite the imperfections?
If leadership looks for models, what if church leaders would evaluate their
church governance using the moral standards they so strongly demand from
civil authorities rather than exempt themselves? The BECs’ potentials for good
abound more than the actual evils to be resisted or corrected. In there lies the
hope of Easter!

Concluding Reflections
Mabini and our other heroes may be faulted by Roman Catholicism for having
attempted to make a religious institution a political tool of our first public
good, namely the first Philippine republic (res publica!). But behind it was the
correct understanding that religion does not exist for its own benefit, that is to
say, a people’s relationship with a Supreme Being, and the creed, code and cult
emanating from such relations, ought to shape how they relate with and treat
each other.

The church is indeed not, in an exclusively political sense, a government by, of

and for the people! But a church that hesitates to be at the service of the
common good will lose its relevance and forfeits its fidelity to be God’s
instrument so that “all may have life and have it in its fullness” (John 10:10).
Aloysius Lopez Cartagenas, S.Th.D.
Seminario Mayor de San Carlos
Graduate School of Theology
Cebu City