OPINION: The Pope’s visit and the healing of the nation

As Pope Francis, the ‘people’s pope,’ lands on these shores and gets treated to the kind of welcome we are famous for, he will find a people of great emotional warmth and fervent devotion, effusively exuberant and ritually flamboyant in their faith. Even as Filipino Catholics share a commonality with the one billion faithful all over the world, there is a uniqueness to the way we have embraced this faith.

 

After almost five centuries of Catholicism, our people have so appropriated this faith that the indigenous matricentric culture has morphed into a deep veneration of the figure of the Virgin Mary, and its playful, childlike innocence into a host of Sto. Niños that we dress up according to the predilections of particular communities of devotees. There is a Sto. Niño de Bombero, even a Sto. Niño for gays and sabungeros! This is the only country, I am told, where the Vatican has allowed the celebration of a Feast Day exclusively devoted to the Sto. Niño.     

 

The power of the indigenous culture is such that as the Catholic scholar Jose de Mesa puts it, "Filipinos have not so much been Christianized as to have Filipinized Christianity." It has yet to engage what anthropologists call the "deep structures" of the culture—matters of consciousness like worldview, values and ethical behavior. 

 

What has happened so far has been mostly change in the "surface structures"—artifacts like ritual and statuary—without change in the indigenous mindset. We exchanged our dark, wooden anitos for plaster saints with Caucasian features, and transmuted fertility rites and harvest festivals into fiestas dedicated to favorite patron saints. In place of caves and sacred mountains, we built cathedrals as worship sites. 

 

Hence, we see the spectacle of a former First Lady walking on her knees to the altar of a cathedral in New York to implore the Almighty for mercy in her trial for corruption charges. We are treated to a President’s display of devotion to the Lady of Manaoag while using the pork barrel as leverage and largesse, lining the pockets of favored allies in both Congress and clergy. And then there is the continuing saga of the pork barrel scandal, involving politicians said to be devout or even "born again," invoking God as witness to their innocence even in the face of overwhelming evidence. 

 

The Jesuit psychologist Jaime Bulatao had long ago labeled this lack of congruence between religiosity and ethics as "split-level Christianity." More deeply, we sense a split between the culture’s ideas of right and wrong and its intense preoccupation with the miraculous and getting on the good side of supernatural powers. 

 

It does not take very much to collect a million people round tales of the sun dancing in Agoo, or a miracle-working Nazareno like that in Quiapo. "Signs and wonders" like images on petals or a particularly efficacious faith healer attract press coverage. It is a thing of great wonder, however, that such religiosity has not found expression in such forms as public justice or simple decency in our politicians.

 

In contrast to Confucianism, with its strong orientation towards a harmonizing social ethic, or the tradition of the rule of law as it has evolved in western countries, we lack a serious feeling for conscientious rule-keeping. Traffic rules are only suggestions, truth-telling gets fudged under pressure, and stealing is a sin only when one happens to get caught and exposed to shame and public censure. 

 

To our great embarrassment, we are often advertised as "the only Christian nation in the Far East," in the outmoded language of Orientalism. But where it really matters,—in that part of us where good and evil are locked in a deadly struggle—our Christianity has yet to show itself deep enough for us to will and choose the good.

 

There is a great deal of softness in our moral fiber. In Shintoist Japan, 80 percent of the time, criminals are caught and get punished for their crimes. In this country, a President can rule us with an iron fist and rob us blind and then run to Hawaii and die peacefully. In contrast, longtime dictators of the same period, like Nicolae Caecescu of Romania, got promptly tried and executed upon his overthrow, along with his family. In our case, Marcos’ wife and progeny were allowed to return to the country and run for office, and their temerity rewarded by winning.   

 

The reasons for this lack of will to enforce the hardness of the law will take a great deal of research. But offhand, this is perhaps a function of our empathetic nature as a people. Our consciousness of human frailty is such that when someone lapses into some moral failure, we tend to excuse it as “Sapagkat kami’y tao lamang.” While this makes for a sympathetic people, it does not make for a country that is just and made stable by a steadfast adherence to law. 

 

Our failure to prosecute wrongdoing continues to hobble and enfeeble us. Now and again, the historical experience of authoritarianism that has fractured us as a nation shows its fissures when some epochal event happens, like Super Typhoon Yolanda and its aftermath, or, as now, the Pope’s visit.

 

It is open knowledge that Palo in Leyte is Petilla country, an ally of President Aquino. Tacloban, on the other hand, remains a bastion of the Romualdezes, kin to the Marcoses. That Pope Francis’ visit has been organized such that he spends more time in Palo instead of Tacloban is patent indication of the sore divide between those alliances identified with the Marcos regime and those victimized by it.     

 

Talk of "reconciliation" surfaces again now that a peace-making Pope comes to visit. But whether it is between the Tamils and the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, Muslims and Christians in the South, or the victims of martial law and the perpetrators of it and the political configurations that took shape in the wake of it, justice has to be at the center of any talk about peace and "moving on."

 

We need to be reminded that God, whose nature is always to have mercy as well as justice, had to send his Son to die on the cross just so he can forgive. “Without the shedding of blood,” says the writer to the Hebrews, “there is no forgiveness.” This nation needs to learn not to forgive until repentance and the demands of justice are met. 

 

Only in this way can we move towards healing the wounds of our past, redress the grievances of those still reeling from the injustice of it, and bring together a nation riddled by corruption and fractiousness.   

 

Pope Francis comes to us after a very public chastisement of the Curia for its sins, evoking memories of the first Francis founding a monastic order devoted to the poor, a movement pointedly in reaction to the corruptions of medieval Christendom. 

 

Besides our fabled hospitality, we will honor this Pope more by righting our ways and seeing to it that justice and concern for the poor are at the center of our social order.

 

 

Dr. Melba Padilla Maggay is a social anthropologist and president of the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture (ISACC).

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of this website.