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By Rene Q. Bas
Conclusion
[The first part of this article
came out on page A1 of the Sunday April 8 issue—Special Report on
the state of the Catholic Church.]
The situation—of disobedience
to the Magisterium and to rulings made by the Holy Father, rejection
by local Church authorities of basic norms, clergy misbehavior
(including sexual crimes)—has never been in any way as bad here as
it is in America.
No dramatic defections
There are no dramatic defections
from the Church. The individual departures are more than offset by
the constant flow into the Church of new converts from animism (from
our cultural minorities), Buddhism and Taoism (especially among the
Filipino-Chinese and their newly arrived cousins from Fujian and
Taiwan). Then there also are the streams of returning sons and
daughters who were misled into flirting with Pentecostal and even
mainline Protestant churches.
For the past several decades, the
Catholic Church has maintained its 81- to 83-percent membership
among the total population.
Statisticians and
historians—including historians associated with Protestant
universities—have been writing that the only time there was a
decline in RC membership was during the revolution against Spain.
That decline was quickly reversed when the United States replaced
the first colonizer.
The American colonial
government-supported effort to Protestantize the Filipinos did not
quite work. Even the pensionadoes who joined the Freemasons
continued to have Catholic ties. And many of them never stopped
going to Sunday Mass with their families to meet the minimal
requirements of the Church.
‘Leftist’ clergy
Although the Philippine military
authorities have been claiming that the Catholic clergy and
churchworkers allegedly supporting the communist rebels have
increased these last two years, the matter is being handled
discreetly by the bishops.
What The Times has been told by
our sources in the military is that Church-related revolutionaries
are not specifically only from the Catholic Church, but also the
Protestant and Aglipayan denominations. And these have not become
New People’s Army recruits. They are activists of legal charitable
organizations that have become members of the Communist Party of the
Philippines-led National Democratic Front. To military anticommunist
hardliners the National Democratic Front is just as subversive and
culpable for criminal rebel activities as the CPP-New People’s
Army.
Political involvement
Some miss the voice of the late
Cardinal Sin. They wish Cardinal Rosales, the revered archbishop of
Manila, would make himself as politically nettlesome to the powers
that be as his late predecessor. But didn’t we hear some Catholics
reproach Cardinal Sin for his forays into political issues. Cardinal
Rosales’ emphasis on the formation of priests and the laity, acts
of charity to increase Catholic aid to the extremely poor and making
his flock more prayerful is appreciated by a great number of
Filipinos.
Politicians and rabble-rousers
not happy with the stand of some bishops on political and economic
issues criticize the Church and have been predicting her decline for
not being “one with the people.” But that has not happened.
That must be because—despite
the occasional errors in tact or judgment committed by one or two
bishops in the Philippine hierarchy, despite some scandals
even—the scores of other bishops are doing the right and truly
Christian thing. And the people are with them!
Also, most of the bishops,
diocesan priests, priests and brothers belonging to the religious
orders, nuns and members of lay associations—in varying degrees of
piety and purity of intention—are praying really hard for the
healing of our land and our people.
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