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Newsbreak’s Purple S. Romero reports it in “Twist to Neri case:
Lawyer wanted dissenting justices to inhibit.” Read it online in
both ABS-CBN Interactive and Newsbreak’s own website. It was
“the call of the church to ‘seek the truth’” about the ZTE
NBN deal that “encouraged” Lawyer Antonio Ballena to file a
motion to inhibit Supreme Court Justices Antonio Carpio and Consuelo
Ynares-Santiago from participating in the case of former NEDA
secretary Romulo Neri’s petition to stop the Senate from calling
him to answer three questions.
Neri’s answers to the questions would most
likely prove that President Arroyo knew about criminal acts of
bribery and overprice schemes because he had told her about them.
The answers would likely also prove that she did nothing at
once—as she should have because she was dutybound to do so—to
stop the scandal-rocked project and to prosecute the bribe offerers
and overpricers.
Neri did not bother to attend the hearing. His
lawyer answered important queries from some of the justices with the
refrain, “I cannot fathom.” It sounded very much like a comical
scene from a Dickens novel.
Not quite “the Church”
If Lawyer Ballena meant the CBCP’s pastoral
statements, it was not quite “the Church”—not the entire
Church anyway—that was telling him to seek the truth about the ZTE
deal. It was a portion of the Church —the hierarchy—that wrote
and distributed the pastoral letter. But then of course members of
the Church are obliged to obey the hierarchy on matters of faith and
morals.
The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ. Its
head is Jesus Christ in the person of His vicar the Pope. The
members are the hierarchy (the Pope and the bishops), the clergy and
the religious and the laity.
This point is very important. Some members of
the Church in good standing—and probably living lives that will
earn them heaven without going through purgatory—don’t care a
whit about seeking the truth about the ZTE NBN deal. Some may even
be sincerely of the opinion—though why may puzzle a lot of
people—that Mrs. Arroyo has been a good president and is guiltless
of corruption and other wrongdoings her enemies claim she has
committed and/or abetted.
So, it is not quite right for Atty. Ballena to
say it was “the Church” that encouraged him to be an activist in
seeking the truth about the ZTE deal.
Purple Romero reports, too, that Ballena came to
his decision also as a result of the activism of his Mary the
Immaculate Conception parish in Las Pińas. The parish priest, Fr.
Fidel Fabile had joined the massively attended Interfaith rally in
Makati.
But Ballena correctly maintains that for all
these influences the decision to file the motion was all and
ultimately his own. Purple quotes him as saying: “The motion that
I filed ha[d] a simple goal: to ensure impartiality in the decision
of the Supreme Court.”
Do temporal work well
Now here is a reminder to good Catholics like
Atty. Ballena—and all Christians and believers in the One True God
(including our Muslim brothers and sisters.
In making up our minds to do something we must
not only have purity of our intention—seeking to do only what we
believe, in all honesty and after deep prayer and meditation, to be
God’s will. We must be untainted by any wish or thought of
self-interest. But besides purity of intention we must also have
done our temporal work and research—in this world, with our feet
solidly touching ground—very well. (Excellent work, after all,
glorifies God, shoddy work does not.)
Here, Atty. Ballena fell short. For the objects
of his motion to inhibit were in fact justices whom he had wrongly
assessed to belong to those who would—perhaps out of utang na loob,
being President Arroyo’s appointees, or worse perhaps subservient
to a signal that they must vote in favor of the Palace and Neri. The
latter is persuasively alleged in another breathtaking inside story
by the chief of Newsbreak herself, the distinguished journalist
Mariles Danguilan Vitug, “SC justices had premade votes on Neri
case.”
Research not thorough
Atty. Ballena’s research was not thorough, as
far as Justice Carpio’s allegiance to his former law firm went.
For the Villaraza group of lawyers is said to be no longer thick
with Mrs. Arroyo and the First Gentleman. The Firm has ceased to be
the First Couple’s private legal counsel. And the scuttlebutt is
that the parting of ways was a result of resigned former Defense
Secretary Avelino Cruz’s having opposed Charter Change plans that
could have led to a parliamentary form of government with an
undemocratic and authoritarian regime ruling the country.
He was also wrong about Justice Ynares-Santiago’s
vote.
Atty. Ballena must thank God for not listening
to his prayers. Had his motion won, the vote would have been 9 vs.
4.
Something similar happened to the pious people
who—with their prayers, mortification and activism—helped bring
down President Erap Estrada and raised President Arroyo to the
Malacańang throne. They now regret what they did. They are now
moving to bring Mrs. Arroyo and her administration down.
rq_bas@yahoo.com
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