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The political crisis could suddenly explode into another
people-power revolt that will lead to a military-police takeover.
This could happen because I sense, from their recent pronouncements,
the evaporation of the first two–Wisdom and Understanding—of the
Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit in Jun Lozada and a group of 300 nuns
in Mindanao.
Jun Lozada
I am one of the first, if not the very first,
writer in a national daily to register disgust at the treatment
Rodolfo Noel Imperial Lozada Jr. received from security officers
Atutubo, Valeroso, Mascariñas, et al.
The latter—no matter what Chief PNP Razon and
DENR Secretary Lito Atienza say—abused Lozada’s human rights.
For they refused to identify themselves when he
asked who they were. And they referred to him as “ito” (this
thing, insect or expendable pain-in-the-rectum human). They forced
him to sign affidavits. They intimidated him not with their guns
pointed at his head but by their mere act of placing him in an
unknown and fearsome situation in their van, by their telling him to
stop texting his relatives because anyway they (his captors) were
reading whatever he sent from his cell phone, by their refusal to
take him home to Pasig and their giving him a frightening ride for
hours. His life was indisputably in their hands. Lozada admitted to
Sen. Enrile and others who asked why he did not scream for help and
run away or jump out of his captors’ vehicle: “I am not as brave
as you are. I didn’t want to be in the news as someone who got run
over in the highway.”
The Book of Job’s Chapter 28 (on “The
Inaccessibility of Wisdom”) asks “Whence then comes wisdom, and
where is the place of understanding?” At length comes the answer,
following verses that show how puny earthly things are compared with
it, “Behold, the fear of the Lord is Wisdom, and avoiding evil is
understanding.”
Is Lozada losing the Spirit of Wisdom and
Understanding? I ask because of the report the other day by Ellen
Tordesillas of Malaya that “ZTE star witness Rodolfo Noel Lozada
Jr. on Sunday called on upright members of the Armed Forces and
Philippine National Police to make a stand on the issue of
corruption hounding the Arroyo administration.”
Lozada said, according to the report, “that
the opposition should abandon its call for President Arroyo to
resign. ‘She has to be ousted.’ ” Lozada is quoted to have
said also that President Arroyo will never resign “because they
have committed so many crimes that the only way to exit is when they
are dead,” he said.”
He was quoted also to have said he had
“overheard a Cabinet member saying, ‘Hindi natin ibibigay ito
(the government) na walang patayan. (We will not give this
government up without bloodshed). That’s why we have to appeal to
the military and the police.’”
I don’t think—as some Times columnists
do—that Lozada is following a script written by politicians
scheming to replace Mrs. Arroyo. But it worries me that he seems to
be unwisely willing to have a police-military junta take over the
country.
He seems not to understand that, as Sen. Gringo
Honasan has pointed out, this time the involvement of men in uniform
in bringing down a sitting president may not be as miraculously
bloodless as in 1986 and 2001.
Sen. Lacson chided Honasan for having no right
to warn against the dangers of military involvement since he was the
leader of coups against President Aquino. What Lacson said of his
fellow PMA alumnus Honasan may well be true but it doesn’t make
the warning invalid.
Politically charged nuns
The more than 300 nuns of the Sisters’
Association in Mindanao (belonging to some 40 congregations) calling
for the ouster of President Arroyo also seem to have lost their
wisdom and understanding and the theological virtue of charity.
Unlike the Catholic bishops—whose much
criticized pastoral statements counsel the people of God to
meditate, pray and come to a decision at the “communal”
basic-Christian- community and parish levels before rising to assert
a new kind of people power—the SAMIN nuns have called Mrs. Arroyo
names and condemned her.
Noting that they “continue to be unwavering
despite the perceptible absence of a uniting spirit within the
church” the nuns, through SAMIN’s secretary and spokesperson,
reiterated their belief that “President Arroyo has committed the
grave sin of stealing her legitimacy from the people. She has
committed a serious immoral act in government … broken her
covenant with her people and had already lost the moral ascendancy
to govern … and has become a recidivist sinner.”
The nuns also say that under Mrs. Arroyo
“illegitimacy, corruption, idolatry of foreign powers and
globalization and tyranny have merged” into an evil “responsible
for the malevolent spirit of poverty, hunger, extrajudicial killings
and human rights violations.”
SAMIN wants Mrs. Arroyo removed from power
“because we lose our own self dignity and righteousness if we
tolerate Arroyo’s sins until her term ends in 2010.”
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