Ang Kape Ni LaTtEX

It’s not very often that I agree with the Catholic Church on its stance on local politics, especially during the days of Jaime Cardinal Sin. But his successor, Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales, is starting to appear to be more in tune with the fine balancing act between acting vis-a-vis moral leaders of a citizenry and separating the Church from governance, especially in its handling of the recent NBN-ZTE scandal facing the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo government.

His pastoral letter for Palm Sunday, Towards a Morally Rebuilt Nation [PDF] , strikes that balance so well, with a perfect Biblical analogy for the situation Filipinos face today.

In this letter, he likens the EDSA I to the liberation of the Israelites from the clutches of the Pharaoh:

The history of salvation teaches us that the long road to freedom inevitably passes through the desert of purification and conversion. Having escaped from Pharaoh, via the miraculous crossing through the Sea of Reeds, the Israelites considered themselves liberated. But they were not yet free, because they wanted to go back to their old ways in Egypt. “Should we not do better to go back to Egypt?” (Numbers 14:2-3).

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Looking back at EDSA I, euphoric and heroic as it was, it appeared that the event became the Filipinos’ day of crossing to freedom; but that was only the first step that hardly anyone knew. The “desert” awaited the people who would be purified and converted, before they become fully liberated. But people preferred the convenient streets as the easier route to an imagined freedom, and feared that the “desert experience” that awaited conversion and new beginnings. [Embargo, 03/14/2008 (pdf)]

Excellent analogy, as it puts into words something that we’ve known for a long time but could not explain; the essence by which why, even if we have ousted a dictator and a plunderer, the country keeps on coming back to its old problems.

The pastoral letter continues into a justified accusation — that our country’s prime industry is not agriculture, not even cheap labor, but simply politics:

We cannot add more to the wrath of God for lies, untruth, injustice and evil. Conscience, as the voice of God within, already tells us what good there is to pursue and what evil to avoid. Our people are known to be God-fearing and God-loving; sadly, they fight, deceive and kill for money.

Shamefully, we have been known to be a nation whose prime industry has been identified as politics simply because politics is the main route to power, which in turn, is the main route to wealth [Embargo, 03/14/2008 (pdf)]

More importantly it underscores a point that I’ve been trying to emphasize for a long time: that beyond expecting our government to clean itself up, everything starts by cleaning ourselves up (emphasis mine):

The Seventh Commandment covers not only the present corruption deals that have been recently exposed, but also all deals, at all levels of government service, of all administrations and governance, no matter what came out of the past or will come out of the present or future inquiries. “Thou shalt not steal” covers also all trading of even ordinary citizens.

We suddenly noticed that the widespread corruption we see in others is also the corruption we detect in ourselves.

Corrupt practices and fraud prevailed in the cities, towns and even in small Barangays. [Embargo, 03/14/2008 (pdf)]

Of course this is not to say that leadership is not required — the point, however, is that everyone from top to bottom must be part of that change:

We need the leaders from the highest to the lowest and their families not only to leads us, but also to give us examples of repentance and true humble conversion. We also need people with other ideas but with positive emotions in nation building. Given the example and encouragement, the citizens will be inspired to follow where in the past they hesitated to proceed — to their “desert” transformation. [Embargo, 03/14/2008]

It also warns against the anger and rage that way too many opposition leaders and leftist propagandists use to stir emotion in the false pretext that such fury translates to action:

We need God’s grace, if we are to encourage one another, forgive each other, pay our debts to the justice that we all violated, and start again, not at the banks of “our Sea of Reeds”, but beyond the streets of EDSA. Believers and lovers of God, like true Christians do not have to hate, destroy each other even if they want to correct the mistakes of the past or the present and of each other. Many are critical of the present governance particularly in the areas of truth and justice. But we can restore truth and justice without restoring to violence and hatred. A nation built on contempt is completely unimaginable. [Embargo, 03/14/2008 (pdf)]

The analogy of the desert transformation is apt not only in form, but in chronology. The Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years. Such a fundamental change in our system will take a lot of time, and I do not even expect that change to come within the next ten years. But eventually the Israelites did get to the promised land — and eventually they were able to rebuild their kingdom.

We must be patient. We must be unrelenting. The time has come for us to stop waiting for manna from heaven or God to part the Sea of Reeds for us: the time has come for us to stop demanding instantaneous change and start subscribing to our institutional processes. It is only when we let the system work — when we allow our institutions to carry out their duties — will we be able to stop running in circles in the desert and find the promised land of a better Philippines that everyone wants to have, become, and be proud of.

I recommend that every Filipino who cares about the nation read it in its entirety.