January 20th, 12:20am January 20th, 12:13am Larry FaraonTablets of Stones

In one of my ministry visits to Abu Dhabi years back, I gifted the Italian missionary in charge of the mission station with an image of the Sto. Niño. He couldn’t hide his hilarity which finally burst into laughter when he saw the little image.

He could not imagine a child Jesus dressed in royal vestments, complete with a golden crown, in delicately ornate woven robes, standing in a pair of golden boots and complemented with a scepter and holding the globe in its little right palm.

The Italian Catholics have their own version of a child Jesus called “Bambino.” However, the image is donned with the normal boy’s garb recalling the “hidden life” of the puerile Jesus.

To his query, why do we have in the Philippines this image and devotion to the child Jesus, I simply quipped, “Well, because in our country, the child is the king!”

In a geography class in one of the public schools in Tondo, a teacher asked one of her students, “Where is the Tondo?”

The teacher squealed back with, “And Manila, where it is located?”

The boy quickly answered, “In the Philippines….”

“And the world, where is it?” the teacher insisted.

The boy thought for a while and shouted, “In the palm of the Sto. Niño!”

Indeed, the world is in the hands of the child, for he is the future. He is king of the home and the world.

Statistics, however, seem to prove otherwise.

In 2017, the UNICEF and the Philippine Council for the Welfare of Children found in a survey that more than 60 percent of the cases of physical violence against children happened at home, with 81.5 percent of boys and 78.4 percent of girls.

With Filipino children of impoverished families attracting pedophiles globally, sex voyeurism online became actually a multimillion-dollar business in this country at the expense of our children.

Advocacy groups line up 13 types of violence against children, namely, physical or psychological neglect, trauma over witnessing domestic physical or psychological violence, actual physical or psychological violence, severe sexual violence, peer violence or bullying, cyber violence and collective violence, such as street gang wars.

Despite the laws protecting the Filipino youth, abuses and violations against their persons are glaringly exposed right before our eyes and under our noses. And more seriously, the minors involved in all sorts, not only in petty crimes, but also in adult crimes such as daytime robbery and killings, are increasing.

Indeed, timely is the declaration of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) of 2019 as the “Year of the Youth,” a takeoff from Vatican’s Synod of Bishops on the Youth, which concluded towards the end of last year.

The Church shall direct its focus on the youth of today, in particular, the millennials. The CBCP in a pastoral letter marking the beginning of the celebration invited all young people to discover that they are well-loved, gifted, empowered and are on a mission.

It is our hope that more concrete actions for the year’s celebration would roll towards the core of today’s problems of the youth, especially those outside of the Church circles, the marginalized, those who easily and helplessly fall prey to abusers and manipulators.

We still are convinced that the world is in the palm of the Sto. Niño rather than the youth being crushed in the hands of the evil perpetrators of our society.