Piety in deceit

Flaviano Villanueva, a priest who in his teens was into drugs, underwent rehabilitation and was subsequently bestowed a Magsaysay Award. Recently he grabbed the headlines after he and several others filed a plunder case against Vice President Sara Duterte and 15 others before the Office of the Ombudsman. 

It was obviously well-orchestrated under the baton of a master black propagandist for even as the complaint severely lacked substance it landed on the front pages and news feeds of advertising-hungry broadcast media. And it was not lacking in hoopla. They were referred to as civil society. They arrived at the Office of the Ombudsman with tons of documents advertised as evidence and the TV cameras were ready for the take.

Friar Villanueva and his five-man civil society had a support group from the House of Representatives in the persons of Leila de Lima, Ben Abante and Chel Diokno who were quick to demonize VP Sara. Their incendiary sound bites, just like that of Fray Villanueva, resonated like they spoke from the altar of honesty and high moral standard but given the hard realities besetting the country, their ministrations were nothing but a shameless display of virtue. 

Villanueva and his civil society is unpardonably myopic; no wonder they have been dubbed as hypocrites. They cannot fault anyone but themselves. They are after the neck of VP Sara over the P600-million CONFIDENTIAL and INTELLIGENCE funds which they claimed were misused by Sara and the officials of the Department of Education when the VP was the secretary of education. 

They are moreover blind, deaf, and dumb to the magma of corruption involving hundreds of ghost flood control projects costing over a trillion pesos and the billions of pesos in kickbacks that had been delivered to the characters ensconced in the highest totem pole of power. 

It is simply incredible for Fr. Villanueva not to know about the most scandalous thievery of the government’s treasury and the plunder of billions of pesos in trust funds that belonged to the members of PhilHealth and the Philippine Deposit and Insurance Corporation. That is true for De Lima and associates who actually have no other agenda but to get rid of Sara from the presidential race in 2028. 

There is no need to go into details. For certain, the society of Villanueva, De Lima and their ilk have witnessed the exposés in the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee, the Infrastructure Committee in the House of Romualdez, the Independent Commission for Infrastructure, and the series of explosive revelations of former appropriations committee chairman Zaldy Co who implicated ex-speaker Martin Romualdez and President Marcos in the ghost infrastructure projects and alleged multi-billion kickbacks.

What we see in the plunder case filed by Villanueva is his foray into politics and his selective outrage against the VP’s molehill of CIF funds and his acquiescence to the mountain of purloined taxpayer money which he knows are in the personal vaults of corrupt politicians. 

That, we were taught in catechism, is a mortal sin.