Rocking the boat

Most Catholics and their leaders opted to ignore the supposed “irreverence” and admonished the Catholic faithful to move on.

Not in recent memory can we recall the highest leader of the country challenging the powerful Catholic Church in a most indescribable language and candor.

When the president referred to God as “stupid,” he was curtly referring to the God of the Catholics and not to his own personal God, who was “merciful and forgiving.”

And the claims of a forgiving God rise from the context of “original sin” of Adam and Eve, the biblical account of which the president took to task in one of his speeches.

It is man’s sinfulness that the Church and practically all religions and faiths use in order to clamp man’s consciousness to his own weakness as offending somebody up there whom he doesn’t even know. Yet, he is supposed to lament at the prodding of a preacher from the pulpit for him to kneel before a priest in the confessional begging for “institutional forgiveness” called absolution to save his wretched soul from perdition.

Then comes the concept of heaven or hell or purgatory, the threefold final destinations of a sinner. It depends, however, on how the Church would assess the sins as either “mortal or venial,” deserving hell or, at least, a transitory purification stop at purgatory as a prelude to heaven.

No doubt, the president has misgivings about the traditional systems of acquiring salvation based on the sinfulness of man on earth, his contrition and his eschatological destinations as “dictated” by the institutional and established religions. He probably toys with the idea that these are inventions of the Church hierarchy to get hold of (or manipulate) their congregation’s submission.

He is actually “rocking” the indomitable titanic ship called the Catholic Church, which like other faiths claims to possess a “franchise” of salvation and, based on their categories, pass judgment as to who goes where at the end of one’s earthly routine.

For the president, this is simply despicable especially when that claim is framed from the hypocritical conduct of some of its priests and pastors or simply, the self-righteousness, as was his experience as a young student in a boys’ school.

The Catholic Church generally opted to let the tirades pass off instead of getting pissed off. Some, although from the same sector, were voices of anger shouting outright blasphemy from the president’s lips and were about to articulate it in a more public mode.

However, most Catholics and their leaders opted to ignore the supposed “irreverence” and admonished the Catholic faithful to move on.

On the other hand, some including myself would rather see the presidential polemics as metaphors not to be taken literally but require interpretation and serious attention.

Questions about original sin, sinfulness, contrition, heaven, hell and purgatory including priestly celibacy, among others, are continuous and contentious issues, theological or otherwise, within and outside the halls of the Church since time immemorial. Much theological capital has been invested to interpret and explain such issues and even more, efforts at scaling them down to the level of the “unschooled” in theology or basic catechism.

That alone becomes a challenge to the doctrinal integrity of the Church, a challenge too real to be ignored as these beliefs still continue to bother the mind of the believers and non-believers.

A conscientious Church would rather look at such critiques or comments no matter how rude and frank, whether from the president or an ordinary member of a congregation not with grains of salt but with loads of utmost attention and thought.

PRRD may not be a theologian and surely would not sit in the company of such, but surely he is affording the institutional Church the opportunity to soul-search, to redefine its edges, recast their difficult tenets, to ask real and valid questions and probably come up with more realistic responses to make faith more relevant especially in the millennial setting.

At the end of the day, still it is the Church that would benefit from the provocative stimuli provided by no less than the highest leader of the country; yet surely, I suppose, not even a word of gratitude.

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