by Bp. Pablo Virgilio S. David, D.D
Bishop of Kalookan
President, CBCP
January 27, 2022
Your Eminences, your Excellencies, especially our Apostolic Nuncio to the Philippines, dear brother archbishops, bishops and diocesan administrators of the Philippines, magandang umaga po sa inyong lahat.
We enter into this 123rd CBCP Plenary Assembly in the spirit of synodality to listen to one another, and to foster communion, participation and mission, especially as we face these challenging times of the third year of the Covid pandemic, and as we prepare for the May 2022 elections.
Many of our brothers and sisters in the Visayas and Mindanao are still struggling to stand on their feet again after that devastating typhoon Odette that left thousands homeless and caused unspeakable damages on properties and lives.
We think in particular of the faithful of Surigao under the spiritual leadership of Bishop Yiet, those of Tagbilaran under Bishop Abet, Talibon under Bishop Danny, Maasin under Bishop Precious, Tandag under Bishop Raul, San Carlos under Bishop Gerry, Cebu under Archbishop Joe, Dumaguete under Bishop Julito, Puerto Princesa under Bishop Soc, Taytay Under Bishop Broderick, and Kabankalan under Bishop Louie.
Excellency, our dear Papal Nuncio, please convey our heartfelt thanks to the Holy Father for remembering the Philippines in his prayers, especially the survivors of typhoon Odette.
We remember with sadness our brother Archbishop Romulo De la Cruz of Zamboanga who passed on last December 10, 2021. And we pray for Archbishop Ramon Arguelles, emeritus of Lipa, who, according to Archbishop Gilbert, is critically ill, and has opted to stay home and prepare for the inevitable instead of submitting himself to any further medical intervention. We also pray for Bishop Joe Bantolo of Masbate who underwent a colon surgery last Tuesday.
We thank the Lord that Bishop Val Dimoc, who is currently still in the hospital for a severe case of Covid, is on his way to recovery. He is virtually present, by the way, following our plenary from his hospital bed. We note with relief that the rest of those who also got infected by the virus and have already fully recovered.
Of course we rejoiced with Malaybalay for their new bishop who was ordained last September 14, 2021. Sorry, Bishop Noel Pedregosa, we were prevented by Covid from attending your ordination. Although you have already been with us as diocesan administrator we welcome you again, nevertheless, to the CBCP.
Allow me now to share some thoughts related to the challenges that we are currently facing as a conference of bishops.
From the year 1997 to 2000, in preparation for the coming of the Third Millennium, the CBCP started issuing one Pastoral Exhortation per year: on Economy in 1997, on Politics in 1998, on Culture in 1999, and on Spirituality in 2000. I remember how the late Dr. Tony Ledesma approached me one day, asking for a favor on behalf of the late Archbishop Legaspi. Back then he and his wife were running an NGO known as “CENDHRRA”.
Doc Tony, as I fondly called him, told me in confidence that he used to do a lot of drafting of pastoral statements for the CBCP before, but that he was no longer as adept as he used to be. Apparently, Archbishop Legaspi had asked to find someone to draft the pastoral on spirituality. He said with a tone of sadness that he would actually have done it himself if he had not been diagnosed of Parkinson’s disease. And so his request was, would I kindly do it for him?
I remember how I spoke very frankly to him. I said, “With all due, respect, Doc Tony, do you really think those CBCP pastorals are read and taken seriously by our people? In the first place, they are all written in English, never in a language that the majority would understand. Whom are they really addressing in their letters? (I did not imagine back then that I would be asking the same question again, but this time already as part of the Church’s leadership body that I used to criticize.)
Back then, I also said to Doc Tony, “I would understand the need for an English version if it is a translation from an original text in a Filipino language—no matter if that language might be Tagalog, Cebuano, or Ilocano. Other non-English speaking conferences of bishops sometimes also see the need to have English versions of some of their messages. But you can always be sure that the original texts are always in their own native languages.”
I find it sad that up until now we still communicate to one another mainly in a language that is foreign to all of us. In today’s stratification of the Philippine society, the English language allows us to communicate mainly to those in the upper strata of Philippine society, the more educated class. In a very recent survey that classified Filipino voters by their socio-economic status, we are told that only 3.7M voters actually belong to the ABC educated classes on top of the pyramid, while 48.2 M voters come from the class D and 9.9 M from the Class E.
We must admit with regret that language and our manner of communicating ourselves has been one of the reasons why many of those in the D and E—even the baptized Catholics among them have remained alienated from the Church.
I have a feeling that PCP2’s vision of the Philippine Church as a Church of the Poor was, to a large extent what it said it really was—still a vision, not yet a reality. Well, to cut the long story short, I told Doc Tony that I was willing to draft the Pastoral on Filipino Spirituality only if I could be allowed to do it in a Filipino language, either in Kapampangan or Tagalog. He smiled and said, “Give me some time to discuss it with Archbishop Legaspi.” I also smiled and said to myself, “Good, I’m off the hook.”
To my surprise, one week later, he called me up to say that my proposal had been approved. “If possible,” he said, “please write it in Tagalog, because very few would understand it in Kapampangan, and I will take care of having it translated into English. And so I drafted the said pastoral and entitled it, LANDAS NG PAGPAPAKABANAL PARA SA PILIPINO.
I was surprised to hear later on from some priests, former students of mine from the Visayas and Mindanao, that they did not even feel the need to translate it into Cebuano because they understood the Filipino quite well. I also heard from some parish priests and school directors that they used it as a kind of manual for spiritual formation in parishes and schools. It did not land in the headline news, it did not become controversial, but it reverberated among the grassroots, I heard, and was even used by the BECs. But that was about the only time that a pastoral was drafted in a Filipino language. It did not succeed in setting a linguistic trend in the drafting of other pastorals.
Perhaps it’s about time that we took more seriously the consequences of our cultural distance from the majority in our Philippine society. We must humbly admit that our spiritual and moral influence on them has become very minimal. One of the best proofs for this is the fact that the present populist government is very successful in alienating us from our own people, in stoking deep-seated resentments among those in the D and E strata, against those in the A,B, & C, and to identify us Church leaders with the ABC because seminary formation has given us the same level of education.
Knowing our own vulnerabilities as Church leaders, the populist leader now takes advantage of every opportunity to question our credibility, to call us a bunch of hypocrites, to accuse us of playing politics, and to insult the God we proclaim with cuss words that entertain people—most of whom belong to our Catholic faithful. He has succeeded in caricaturing us as elitists, as pharisaical leaders who don’t walk our talk, as shepherds who don’t smell like our sheep. His social media army of trolls have succeeded in amplifying his message while keeping him high in terms of popularity in the surveys.
We know we are sinners, we have our own share of human failures and weaknesses, but we also know these caricatures are what they are—caricatures. Meaning, “distorted representations in a way that exaggerates and oversimplifies,” with the objective of insulting or making fun of those being caricatured. Caricaturing perceived enemies seems to be very consistent with the typical demagoguery that has given rise to populist governments all over the world, the kind of worldview that has found a perfect tool in the modern social media. All they need to do is to hire armies of IT people, whose job is to create fake accounts that would efficiently amplify their so-called “alternative narratives.”
And mind you, they are very successful at it. They have mastered the technique of boosting their fake news, bullying truth-tellers by blasting their comment boxes with invectives and intimidations. They can spread their falsehoods with the speed of light, and make their videos go viral on Tik-Tok, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter and Fb.
People, especially the young, don’t even know anymore that many of those whom they interact with in the social media are not real people but mostly virtual accounts run by a handful of trolls, who dominate the cyberspace through AI (artificial intelligence), and, in effect, are able to control public opinion about almost anything.
Most social media users don’t even know that what they post on any social media platform does not belong to them. The cloud of data belongs to the owners of those platforms who have the exclusive right to sell these data and earn billions from companies that also earn billions by using them to control people’s product preferences, their choices of entertainment, their sexual preferences and their addictions through AI-generated algorithms in the information ecosystem.
Worse yet, they sell their data to governments and aspiring politicians who have succeeded in making fascism, dictatorship and authoritarianism fashionable all over again. They go by the principle made popular by Joseph Goebbels, whom Hitler appointed Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in the German Reich. He said, “A lie told once remains a lie. But a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.” And that “truth” is now called the ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVE.
That is how the present populist government in our country rose into power. Pope Francis has spoken very often about the evils of populism in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti. His words ring true in our own setting, especially now that we are witnessing how the family of our present populist leader is entering into a convenient deal with the family of the late dictator for political expediency, in a kind of symbiosis of power or a mutually beneficial intermarriage of political dynasties. And apparently they are leading in the surveys, as you will hear later from our invited resource persons. Apparently more than 60 percent of our Catholic faithful will support them, according to reliable survey results.
I think they are having their heyday partly because we have conveniently avoided politics and have kept the social teachings of the Church about the politics of the common good practically unknown to our faithful. As a consequence, our laity have tended to be more clericalistic than clerics themselves. They keep their involvement to a bare minimum, such as through non-partisan organizations for election monitoring like PPCRV (which are, no doubt, also important).
Look, even our Sangguniang Laiko leaders cannot seem to make up their minds on whether or not their leadership body should go to the point of supporting candidates who represent values close to the Gospel and the social teachings of the Church. Ironically, it is those who support the candidates who steal, lie and kill, who tend to be more aggressive about insisting on “non-partisanship”, which, to them means keeping the Church in a pure state of neutrality. They are the ones who love to invoke against us the principle of “separation of Church and State”, as they understand it—not as the Philippine Constitution actually says it.
They remind me of Pontius Pilate and what he did when he asked Jesus in Jn 8:31, “WHAT IS TRUTH?” Pilate somehow knew that the accusations against Jesus were unfounded. That was why he felt the need to conduct his own investigation on the matter. Later in the Gospel, we are told that he had found no guilt in the accused. But in the end, what did he do? He “washed his hands” and chose to stay “neutral” because he did not have the courage to uphold the truth.
In Jn 8:31-32, Jesus said, “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” I remember how the late Jesuit Fr. Guido Arguelles used to paraphrase those words of Jesus. He said, “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.”
Dear brother bishops of the Philippines, I know we feel like a David before a Goliath who is armed from head to toe. I am sure like the terrified army led by Saul, we are inclined to say “He is so big, how can we fight this giant?” With just a slingshot and some pebbles, and a lot of faith in the God who had seen in him the heart of a good shepherd who was fearless when it came to defending his flocks from predators, David saw things differently. He said, “He is so big, I cannot possibly miss.” The Goliath that I am referring to is Satan, no other. Only Satan is our enemy; he fights his battle with lies. Only Christ is our General; He fights his battle with the armor of truth.
In Ephesians 6:10-17,Paul gives us some tips on how to fight the spiritual battle; by drawing our strength only “from the Lord and from his mighty power.” He also says, “Stand fast with your loins girded in truth, clothed with righteousness as a breastplate, and your feet shod in readiness for the gospel of peace. In all circumstances, hold faith as a shield, to quench all [the] flaming arrows of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”
May the Holy Spirit breathe upon us as we begin this plenary assembly. Thank you.
President, CBCP
January 27, 2022
