Monisgnor Jeffrey Malanog, during the Regional Lay Leaders Conference in Tagbilaran, reminded the Laity not to separate our faith from our actions! True! It is...
Pope Francis marked 2024 as the Year of Prayer, in preparation for the 2025 Jubilee Year. Sangguniang Laiko ng Pilipinas, together with the Diocese of...
Contrary to popular belief, “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” is not a Church doctrine.
Yes, we are told to respect authority and public officials. Yes, we are told to follow the Law and to work for the Common Good of our respective communities and nations. And yes, we are also taught to value democracy and all its fruits: the recognition of human rights and dignity, and the power of the ballot, among others.
But there are times when the Voice of the People – even if they speak in astounding unison – cannot be mistaken for the Voice of God. There are times when people are misled by lies, or threatened by force, or rewarded for believing what they know to be untrue.
I think this is very relevant today as we reconcile ourselves with the outcome of the recently-concluded elections. Not merely because I am disappointed with its results, but rather because I am concerned with what they mean for us as a country moving forward.
What I find most concerning is our relationship with truth. The advent of social media has made the spreading of information easier and more convenient, but it has not made the information more reliable. Throughout these elections, many problematic opinions and downright false news and information have proliferated in order to attack certain people and lift up others.
Of course, this is nothing new. Studies from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada (APFC), and other reputable academic institutions have noted the prominent role of Youtube, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter in increasing the media reach of national politicians, most notably the presumptive President in providing “alternative facts” related to the history of his family and his own alleged misdeeds.
I am also no stranger to the fact that many relationships have been fractured by debates and discussions on what is true and what should be believed, and the actions which historical facts should entail. I feel the frustration in every person who, upon wholeheartedly trying to convince the other to not fall for lies on the internet, was just met with a dismissive plea to “respect” the other person’s “opinion.” But I also understand why people find some truths hard to accept.
In its new ‘State of the Global Climate 2021’ report, the World Meteorological Organization says the past seven years have been the hottest on record and that greenhouse gas concentrations, sea-level rise, ocean heat, and ocean acidification set new records in 2021.
Vatican News By Deborah Castellano Lubov
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released the new “State of the Global Climate 2021” report on Wednesday in Geneva, warning that the past seven years have been the hottest years to date and that four key climate indicators set new records last year.
The report will be used as an official document for the UN Climate Change Conference 2022, known as COP27, taking place in Egypt in November.
According to the report’s findings, the indicators of sea-level rise, ocean heat, greenhouse gas concentrations, and ocean acidification, set unprecedented highs in 2021.
Action required immediately
Despite illustrating the grim reality of how climate is changing in unprecedented ways, the report suggested there are “many options to alleviate the impacts, through both mitigation and adaptation.”
Even if adaptation improves, the text cautioned that climate change will worsen unless the underlying drivers are addressed. Only if all sectors and regions greatly and immediately reduce emissions, it stated, will it be possible to keep warming below 1.5° C.
Underscoring the harsh reality presented in the document, UN Secretary-General António Guterres also issued his own video message, stressing, “Time is running out.”
Renewable energy transition
He proposed five “critical actions” to jump-start the renewable energy transition, including renewable energy technologies, such as battery storage, being treated as essential and freely-available global public goods.
While calling for securing, scaling up, and diversifying the supply of critical components and raw materials for renewable energy technologies, he urged governments “to build frameworks and reform bureaucracies to level the playing field for renewables” and “to shift subsidies away from fossil fuels to protect the poor and most vulnerable people and communities.”
Guterres also said that private and public investments in renewable energy must triple to at least $4 trillion dollars a year.
“If we act together, the renewable energy transformation can be the peace project of the 21st Century,” the UN Secretary-General said.
Warning that “without renewables, there can be no future,” he urged both public and private leaders “to stop talking about renewables as a distant project of the future.”
“As today’s report makes clear, it’s time to jump-start the renewable energy transition before it’s too late”
The French-founded Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools have elected Brother Armin Luistro as their new superior general.
Luistro becomes the Lasallian Brothers’ 28th superior general and the first Filipino to hold the global position.
The election took place May 18 at the religious institute’s 46th general chapter in Rome.
Typically held every seven years, the election comes eight years after the previous government was elected in 2014 because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Luistro joined the La Salle Scholasticate, the academic training centre of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, in Manila in April 1979, while studying at De La Salle University (DLSU).
He received the religious habit in October 1981, professed his first religious vows in October 1982 and his final vows in May 1988.
The 60-year-old started his teaching career at De La Salle Lipa in Batangas, where he worked as a religion teacher, class counsellor and campus minister from 1983 to 1986.
In August 2000, he co-founded with Indonesian BishopJosef Suwatan of Manado, the De La Salle Catholic University in Manado, now known as De La Salle University-Indonesia.
Luistro has more than 34 years of experience in both the private and public sectors.
From 2010 to 2016, he served as secretary of the Education department. Prior to this, he was at the helm of De La Salle University in Manila, serving as its president from 2004 to 2010.
In previous years, he also served as president of the De La Salle University System and several other La Salle schools. From 2017 to 2019, he returned to serve as President of De La Salle Philippines, the network of La Salle schools in the country.
He is currently a board member of the Philippine Business for Social Progress (PBSP), the largest business-led non-governmental organisation in the country. In May 2019, he was appointed Brother Visitor of the Lasallian District of East Asia.
Luistro has also held various positions in other governmental and intergovernmental organisations, such as the Advisory Council of the National Youth Commission, the UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines and the South East Asian Ministers of Education Organisation (SEAMEO).
Luistro holds a Doctorate in Educational Management from Saint La Salle University in Bacolod and a Master’s Degree in Religious Education and Values from De La Salle University in Manila. He also holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy and Humanities from DLSU.
The head of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) has called on the faithful to keep the fight against ‘evil’ in the society going.
Bishop Pablo Virgilio David stressed the need to “keep a good attitude” and remain focused on issues that affect the nation “as we move forward together”.
“We should not surrender our hope to the forces of evil at work in our society,” David said in a message released a week after the country’s local and national elections.
The recent polls, the bishop said, had “made more obvious” the factors that continue “to challenge our democratic institutions”.
He was referring to “well-funded trolls” behind massive disinformation and rampant vote-buying “now made easier by online cash transfers”.
But if there’s anything to be hopeful for, according to him, “it’s the reawakened sense of patriotism among many sectors in Philippine society”.
The CBCP head, who is also the bishop of Kalookan, particularly cited the young people “who have discovered the power of solidarity for the common good”.
“Their desire to give a more concrete expression to responsible citizenship as the key to achieving good governance has been strongly manifested in their many spontaneous acts of volunteerism,” David said.
The prelate even went on to call it as “a rediscovery of what we used to call ‘people power’.”
“Now it has to be harnessed through the creation of well-thought out, well-planned, and better organized mass movement that will not only protect our democratic institutions but will also contribute proactively towards community development on the grassroot level and the formation of a better, more mature political culture,” he said.
Angel Marie Vier Albaracin, 6, attends canonization of St Marie Rivier who allegedly cured girl of fatal condition
A photograph taken on May 15, 2022 shows a tapestry depicting French Catholic nun Marie Rivier (L) and Italian Roman Catholic nun Maria Francesca Di Gesu Rubatto during a canonization Mass in St. Peter’s Square. (Photo: AFP)
By Joseph Peter Calleja May 16, 2022
A Filipina child “miraculously” cured by a French nun was presented to the pope on May 15 during the canonization of ten new saints at the Vatican in Rome.
Angel Marie Vier Albaracin was healed in a miracle attributed to Saint Marie Rivier, a French nun who founded the Congregation of the Sisters of the Presentation, according to the Congregation of Saints’ Causes.
Angel Marie, 6, from Bohol province in the central Philippines had been diagnosed with hydrops fetalis, a serious condition when an abnormal accumulation of fluid builds up around the lungs and the heart.
Angel Marie’s mother prayed to Saint Marie Rivier to heal her, according to Vatican reports.
“At first, the doctors did not believe that she would get well and were surprised when they became convinced that she was indeed free from the condition,” a cousin of the child, who wished to remain anonymous, told UCA News.
Bishop Abet Uy of Tagbilaran diocese in Bohol province witnessed the canonization at the Vatican.
“Who would expect that a little kid from Barangay Nahawan in Clarin, Bohol would walk in St. Peter’s Square and be near the Holy Father. This is called grace, a gift from God,” he said on Facebook.
Filipino women and children take part in a dance exercise in Manila to draw attention to child sexual abuse. (Photo: AFP)
UCAN News
Fr. Shay Cullen May 16, 2022 06:19 AM GMT
Child abuse continues to thrive because many in society, including the Church, turn a blind eye
There was a time in 2019 when people were getting the flu and thought little of it until it began to spread and hundreds and then thousands and hundreds of thousands were suffering and dying. No one was ready for what was to become a deadly pandemic that could hurt, wound and kill.
Hospitals and clinics were at full capacity and people were on ventilators and dying at the doors of hospitals. It can mutate, transform itself into another variant, more deadly, more vicious, and find new ways to transmit itself to new victims.
The coronavirus is a perfect simile for the crimes of child sexual abuse. Child abuse is a secret crime hardly ever seen or detected. Abusers change their methods of hiding and covering up crimes, especially in institutions. Schools, colleges and churches have almost perfected the art of covering up such criminal behavior. Most people do not recognize that it is everywhere and children are silent suffering victims. When it is suspected or detected, many people turn away. They do not reach out to the victim, no matter how many symptoms of abuse the child has.
Teachers, parents, duty bearers and child care workers must be taught to recognize the symptoms of child sexual abuse and be open to listening to every child that appears troubled, unruly, disturbed, rebellious and those that withdraw, stop studying, remain silent and stop playing.
Everybody must have the commitment and conviction to help a child get assistance and report the abuse to the authorities.
Online abuse is mostly done by relatives of the children. The acts are videotaped, photographed or sent live over the internet to rich pedophiles getting sexual gratification from the child abuse.
It is allowed, permitted and enabled by the morally bankrupt, uncaring and allegedly a few depraved executives of telecommunication corporations. It is shameful for any Filipino to be employed by them these days. They refuse to obey a law that mandates they install filtering or blocking software to prevent abusive images from passing through their Internet Service Providers. We survive in a corrupt society and must help child victims survive.
The most recent horrific cases involved an 11-year-old girl horribly abused for foreign pedophiles, a Swiss and a UK national. They also paid for young boys seven and 10 to be sexually exploited online by their mother. I hope the legal officers at the Swiss and UK embassies will take an active role in helping get justice for victims. They can get the testimonies of the victims in the care of the Preda Foundation. An average of 16 children at Preda homes in the Philippines get their abusers convicted every year to life in prison.
How wonderful it would be if foreign embassies and their attached law enforcers could investigate their abusive nationals and get convictions, too, and stop their pedophiles raping Filipino children.
The question is how much do they really care? The greed for money and the insatiable demands by rich foreign pedophiles are behind the sexual abuse of thousands of Filipino children. German police found as many as 30,000 pedophiles accessing child sexual abuse material online and identified 70 of them, many connected to the Philippines.
With exceptions, most families, citizens, government officials and agency heads, including many bishops in the Philippines and other churches have an uncaring attitude, indifference and a culture of apathy surrounding the sexual abuse of children. That is because, besides the few eight great bishops, they have many clerical abusers whom they hide away from the law and accountability and are not active defenders of child or human rights. Shame on them.
The clerical abusers are still being allowed to travel abroad, go to another parish or diocese or retire in the comfort of a church-supported rest house, all to avoid the shame, embarrassment and damage to the reputation of the diocesan institutional church.
Just a few brave courageous bishops and priests, from the 90 active and 40 honorary bishops and other clerics, are outspoken against child abuse and stand for human rights. The rest are allegedly silent. The abusers go free and the crimes continue. Only a few clerical child abusers have faced a prosecutor. Not a single cleric has been convicted of child abuse in the Philippines in the past 40 years or more, correct me if I am wrong. The abusers walk free and allegedly the child is thrown aside, their parents paid off.
Children suffer without help because of the apathy and because there are very few professionally accredited child care therapeutic homes for the protection, healing and empowerment of child victims/survivors with legal assistance like the Preda homes. There are thousands of hospitals, clinics, and health care centers for every kind of illness but there are practically no clinics, shelters, or therapy homes for the healing and recovery and legal assistance for child sexual abuse victims.
The reason is that society denies and ignores the pandemic of abuse and the medical profession is primarily a privatized, expensive, money-making business. The majority of child sexual abuse victims/survivors are very poor children — no money to be made there.
Most psychology graduates work for human resources departments in big corporations, no child help centers for them. The rich hide away their victims successfully. The scandal and shame on the family would be too much, the child is left to endure the abuse.
In the Philippines and elsewhere, thousands more are victims of sexual slavery through human trafficking and they, too, are allowed to be groomed, recruited, and lured over the internet and taken by pimps and traffickers into the sex business.
This human slavery is operated in brothels and sex bars and hotels that all have government permits and licenses to operate. Most operate with impunity protected by the local politicians and corrupt police.
