Sizing up the challenge

IS politics a devil's game? Must be. It certainly shows many signs that it is. For one, there's large-scale and systematic lying, there's massive deception and empty promises galore. These clearly are tricks of the devil, the prince of lies!

Intrigues and discord fly thick and fast between camps that have the curse of multiplying themselves like rabbits. There's such confusion you would not know anymore who stands for what.

Actually most politicians have very similar or not too different views and positions on issues. You wonder why they have the nerve -- the bravado -- to claim they are the best while their foes are supposed to be the worst.

Mudslinging and muckraking seem to be a favorite pastime of many politicians. The air truly gets fouled up, darkened, even poisoned by their stupid and childish antics. Many think, sad to say, that these are inevitable in politics, or worse, that these antics are signs of true leadership. Leadership, my foot!

The endless forms of political madness continue to show themselves. The most charitable description that can be given seems to be that politics is dirty. Politics looks like it cannot help but attract and produce dirt, all kinds of dirt!

There is corruption, and not only of the monetary kind. What is worse is the corruption of the mind, of one's capacity to reason out properly.

Why, even men of known intelligence and accomplishments suddenly degenerate into some kind of unbelievable lunatics once they step into politics. It's a mystery why these men contribute in making society one big mental asylum.

It really stops the heart to hear an otherwise brilliant man give out the most convoluted reasoning to justify, for example, the fielding of an inexperienced but highly popular individual to run for no less than the highest office of the land.

You wonder: Has politics made him nuts? Has politics affected his thinking? What is it in politics that makes people stupid, that transforms them from meek lambs at "peace time" into horrible monsters during election season?

Could it be lust for power? Could it be the insatiable craving for fame and money? Could it be pride that has been hurt?

There's also the shameless playing around with the weaknesses of people -- the "masa" [masses], for example. This is really deplorable, a clear case of a wanton abuse of democracy, as it is converted solely into a numbers game, a matter of popularity.

Democracy is caricaturized and degraded that way. While numbers, popularity and consensus are important in a democracy, these are not supposed to replace or substitute right reason and much less the indications of our faith.

Democracy is not just a complacent and passive determination of what position has the highest number of adherents. That's inhuman. Imagine a family with two parents and three children. The parents could be outvoted by the children anytime, even if the parents are clearly right.

There is always the need to exert the effort to find the truth and the real good for man. We just cannot make a consensus to determine what is true and good. We need to think properly, and go to the ultimate sources of truth and goodness.

Democracy would be incomplete, would be a dangerous traitor to a country when it fails to blend its mechanism of popular vote with its need to be rooted in some absolute ground of what is right and wrong, what is good and bad.

Democracy would be incomplete and dangerous when it cannot distinguish equality from uniformity. That's when it becomes blind to the legitimate differences of people, and to the reality that there is such thing as hierarchy of values and priorities that should be respected.

This way of understanding democracy opens the possibility for politicians to easily develop a lust for power, wealth and fame. And this is what we are witnessing these days. Politics becomes a game of thugs, a devil's game.

This is the challenge we have today -- how to bring to the minds of everyone the true essence of democracy and the ideal picture of a politician. The challenge, indeed, is daunting but it simply has to be faced.

Yes, we need to pray a lot and offer loads and loads of sacrifices to make our politics more Christian, but we also need to do a lot of concrete things to make it so.

I hope that the Christian laity from all walks of life do something to make our politics a politics of true men and women, of the children of God, and not of animals, nor of minions of the devil!
Church of errors and heresies?

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SOMETIME ago, Pope John Paul II made on behalf of the Catholic Church a public apology for the mistakes and crimes committed by some churchmen in the course of the history of the church.

It was a bold and dramatic move. Some were dismayed at the thought the papal gesture meant the church after all had been committing mistakes through the years. It taxed their faith, it brought them to the brink of scandal.

It somehow made them vulnerable to the wild accusations hurled by some rabidly anti-church people who say that the church is nothing more than a producer of myths, superstitions and other scientific heresies.

Worse, the church is pictured as incapable of teaching anything right about any matter anymore. That's why its condemnation about family planning just can't be right.

Still, the reasoning goes, the church, like a tyrant, has to impose its teachings on its faithful under pain of cruel penalties.

In reality, what the Pope did corresponded to a reality often missed by many people. That is that the church, while it is holy and immaculate in view of its head, our Lord Jesus Christ, is also very fallible in view of the men and women who make up its body.

As the Catechism expresses it well: "The church is therefore holy, though having sinners in her midst, because she herself has no other life but the life of grace.

"If they live her life, her members are sanctified; if they move away from her life, they fall into sins and disorders that prevent the radiation of her sanctity.

"This is why she suffers and does penance for those offenses, of which she has the power to free her children through the blood of Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit." (827)

It is the human element of the church that is responsible for the errors and offenses in it. As a human institution, the church is subject also to the vagaries of the times and other historical and cultural conditionings. But just like any human institution also, it can learn from these mistakes.

Lately, the Catholic Church has been suffering because of the sex scandals committed by some clerics. Some have expressed the view that these sex scandals erupted, if not are endemic in the church, because of the intoxicating power wielded by its leaders.

There definitely are some traces of truth in these observations, but they are not what the church teaches or how our Lord lived. The offenses are subjective, that is, of the persons involved.

In the Catholic Church, power and authority always have to be exercised in humility and meekness, and meant to serve others rather than to lord over them. Certainly, given the human weakness, some appropriate norms of prudence have to be installed, so these crimes could be minimized, if not eliminated.

In the past, the church also got entangled in some controversies like the Galileo affair that reflected more on the cultural and social conditionings of the times than that the church committed an error of doctrine.

The position then that the sun revolved around the earth was held by some churchmen who interpreted some biblical passages literally. Later, these churchmen would learn to be more cautious about interpreting biblical passages.

The fact is that while truth is only one, it has many layers and levels, each with its own methodologies, standards and purposes, and therefore should be respected as such. Otherwise, there will be distortions and troubles.

So the truths of religion and those of the sciences should not contradict each other, as long as their peculiar ways and characters are respected.

Still, that geocentric view was not an official Catholic Church teaching, although it was also held by most of the people then, given the limitations of their scientific means to verify the scientific truth.

Galileo's findings at that time were also not yet that conclusive. But while he was silenced, he also opened the eyes of the churchmen to the possibility that indeed what he claimed, that the earth revolves around the sun, could be true.

Only later was the truth about this scientific fact known and verified, and the church had to make a correction on what appeared to be an official teaching because it was held and taught by some churchmen.

Yes, it was a painful part of the history of the Catholic Church, which only reflects the fragility of the human condition in which the church is set. This is something that we should try to understand, rather than use to dirty the name of the church.