Dissonance in the Church?

CALL the Catholic Church any name, as is commonly done today in social networks, or even accuse her of being out of touch with reality as one recently did when he carelessly dared the church to peep under the bridges in Metro Manila and discover that the world is swarming with unwanted population—without realizing that it is the likes of Caritas Manila or religious and social action groups that are persistently accompanying the misery of these much blighted brethren—she will always hold on to her teachings which for more than 2,000 years now have survived even the strongest heretical onslaughts.

When there are unjust relocations of urban communities or land disputes and other such clashes where the poor are always at the losing end, the church will always be there in sympathy and defense, sometimes joining in hunger strikes—and not the well entrenched pro-Celdran bourgeois—even mostly at the cost of being wrongly accused as ideologues or outrightly communists as was the common case during Martial Law.

There is no denying, however, that while the church is solid with her teachings some church men are, in some cases, not. Elizabeth Angsioco’s “Dissonance within the Catholic hierarchy?” that appeared October 23, 2010 at Manila Standard maybe a sore case in point. She writes, “The reasonable conclusion from all these are: some within the Catholic hierarchy do not study the issues before making public positions; priests’ and bishops’ positioning on family planning and RH also change; and, if we continue to closely scrutinize the Roman Catholic hierarchy, we may find that dissonance within exists.”

Perhaps disputably, when it comes, for instance, to pro-life issues, demography or the Reproductive Health Bill, the Catholic Church is losing, maybe by default, in the areopagus of public opinion. Some church people hastily blame the seeming defeat on the media or on the well-funded global agenda that keep propagating eugenics, demographic economy and an imposing world order. But, of course, this line of thinking is like blaming and using the Satan scapegoat for all the evils in the world. It is more plausible to think that the problem is not in the stars; it is right here in the dissonance and the sluggishness of some church people.

Thus far, nobody has yet heard of a serious church campaign, using serious church resources and well-planned strategies to seriously educate the public about the truth of, say, RH bill and the demography. One only sees uncoordinated sparks like fireworks in parish fiestas when it comes to church advocacy initiatives. But then again, this is very likely of the church that has survived not by the strength of its scrawny leaders but by the foolishness of her founder who decided to die on the cross.