President Duterte Attacks the Catholic Church – Again
Famous for his blunt attitude, swearing and general undiplomatic approach, Duterte again causes uproar in the Philippines for “apparently” declaring that he does not believe in God.
After he claimed to be abused by a priest as a child the Catholic Bishops challenged him to name the priest, he did so naming the priest, one who the church in America paid out millions for in abuse settlements. The church elders became silent.
Calling the Catholic Church “the most hypocritical institution” and the Catholic Bishops of the Philippines “sons of whores” he has been on a collision course with them for many years.
An advocate of artificial birth control and LGBT rights he is constantly fighting the Catholic Church which believes it has greater authority in the Philippines than the democratically elected State.
Unfortunately, due to his personality, a lot of what he says and does is lost behind the persona he portrays, however progress is being made.
Despite the church objections and delaying tactics the State Reproductive Health program is making progress - albeit slowly. The latest survey shows that 40% of Philippine Catholics now use artificial birth control, a figure that is growing yearly, but much less than the 85% across the whole international Catholic Church.
Recently he signed in to law a program for providing free “substantial and nutritious” school meals in all public schools for the children of indigent families. Children the church generally ignores other than to provide very basic quality, yet highly indoctrinational schools.
The focused message that recently got lost in his tirade against the church – “I don’t believe in God” – being emphasised up by his opponents, was not what he actually said.
What he was saying is “I don’t believe in YOUR God”. The point he was making is why the Catholic Church in the Philippines teaches differently to what it teaches in more enlightened countries. Meaning why in the Philippines do they teach the story of Adam and Eve as being true? Why do they teach the belief in “Original Sin”? Why do they teach that God is jealous and vengeful? Why is the emphasis in the Philippines on the Old Testament whereas in other countries, and amongst leading Catholic theologians, the Old Testament is now considered irrelevant and focus is now on the New Testament?
What Duterte said was I do not believe in YOUR God, I believe in MY God who is Kind, Caring, Understanding and Forgiving.
Usually the press, especially the popular press, castigate Duterte when he criticises the Catholic Church. Recently, however, I came across two editorial articles in the Manila Times, a respected broadsheet, which came to his support and decried the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. See below:
Duterte’s legacy:
Liberation from religion?
GOOD or bad politically for President Duterte, his making fun of the “God” of the Adam and Eve myth (really from the Hebrew Tanakh, or Bible) and his chiding of the Church since the election campaign, are a giant step in the huge task of taking our people’s medieval, superstitious worldview into the 21st century.
As my friend Stephen Cu Unjieng, one of the very few investment bankers I know who care for the soul in its real sense, remarked in his Facebook time-line: “I never thought I would see a Philippine President take on the Church and now even better the ridiculous creation story in my lifetime. Bravo.”
I wrote the following column (January 7, 2017) of the same title which I think is more relevant now, what with clerics and the hypocritical Yellows1 hysterically jumping up and down calling for the ouster of Duterte for ridiculing that 10,000-year-old myth many Filipinos believe really occurred.
2017 column:
“Will Duterte liberate us from religion of the superstitious kind? That seems unlikely, as Catholicism has brainwashed over 20 generations of Filipinos, as Christianity has Western civilization
for about two centuries, and its hold on people’s superstitious minds will probably last for another millennium.
Still, President Duterte is not only the first Philippine President, but also the first national or even local political leader of note, to take on the Church, and to show his disdain for it. “I challenge the Catholic Church. You are full of s**t. You all smell bad, corruption and all,” the President said.
No one but the kind of person Duterte is could have spewed such vitriol on the Church: “Gago,” he described himself, using that term to mean an unorthodox person who does what he thinks is right and doesn’t care what others think about him.
With those kinds of words, and his relentless criticism of the Church, Duterte is at least lighting a candle in the vast dark landscape of Filipinos’ worldview, by which they would risk life and limb to touch a wooden statue so they’d get a boon from the Deity, such as a visa to the US or a brand-new SUV.*
Duterte is certainly treading on very dangerous ground in challenging religion. Confronting one’s beliefs developed since childhood is not for the faint of heart, as this wakes one up to the realization of an uncaring cold, universe. What if one wakes up in the middle of the night, and realizes that this – this life – is it, and there’s no magical territory one migrates to after death?
Philippine President angry at ‘God’s’
clerics
Indeed, most Filipinos choose, whether they realize it or not, to have as their mind-set throughout their lives what is called Pascal’s Wager (which that 17th century philosopher and
mathematician formulated): “If you believe in God, and He exists, you will be rewarded in heaven. And if he doesn’t exist, you won’t know about it, so it’s best to believe in
God.”
Still, though, it is challenging to realize that we are probably among the first generations of humankind to have the intellectual tools and the vast information accumulated by civilization for 2,000 years that could be employed to determine what are superstitious beliefs (made by pre-scientific peoples to make sense of the universe) and what are not, using logical, data-based processes we call the scientific method.
A crude example, of course, is that we are certain that the sun doesn’t really rise (much less is it the chariot driven everyday across the firmament by the Titan Helios of ancient Greek mythology) in the east and set in the west. Rather, it is Earth which revolves around a medium-sized star, one among gazillions in the universe. And this wasn’t proven by the eyewitness accounts of astronauts who orbited the earth in space vehicles just in the past several decades. Long before them, it was deduced by the 16th century mathematician and astronomer using methods that would be developed to an astounding level of sophistication which we call science.
It is the same method – in certain disciplines called anthropology, linguistics and comparative religious studies – that was employed to examine, starting in the 19th century, what most humans on earth believed were divine revelations written by the Deity’s ghost-writers, that is, “Messengers,” i.e., the Jewish Torah, the New Testament and the Quran.
However, ancient documents have been unearthed in the 20th century that shed light on the very human origins of these books that have been considered Words of God, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls in the case of the Torah and the Christian New Testament, and a Syrian-Aramaic text of the Quran.
Scholarship on the man called Jesus Christ and on the origins of Christianity has exploded, starting in the 1980s, given impetus by the so-called Jesus Seminar, a group of about 150 critical international scholars and laymen founded in 1985 that examined the Bible using modern anthropological, sociological and linguistic methods.
There is now a magazine and its Web version called Biblical Anthropology that studies, using the scientific method, almost every facet of society in biblical times. (An example of findings there is that Nazareth didn’t exist when Jesus was born, as the Bible reports; there was no census called to require the Holy Couple to go to Bethlehem.)
The writings of these scholars have been such that the debate is no longer whether Jesus is the Son of God – as the Bible claims – but whether he existed, or was merely a fictional character as unreal (but as powerful in impact on a civilization) as mythical gods such as Apollo, Osiris and Zarathustra.
Roman invention
A recent intriguing scholarly book (Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus by Joseph Atwill) even rigorously argues that the Jesus myth was invented by the Roman emperors
Vespasian and his sons, especially Titus, to create a religion that would counter the passionate belief for a coming military-religious leader termed Messiah of the Jews, who gave the Romans so
much trouble that they decided to burn to the ground Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 A.D.
On the other hand, a book by a scholar argues that Muhammad did not exist at all (Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry In to Islam’s Obscure Origins, by Robert Spencer), that it was an invention by the Arab military leaders to foster, as most religions have done, zeal in their conquests. How was it so easily invented? By hijacking the Syrian version of Christianity that was emerging in the 7th century, which explains why Islam officially believes in such biblical figures as Moses and Jesus. One interesting finding of one scholar on Islam is that the 72 virgins the Quran said jihadists would enjoy in Paradise was a mistranslation from the Syriac-Aramaic text. What the martyrs would enjoy would be raisins, then an expensive delicacy in the Arabian deserts that were out of reach for ordinary warriors.
One of the most ignorant, yet prevalent, views is that Christianity can’t be wrong as it has survived for more than 2,000 years, despite its persecution.
This is so totally wrong. Christianity is one of the main religions of the world now, because it was the state religion of one of the biggest civilizations the world has seen: Europe, which originated from the Roman Empire, the most powerful and long-lasting military dictatorships the world has seen. It wasn’t a choice of the vast population of peasants whether to believe in Jesus or not; they had to, or else.
Similarly, Islam is one of the largest religions on earth, because it was the religion first of the Caliphates that emerged out of the Middle East to conquer vast swathes of the world, as far as India, and then of the Ottoman empire of the 13th century that even nearly overran Christian Europe.
That explains why Mithra, Osiris and Zarathustra didn’t become the Deities of world religions: these didn’t become state religions of vast empires that neared the modern era.
If all Duterte does in his entire six years is to, through his tirades against the Church, make us think about these things, he will leave an important legacy to this land made so superstitious by Spanish friars.”
* A “devotee” said a few years back: “The first time I joined the Black Nazarene procession, I got my wish for a Tamaraw FX. This year I’m wishing for a Pajero.”
1Yellows – Philippine Liberal Party.
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With its P100-B wealth, Church can feed 1M poor Filipinos daily, but it doesn’t
ONE of the most shameful, and most hypocritical, things about the Catholic Church in the Philippines, is this: That even as it keeps preaching to its flock to help the poor, the actual work it has done for this duty has really been marginal, if one considers its wealth estimated at least at P100 billion*, and the hundreds of millions of pesos it collects every Sunday in its churches, from its expensive schools catering for the elite, and from donations from the rich, especially from those at the twilight of their lives who think that with this they are buying their visas for Heaven.
Why doesn’t the Church use even a small part of its vast wealth to feed the poor, with real food, and not just silly pious words?
A program to feed the poor isn’t complicated, and the Church has the infrastructure to do it: its parish churches, ubiquitous even in the poorest urban slum communities as well as its schools, both spread all over the archipelago. With its money and with the free labour it always manages to get (who cleans the priests’ toilets anyway?), it can set up what’s called soup kitchens, maybe in our case lugaw (rice Porridge) centres, free for anybody who cares for it, at least every of its Sabbath day but ideally – and “doable” with its wealth – every single day of the year.
Here’s my computation for this endeavour, which doesn’t even have to consume its assets, but only interest from these. A low 5 percent annual income on its P100 billion assets, will generate P5 billion every year. Divide that by the 365 days in a year and it will mean P14 million it can spend every day for soup kitchens. How many poor Filipinos (allowed to eat there only once a day) will that P14 million feed? At just P15 per lugaw, that would mean 1 million Filipinos fed every single day.
Taste of heaven
These are of course illustrative computations. The point is if the Church puts its money where its preaching mouth is, it can play a huge role in making life for miserable Filipinos in the here
and now better, and they won’t have to wait for the afterlife to have a taste of heaven.
The problem with our clerics is that nearly all of them haven’t experienced in their entire lives the pangs of real hunger. Believe me, it’s terrible beyond imagination. A bowl of lugaw given to a poor Filipino who hasn’t eaten in three days is heaven on hearth.
Left, American nuns serving food to the homeless in a soup kitchen. Right, Filipino nuns serving…whom?
I presume, dear Catholic Reader, that you have been going to Mass very Sunday ever since you had to accompany your parents. Even with beggars usually lining up the path to your church (which cleverly estimates that a devotee would feel charitable on the way to God’s house), have you ever seen your parish church opening a soup kitchen for the poor? I haven’t.
The Ateneo de Manila where I studied is probably one of the richest universities in Asia, with a vast campus on now prime land. In all the years I spent there, and after, I never heard of this Jesuit-run institution operating soup kitchens, even during the worst floods that hit the metropolis, even when in 2013 typhoon Ondoy flooded its neighbouring villages in Marikina. Yet it has built in the past 10 years new buildings, even a new athletic centre, worth P1 billion. Yet the Jesuits continue to mouth its slogan, that the Atenean “is a man for others.” Oh well, it really means a man for others who are rich.
You’d be surprised that there are religions for which it is an integral part of the worship of the Deity to feed whoever needs to be fed. The Sikh religion (with 20 million believers, familiarly, Indians wearing turbans) famously has its doctrine and practice of langar in their places of worship (called Gurdwara) where free meals are served to anyone who wishes for one when the Gurdwara is open. The religion’s founder, its Guru Nanak (169-1539), made it an integral part of the practice of Sikhism.
Nanak’s successor, Guru Angad, even institutionalized the practice, setting the rules and training method for volunteers who operated the kitchen, placing emphasis on treating it as a place of rest and refuge, being always polite and hospitable to all visitors.
Also
Buddhists
Several sects of Buddhism also provide free meals once a week. I discovered this only when I chanced to visit a Korean Buddhist temple in Silang, Cavite, on my way to Tagaytay for a vacation. I
was surprised that the bald-headed nun there invited us to come back to taste their vegetarian cuisine on Sundays at their well-appointed canteen which she said was open to anybody who wishes to
eat there on that day. Eat all you can, though everything’s vegetarian food.
Setting up soup kitchens on Sundays has also been a practice of many Catholic and Protestant churches in the US. The biggest are those of the Catholic Charities USA, which routinely operates such soup kitchens in the poorest urban areas in that country that feed 4,000 people.
It is a matter of justice, not charity, for the parishes of the Catholic Church in the Philippines to have lugaw centres to feed the poor. It’s sitting on a P100 billion fortune, accumulated from the Spanish colonial period, of which it was a pillar.
Considering that much of the Church’s assets came from the land grants during the Spanish conquest and later from the donations of the Philippine oligarchy (or stocks in oligarchs’ enterprises), its wealth in the final analysis was extracted from the blood and sweat of millions of Filipino peasants and workers for 12 generations. Why, did you think these were the result of wealth-generating companies the churchmen set up and run, or gifts directly given by God?
Jesus fed 5,000
According to the Church’s New Testament, Jesus went out of his way and defied the laws of physics and biology (which His Father decreed) to magically multiply seven loaves of bread and two fishes
in order to feed a crowd of 5,000 people who had come to hear him speak. The Catholic Church doesn’t need such magical powers, but only a clever financial officer to outdo the Messiah himself and
feed not just 5,000 people but a million hungry Filipinos.
Even as it unceasingly rants against governments, and pleads for the poor, I haven’t heard of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, the very wealthy Opus Dei, the noisy Lingayen Archbishop Socrates Villegas, or the De La Salle University serve free lugaw to the poor, have you? Or do they think God will take care of the poor, anyway?
*P100 billion is an estimate based on about P40 billion in stocks held by its dioceses in blue-chip companies, the biggest of which is the Bank of the Philippine Islands; the value of the now prime lands and facilities of their top-rung universities (Ateneo, La Salle, UST, Letran, etc); and the estates all over the archipelago that the Church has accumulated over four centuries. A broker estimated to me for instance that its vast estates in Tagaytay City alone, on which had been built retreat and summer mansions, are worth at least P10 billion. This puts the Catholic Church among the richest enterprises in the country.
The Catholic Church in the Philippines, both diocesan and religious congregational, must be transparent and make public its finances. This is not unprecedented. In 2015 the Archdiocese of Cologne for the first time published its financial accounts, which showed that its assets as of end-2013 amounted to €3.35 billion (P206 billion). That’s a bit bigger than the assets of the Vatican, which Cardinal George Pell1, the Holy See’s secretary for the economy, revealed in February 2015 as totalling €3 billion.
That label for it as the “Church of the Poor” ranks among the biggest lies of our era.
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1 Note by Charles Birch 2/8/18: Cardinal George Pell – currently facing trial in Australia for historic child sexual abuse.
13/3/19 Convicted and sentenced to 6 years in prison.
8/1/20 Pell's legal team mount an appeal against the sentence.
7/4/20 Pell wins his appeal and is released from prison after serving 400 days. Abuse victims shocked at the decision.