Can a Priest be Prince?

26 August 09

Two prominent religious leaders have made it known their intention to make a run for the presidency in May 2010 election – Bro. Eddie Villanueva of the Jesus Is Lord evangelical group and Bro. Mike Velarde, head of El Shaddai, a Roman Catholic lay movement. Add Pampanga governor Fr. Ed Panlilio, and you get the impression that the church is poised to invade the domain of Philippine politics.

Actually, this is not a new development in so far as the two lay religious leaders are concerned. Bro. Eddie Villanueva had run for president in 2004 against Gloria Arroyo and a few others. And already at that time, Bro. Mike Velarde had been flirting with his followers’ temptation to make his huge organization a platform for a bid to the presidency. Villanueva’s vaunted 7-million strong followers, however, delivered less than half that number although his party list Cibac carried his son Joel to the House of Representatives.

I’m not particularly surprised about Villanueva’s and Velarde’s infatuation with the presidency. Their style of leadership betrays a strong political bent and a thinly disguised ambition to scale the heights of personal achievement and prominence. In preaching the word of God, they are no different from leaders who tend to project themselves and rely on the power of their personality and persuasion. They understand the workings of mass psychology and use this knowledge in furtherance of their goals and objectives. They increase while the people they profess to serve decrease.

In this sense, they are of the same breed as political leaders who practice politics like chess players pushing the pieces on a chessboard. Not that it is inherently wrong, but this is not the way church leadership is to be pursued. Genuine preachers let the word of God speak for itself rather than project their personas. True prophets seek not power for themselves but God’s truths that will inform, enlighten, inspire and enable the nation – governors and the governed – to practice the politics of freedom and liberation.

For the record, Bro. Mike Velarde’s El Shaddai has served to prop up corrupt, inept and immoral administrations. And Bro. Eddie has failed to mobilize the vast number of JIL adherents to denounce government’s human rights performance especially against suspected leftists considering that he himself was one in his youth as he claimed to be. Both religious groups have actually prospered at a time when more Filipino families are going hungry, and have gained approval from a government that is riddled with corruption and scandalous indiscretions.

How can it be said that they speak for the God of Jesus Christ? It’s spiritual leaders of this kind that give credence to the secular accusation that faith is nothing more than ideology in the pejorative sense of the word. In these days of evil, a Christian spiritual leader ought to be carrying his faith like a death warrant not a badge of social approbation. It is in this kind of days that people of faith must resist all temptations to put in their hands the powers of government. That is not their calling. The place that is proper to them is with the victims of evil and those who suffer for their sake.

But, in another sense, people of faith who wish to become president of the republic have proved a very important point – the central issue in politics is morality. The people have seen a succession of leaders provided by the social elites – from a brilliant lawyer who put the nation under martial rule to an intellectual with a doctorate in economics who has further impoverished the poor. The recent reappearance of yellow ribbons in the wake of Cory Aquino’s death demonstrates the people’s longing for a genuine moral leadership more than anything else. Politicians of confirmed moral fiber are a rarity, if not an oxymoron in Philippine politics. But neither is it a monopoly of people of the cloth. The people are left with choices among political leaders with tainted morality. After all, in the end it is the people that create the conditions for leaders to behave either morally or immorally.

These are days of evil when spiritual leadership is most needed. It would not serve the people well for spiritual leaders to trade their spiritual cloak with the political.