Philippine Society and the Church: Challenges

“A Spiritual Journey with the Poor”
A Lecture to Visiting Students of Japan Biblical Theological Seminary
Rev. Everett Mendoza, D. Theol.


Introduction: I’d like to share with you conversation I had some years ago with an Italian tourist at the home of a visiting professor. She was quite impressed with the Philippines and the Filipinos she came across during the week. She showed a nice tan from a few days at a beach resort in Cebu and snorkeling at Apo Island where you’ll be going to later in the week. It’s almost like paradise, she said – the unspoiled beauty of nature and people who are nice, friendly, helpful, accommodating and beautiful, so unlike her country that suffers from environmental and moral pollution as a result of industrialization and urbanization. And Silliman campus gave her yet another dimension of Wow! Philippines. What she saw was true and I felt complimented for her observations. But that’s only the upside and sunny side of the Philippines. There’s an underside, a dark and much larger side that is invisible to most people who visit the country.

I

The material that was given to you earlier is filled with facts and statistical data. It’s printed in clean white paper that seems incongruous with its content. The author communicates with the detached objectivity of a scholar researcher although there’s a bit of sarcasm in the way it’s presented and perhaps a subtle touch of passion between the lines. But it can’t conjure actual images of the realities behind the words and numbers. The word poverty is already a generalized abstraction of the concrete life of poor families in their millions. Injustice is a topic discussed in every form of discourse in and out of the academe but without passion and commitment because many of the so-called experts have not actually seen and heard its victims.

The underside of Philippine society is inhabited by people who live under the bridge, along the river banks and railways, in the slums, on the pavements; they are also found at the perimeters and inside the camps of plantations, on the hillsides and on what is left of forests. All day long they think, talk, imagine and go about to find food for the day. It was reported last month that 4 million families or over 20 million individuals suffered involuntary hunger in the last three months. Their young children drop out of school and on to the streets hawking bottled water and beads of flowers, go with their parents to the farm or gather sea shells when the tides are low. When a family member gets sick they go to a manghihilot or erbolaryo or light a candle before a patron saint and wait for healing or the final breath. Many of the youths join gangs and syndicates robbing passers-by or pushing drugs to their own kind. A good number of them stay at home staring at nothing and watching their lives passing them by. The unlucky ones end up thrown in jail or lifeless to the ditch.

For many families, life has been like this for many generations. It’s the only past that they can remember and the only future that waits them. So, the reason for this situation cannot be because they are lazy or dumb. It can only be historical and systemic to Philippine society. The growing contention based on scientific research and analysis is that the underside of Philippine society must be maintained in order to preserve, sustain and perpetuate life on the upside. This is unarguably true in Negros. The highest concentration of wealth in the whole island is found in sugar estates. The few families who own the land and control sugar production and trading – in most instances they are one and the same – are among the richest in the whole country. While those who actually work on the land and tend the sugar cane are among the poorest in the whole country. Now, how come the same productive activity makes a few very rich and the many very poor? It’s because land tenure in the Philippines, the sugar industry and the Philippines’ entire philosophy and strategy of economic development is designed to extract maximum wealth for the owners of property from the labor of people at the least possible cost. This strategy of development is absolutely and consistently compliant with a global economy which is also designed to exact maximum wealth for the global elite. There is, therefore, a proportion between the economies of rich countries and the economies of poor countries. Every unit of foreign capital invested in the Philippines is made to serve the same purpose. It becomes clear that given that framework of economic development, the infusion of foreign capital to the Philippine economy won’t reduce but rather widen the gap between the rich and the poor.

But this kind of social arrangement is not and cannot be sustained by mutual consent. This is being challenged from the underside. Consequently, the Philippine government must set aside a huge portion of its scarce resources to build up an inordinately large police and military apparatus to suppress, if not remove, any such challenge from the underside; hence, the hugely disproportionate amount spent by government for counterinsurgency compared to health, education and housing combined. The policy of suppressing rebellion rather than rooting out its economic and social causes is again consistent with the overriding goal of sustaining an elitist society. Endemic to a police/military solution is a high incidence of human rights violation and the victimization of non-combatants and civilian dissenters. Entire communities regarded hostile to military presence in the countryside are forcibly displaced and prevented access to basic necessities. In addition, individual persons and activists with suspect loyalties are becoming targets of extra-judicial killing. All this is done with impunity. State authorities and agents of the police/military and even officers of the judiciary conspire to cover the tracks of killers so that there is hardly any arrest, conviction and punishment.

II

Throughout Philippine history, the institutional church and certain Christian individuals and groups have always been implicated in the evolving life of the nation. For three hundred and fifty years, Spanish missionaries did evangelical work alongside the colonial authorities; at certain points they disagreed but most of the time they cooperated in subduing the inhabitants under the Spanish crown and the Pope. The case of the American Protestant missionaries is hardly different but the effects are more subtle. Where the Catholic Spaniards have failed, the Protestant Americans succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of the colonized subjects. While the Catholic priests frightened the faithful into submission with images of hell, the Protestant missionaries preached God’s grace and demonstrated it with material gifts, schools and hospitals. Through massive indoctrination in the guise of public education and the new gospel propagated by enlightened missionaries, the economic intentions of U.S. imperialism and the savagery of the American pacification campaigns went underground in the subconscious of the Filipino mind. The predominantly anti-Catholic thrusts of the Protestant missionary movement also came across as a gospel of liberation from the darkness of Spanish colonial rule. In other words, the theological turned out also to be political.

But there is a fact in Philippine church history that has survived the American colonial indoctrination although it failed to materialize is theological and political potentials for the shaping of the post-colonial Filipino identity. A good part of the Filipino Catholic clergy and the Catholic faithful throughout the Philippine islands went to the side of the anti-Spanish war of liberation. At the conclusion of the Spanish colonial occupation, they broke away from Rome and established an independent Catholic church, the Iglesia Filipina Independiente or the Philippine Independent Church. However, history has not been kind to an incipient independent Catholic church in the Philippines. The United States Supreme Court ruled that all lands, buildings and properties occupied by IFI be returned to the Roman Catholic Church. Deprived of land and many of its clergy, the new church lost a historic opportunity to help direct the post-colonial rebuilding of the Philippines.

Religious piety in the Philippines has never been insulated from political and economic struggles. The Philippines’ colonial history is punctuated by peasant rebellions with religious motives and symbols. Eventually, the seeds of a politically relevant gospel sown during the 1896 Revolution also fell on Roman Catholic and Protestant grounds. In the late 1970’s they flowered into a full-blown underground revolutionary organization under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines. The radical involvement of Christians from various churches and denominations has in turn spurred liberal and progressive social tendencies within the institutional churches. Today, the question of whether the church should be involved in social and liberational projects is a settled matter. The problem rather is in what forms and to what extent.

III

The truth and force of the gospel of Jesus Christ – the account of his public ministry and later interpretations especially by Paul – is never felt more fully than in the church’s engagement with the poor, marginalized and the victims of social injustice. Whenever the gospel is preached outside that context, it will suffer emasculation or distortion. A Christian theologian or preacher, who wittingly and intentionally glosses over, ignores or denies this context is engaged in falsifying the gospel and deception of the faithful. The church is truly there whenever the gospel is faithfully proclaimed. And it may claim the promise that where the church is, there is Christ.

The real presence of Christ in the church is the fundamental reality that determines every facet and the whole of the life and work of the church. It is the center of celebration of faith. It draws the blueprint of its internal common life. It is the compass that directs the church’s ventures into the wider world. The mission of the church is to live out the life of the crucified messiah amidst the concrete historical realities of the world. How should the church live among the rich elite of Philippine society? Among people on the underside, what forms of ministry are truthful and pertinent? And in the face of conflicting social agenda, politics and ideologies how should the church demonstrate loyalty to God, the God who suffered the fate of Jesus?

From the first century and on to the 21st, the church has had to make historical decisions in answer to the same kind of questions. The church has made many mistakes, has repented for some of them and remained unrepentant for many others. At no time has the church spoken with one voice and but has to live with self-contradictions and survive from self-inflicted wounds. But in all these, Christ’s living presence is there to the extent that the church or part of it has struggled to live out the gospel.

In the hinterlands and the slums of Negros where the poor suffer and from where they are waging a struggle to achieve change in their lives, they look up to the church for refuge, comfort and support. Their call comes upon the church with an urgency that leaves no time to reflect on what is the correct theological and ethical response. And when it does, it is not because it can be sufficiently demonstrated to be right but because it is the kind of response that they find most helpful. Usually, it is somewhere between what they ask for and what the church is able to do. In the end, it’s always never enough and not completely right.

This feeling connects us to Jesus’ own struggle to en-flesh divine solidarity with the world. Jesus’ own feelings of inadequacy and inability to bring full and total salvation to everyone must be an enormous burden that he was carrying to the very end. Hanging on the cross, perhaps he wondered what he had accomplished. It was too little for a job that was too big, too little time for a task so huge. There must have some moments when he faltered nevertheless he went on to Jerusalem to meet his fate. And along the way he healed the sick, cast out demons, comforted the hopeless and sought controversy with the authorities.

This thought is comforting to those in the church who are persuaded that loyalty to Jesus compels them to serve the cause of the poor. Jesus’ presence in the church does not endow us with the supernatural power to lead the struggle of the poor to victory. The church is not the savior of the people from poverty and oppression; Jesus didn’t aspire to be that kind of savior. If he had ambitions of that sort, he ended up disappointed. And we shall be in for that kind of disappointment, too. The mission of the church to the poor is to bear their sorrows, to nurture their passion for justice, to accompany them in their journey to freedom and to carry their hopes. It is also to be counted among those who are persecuted for their solidarity with the poor.