It is superstition, not religion

The Asahi Shimbun correspondent, Shibata Naoji, dropped by the shop last week to have his observations checked by this self-appointed oracle of Padre Faura. He was stationed in Manila more than a decade ago so his Tagalog is flawless and his English, too. He saw the frenzied preparations for the visit of Pope Francis as well as the millions of devotees of the Black Nazarene convening in Quiapo and the Luneta. He was amazed, he said, at the continued religiosity of the Filipinos which translates into the mass of jostling, sweating people, many of them women and even children.

Way back in the ‘50s when I was with the old Manila Times, I covered the annual procession, asked the devotees questions, and listened to the same replies echoed today by them. We were only 25 million then; the devotees begged the Black Nazarene to give them jobs, deliver them from their ailments and poverty, and bless them with children and a happy family.

I told, the Japanese journalist that worship of the Black Nazarene and those huge Iglesia Ni Cristo and El Shaddai rallies confirm only too well what Karl Marx intoned: that religion is, indeed, the opium of the masses.  I agree with Marx and I have long concluded that this massive display of piety is not religiosity but superstition, that all those so-called devotees want something precious for themselves — a miracle if need be. And sometimes, a “miracle” does happen, affirming the validity of their devotion. On the whole, however, most of them will be disappointed for their lives will not change, the manna from heaven will not come. If we were truly religious, our country would not be such a sorry mess because we would then be an upright and moral people.

In saying this, I must state I am no atheist; maybe, at the very most, agnostic.

First, who is the artist who proclaims himself an atheist, yet denies the transcendent majesty of creation, the mystery of life, of reason? He cannot be impervious to questions of cause and effect that are drilled into him. The creative spark in himself — he can attribute it to the trite dictum that he was made in the image of the Creator.

With Pope Francis visiting the Philippines this week, we should contemplate once more what religion truly is, more so because Pope Francis represents the single most powerful church in the world — but for us, a rigid and conservative institution, now finally stirring and responding to the need for change — for revolution even — in a world doomed by commercialism.

History tells us that so many wars were caused by religious intolerance, that a just society need not be based on religious faith yet such a faith is innate with human beings, even in so-called savage and primitive societies. Charlie Hebdo — the French satirical magazine named after the American comic strip character, Charlie Brown — has satirized all religions as “toilet” material - --and published cartoons poking ridicule at Islam, among other religions — and the other week, gunmen killed 12 of its staff and two policemen.

This most dastardly deed strikes at the most fundamental of human rights. That is clear enough. But more than this, it challenges our traditional concepts of faith, and the meaning of religion and God. The churches in Europe and the United States — why are they empty? Why are our churches bursting with people? The Americans called it a war after The World Trade Center was destroyed by daring suicide attack.

 As war, it is unprecedented barbarity when schoolchildren are massacred, a war also illustrating how much belief translates itself into the total acceptance of sacrifice. The examples are many. The immolation of monks in Vietnam, Burma, Tibet; and earlier in the past, those kamikaze pilots ramming their planes into America battleships; and much farther in the forgotten mists of history, those Jews committing mass suicide on the Masada rock before the Roman legions could reach them.

And what about that dreaded Catholic aberration — the Inquisition? It lasted not decades but centuries, and at its worst in Spain, and supported by the Crown, it imprisoned, tortured and burned at the stake thousands because their blood was “impure,” their ideas heretical.

This new form of warfare is not waged by colossal armies, by nations armed with brilliant new technologies. It is waged by individuals, by small groups who truly believe in their cause.

Some 20 years ago, the American savant Sam Huntington postulated that with the defeat of communism, the next global conflict would be the war of civilizations — meaning the west and Islam.

 So many now believe that his prophecy is correct. It is not so; the Islamists have merely found in their faith the will and the strength to fight the west, which they regard as their oppressor. As I told US Ambassador John Negroponte that night that I was at his residence for dinner — he literally wept when he announced the tragedy of 9/11 — “I do not think this is an attack against the American people. It is an attack on American foreign policy particularly as it impinges on the Middle East and Israel.”

I am only too aware of the complexity of Jihad as it applies to Africa and the Middle East. Islam, as the scholars put it, is a moral religion. At the core of this war is resentment against the west as oppressor. Any people or nation that suffers the heavy hand of oppression, sooner or later, commits violence and seeks revolution.

Yet we must not ignore the fact that Muslims are killing one another — the Shiites against the Sunnis. Again, it is not religion that divides; it is the feeling of oppression by a Muslim majority against a Muslim minority. It is when the causes of such profound resentment are fully understood that the possibility of resolution will also be found. For as long as the core is misunderstood, prejudices deter solutions. 

Even our own Moro rebellion is not religion-based and therefore, there is no military solution to it, just like there is no easy solution to a war that is not carried out by mass armies, but by single individuals who are convinced that they will go to heaven if they die.

All this is not an argument against religion, against men having faith in the Almighty. On the contrary, particularly in these times when commercialism as an extension of capitalism has gone haywire, the world needs ethical leaders; ethics implies religious renewal or adherence to moral imperatives; not that it be Christian always — what good does it do us to proclaim ourselves as the only Christian nation in Asia? Japan is not Christian but Japanese society is ethical and — more than this — it is rich, democratic, with much fewer natural resources than us. We can never argue against their success.

Those millions of worshippers at the Luneta, the Iglesia Ni Cristo and El Shaddai masses united in prayer — can you imagine what impact they could make on the powerful if they marched instead down the gilded streets of Makati or surrounded the enclaves of government like Malacañang and Congress? Or even just City Hall, which cannot keep the city clean and secure?

But they will not do this because they are not primed, or bright enough to do it, or because they are lulled by quasi-religious leaders who want power only for themselves.

This is the reality of Filipino religiosity, the emptiness of so-called “folk Catholicism” which strengthens the oppressive grip of the irresponsible elite on the masses.

I hope that when the Pope visits, this truth will touch him. He has already brought fresh air to the Vatican, and shamed those peacock bishops and exposed their hypocrisies.

What is this Pope like, really? What makes him so meaningful today, particularly to the poor? The disenfranchised? To us?

A bit of historical background again. The Hispanization of the South American continent in the 15th century resulted also in the spread of Catholicism. There, in opposition to the American hegemon as well as a natural impulse of a colonized people, a strong socialist influence pervaded the politics of the continent resulting in the rise of socialist governments, Allende’s Chile, Chavez’s Venezuela, Evo Morales’s Bolivia. The rise of such leaders was influenced by the emergence of Fidel Castro in Cuba — in this atmosphere, a social movement developed among the Catholics, priests and members of the laity what is now known as Liberation Theology. In turn, this movement inspired guerrilla activity all over the continent. Among these guerrillas was the Catholic priest Camilo Torres, who tried to merge his religious faith with revolutionary communism. He joined the guerrilla organization, the FLN, and was killed in an encounter with the Colombian military.

As bishop of Buenos Aires, Pope Francis opposed Liberation Theology because it espoused violence. But he supported the very poor; now as Pope and with the name he chose to adopt, he lives the Christian dogma as Christ himself defined it with His life. In essence, he has gone beyond the Theology of Liberation.

Those barefoot devotees to the Black Nazarene, those singing, jumping followers of El Shaddai and those millions of Iglesia Ni Cristo believers and all the other religious sects with mass followings — I empathize with them, even pity them. They want the good life, but the miracles will not come until they get to understand that they first have to help themselves, that they must recognize the origins of their poverty — they will then also realize that they themselves are to blame for electing to power crooks merely because they are popular, that they were lulled into apathy and superstition by the eloquent preachers who mesmerized them.

I hope that the Pope who has already shaken Rome will also shake our pompous bishops who have forgotten what Jesus was, the crooked leaders and the expensive Catholic schools that produced them, and the charlatans who have become fabulously rich with just saliva as capital.

And lastly, I hope he will also anoint the preachers, teachers and lay people who truly sacrifice and labor so that we sinners will be redeemed. There are so few of them.