A bishop filing impeachment charge!

Susmariosip! was my reaction when I read about the third impeachment charge filed by Bishop Deogracias Yñiguez against PGMA. What is happening to our Catholic Church? What is happening to our priests? I asked myself.

To exculpate himself from raised eyebrows the Bishop justified his action by saying that there was no politics involved because "it's in the context of coming up with the truth, and the truth is apolitical".

Any half-wit can easily see the loophole of the Bishop's reasoning. Clearly he got confused with two types of truth: Truth of idea and truth of fact. The sun rises in the east is true whether you are a bishop or a bum. It's a general truth like fire burns, man dies, water is H2O. But when the reality of whether or not something happened is considered, the thought process shifts to another level of truth. And this can be political or non-political depending on the environment relative to such truth. Did PGMA cheat in the 2004 elections? Whatever is the truth or non-truth of this, the outcome is inevitably political.

Most likely the Bishop wanted to avoid the stigma of getting his hands soiled in the mud-pie of politics. But whatever his justification he has already dirtied his hands. This is aggravated by the fact that the opposition filed last year and has filed this year its impeachment complaints against PGMA. The perception therefore is that Bishop Yñiguez has danced with the music of Estrada and his cohorts in and outside Congress. And since his complaint was endorsed by Akbayan, one of the political arms of CPP-NPA, it also appears that he has aligned himself with the cause of a godless ideology.

Furthermore, the good Bishop claimed that what he did he did as a member of the citizens' Movement for Nationalist Economy, which by its very name is undeniably another legal front of the Philippine Communist Party similar to Anak-pawis, Bayan, Kilusang Mayo Uno, and what have you.

We are not implying that the Bishop has become some kind of a communist. That would be witch-hunting. But perhaps, he has read a lot of Liberation Theology literature which condones arm struggle in behalf of the poor but which was severely criticized by Pope John Paul II with these words: "The Gospels clearly show that. Jesus. does not accept the position of those who mixed the things of God with merely political attitudes. He unequivocally rejects recourse to violence".

Even assuming that his membership with the Movement is based on a firm conviction that he was serving the cause of his country, and that he was acting not as a priest of Jesus Christ but as a plain citizen, still the image of a maverick man of the cloth persists. A priest is a priest is a priest. Whatever he does or says cannot be detached from his priestly vocation. He simply cannot play Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll because unlike other vocations priesthood seeps into the whole man - body, mind, and soul.

If the frame of mind of Bishop Yniguez on his claim that he filed the impeachment charge as a citizen-member of the Movement, was he implying that a priest who does a grossly immoral thing - such as what happened to Fr. Jose Belciña - can be excused because when he committed the act he was not acting as a priest but as a sexually-aggressive lay man?

We are not suggesting that a man of God should play like the three wise monkeys insofar as secular affairs are concerned. A classic statement on this is from St. Thomas Aquinas: "A modicum of material comfort is necessary for the practice of virtue". Since the Church is concerned with the whole man it cannot afford to be blind to the socio-economic problems affecting its faithfuls. It has to be in the forefront of efforts to reform a social order to make it conform to the laws enshrined in the Ten Commandments. And if such a social order becomes of the type that the practice of Christian virtues is no longer possible the Church has the duty to do something about it.

Has Philippine society become so rotten on the moral and temporal plane that a bishop has to actively wage war against its governance?

We don't think so.

* * *

Email: [email protected]