A medieval format

KUALA LUMPUR – It is fitting to discuss the Pope’s recent statements here in Malaysia, a country which is arguably a showpiece for how a country has effectively adapted Islam to modernity. Conversely, it has also made modernity adapt to Islam. It is not taking every modernity hook, line and sinker.

However the effort is a work in progress and not immune from glitches, but the overall picture is a positive one. Malaysia is a stable and prosperous country but it is not above criticism especially from the West and occasionally from its own citizens. It presents a picture of a well-managed country to a visiting outsider.

Of the many sites shown to me during a quick tour of the city, it was Ismael, the taxicab driver who gave me a memorable political lesson. He pointed to the Istana Negara, the official residence of the DYMMSPB Yang Di-Pertuan Agong (the King) on a hill at Jalan Istana. That, he says, is ‘kings’ (kings in plural) palace with pride. At first I was puzzled, with Thailand’s solitary king in my mind. I forgot that Malaysia is a federation of several states, each with a king of its own. The kings take turns living in the Palace with its lush green gardens in the heart of the city. "They take turns living in the Palace, so no one feels aggrieved," said the perceptive Ismael. And that is the equivalent of many lessons in federalism as distribution of power.

The country might be ruled by parliamentary government patterned after its British colonizers, but it adopted a federal system even if the UK is not. Once again here is an example of a country taking lessons from others without being a slave to the model presented by its former colonizers. The Malaysian lesson can very well apply to us, with its distribution of power to different centers as an effective check and balance.

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The Philippines continues to be held down by persisting historical forces – one of them the Roman Catholic Church’s influence in political affairs. We must open up to more information other than what religious authorities dish out to us. By relying on religious authority Filipinos do not develop their own judgment. Moreover this attitude spills into other areas of life, most disastrously in governance and politics. I suspect this is a throwback to colonial times when religious authority was supreme.

Recently the bishops of England and Wales condemned the BBC which they said misrepresented Vatican documents when it said that "Benedict XVI used to cover-up the sexual abuse of minors." The prelates said the program "Sex Crimes and the Vatican," broadcast by Panorama, the BBC’s investigative news show, is unwarranted and misleading. The program claims to have uncovered secret Vatican documents that imposed silence regarding all claims of child abuse, and accused then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – now Benedict XVI – of shielding priests from investigation in his previous role as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The trouble is we never get to see the BBC show or read an unbiased report in our local papers to enable us to make a balanced judgment. We do know of a bishop caught red-handed with his self confessed ‘inappropriate display of affection’ towards his hapless secretary but nothing ever came of the papal investigation. The bishop has retaken his exalted position in the CBCP issuing statements on morality and surprise, surprise even what should be the political direction of this country.

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The Church’s insistence on its colonial status is bad enough but the real damage without a more open system of information is to the Filipino psyche, which is disabled from thinking on its own when church authorities decide what is good for the country. How many Filipinos, for example would come to know of just what the Pope said against Muslims? The offending portion of the Pope’s speech is "about this potentate who supposedly once engaged in debate – the precise time and place is unknown – with an unnamed Persian. The Byzantine asks the Persian to "show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." He then adds "to convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death."

Christopher Hitchens who writes a column for Vanity Fair says the Pope should not have used the quotation. "He dishonestly tries to make it seem as if religion and the Enlightenment and science are ultimately compatible, when the whole effort of free inquiry always had to be asserted, at great risk, against the fantastic illusion of "revealed" truth and its all-too-earthly human potentates. It is often said – and was said by Ratzinger when he was an underling of the last Roman prelate – that Islam is not capable of a Reformation," writes Hitchens.

We would not even have this word in our language if the Roman Catholic Church had been able to have its own way. "You do not have to be a Muslim to think that for the bishop of Rome to cite violence of Islam is the most perfect hypocrisy. There would have been no established Byzantine or Roman Christianity if the faith had not been spread and maintained and enforced by every kind of violence and cruelty and coercion. To take Islam’s own favorite self-pitying example: It was the Catholic crusaders who sacked and burned Christian Byzantium on their way to Palestine – and that was only after they had methodically set about the Jews, so the Muslim world was actually only the third victim of this barbarity," continues Hitchens.

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Joaquin Bernas, a Jesuit who has taken up the cause of One Voice, the main group against Charter change led by (guess who?) Meralco (of the Lopez oligarchic empire) boy Chris Monsod. It does not bother him that being a priest and chief defender of the 1987 Constitution at the same time he cannot avoid using the power of the Church as a former colonizing medium to bear on Filipinos. Indeed, that is the principal challenge to Filipinos today, how to cope with the Church fighting Charter change. In his column "A constitutional nightmare", Bernas is unhappy of a very real possibility for "a divided opinion for revisiting the 1997 Santiago vs Comelec decision. But he carries his priestly authority too far when he calls the People’s Initiative, a mode of changing the 1987 Constitution, as "a scandalous travesty." He should revisit Philippine church history to know that he has overstepped the bounds of church-state relations.

My e-mail is [email protected]