Strange but true. False.

To all baby boomers out there, here is one more time to relive the best years of our lives. Gary Lewis and the Playboys will be performing tonight at 8:30 at the Cebu International Convention Center. See, hear, and be part of some of the best 60s music there ever was.

And to the sons and daughters of the baby boomers, here is your chance to experience live the music you probably grew up with. See for yourselves why the music of the era of your fathers and mothers defined future music genres and yet remained so enduring by itself.

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Commenting on the eight libel cases he is facing, over which he is being asked to pay a total of P800,000 in bail, Lingayen-Dagupan archbishop Oscar Cruz said: “Strange but true.” Even in such a predicament, trust the dour prelate to see only the tip of his nose.

Okay, it is to be submitted that the situation he is in is true. There is no denying it. After all, the cases are there. They have indeed been filed against him in court. But strange? Come on. Who is this misguided mortal in priestly robes kidding?

But of course he has no one else to kid but himself. For despite his age, and all the experiences he must have absorbed over the years, Cruz still actually believes he lives on a one-way street.

Cruz believes he has a license to criticize and attack anybody, that it is his God-given right to tear the reputations of people to shreds, that he can squeeze the dignity of people as he pleases, that he can question anyone and anything with impunity.

But Cruz apparently does not believe the same license and the same God-given right can also be invoked by other people. He is aghast that other people can also question him and the things that he does. That is why Cruz believes the libel cases he is facing is “strange.”

Strange? Well, maybe it is indeed strange because he is a priest. A priest, in the common understanding of most people, especially those in the predominantly Catholic Philippines, are normally seen as the personification of Christ.

Throughout the whole of Christendom, Jesus Christ is seen, in his human embodiment, as somebody who was good, kind, loving, courteous and soft-spoken. There is never any account in all of Christian history in which Jesus launched an attack on anyone out of malice or spite.

The general perception that priests are the personification of Christ was reinforced not too long ago by prosecutors who threw out a sex abuse case filed by more than a dozen young high school students against a priest.

The students claimed that the priest, while hearing their confession, played with the straps of their brassieres, strokes their arms and backs, and asked them if they already have boyfriends and whether they already had sexual experiences with them.

But, to the befuddlement of everybody in Cebu, where the ghastly incident happened, the prosecutors who handled the case threw out the complaint filed against the priest, saying a priest, being the personification of Christ, could not have done such things.

If it was not a criminal act to lynch the prosecutors, they would have cut a very fine example of what mob rule can do under certain volatile instance. But since Cebuanos are decent people, they simply let the insult to their intelligence pass.

But Cruz is far from being the personification of Christ, despite his rise up the heirarchy of the priesthood where he is now an archbishop. There is just nothing Christ-like about him.

Listening to him launch into one of his constant verbal attacks is like listening to the barking of an angry dog. There is just so much darkness in his heart. There is so much hate in his words.

Cruz has become an incongruity in the practice of Christianity, a religion founded on the principle of salvation through forgiveness of sins. Cruz does not see sinners waiting to be saved through forgiveness. He sees enemies who deserve to be condemned and punished.

But the targets of his attacks are not rocks that he can just kick aside in the dusty road he is pursuing away from the gates of heaven. They are people who hurt, who feel the pain, people who, thus hurt and thus pained, can also fight back. And Cruz thinks this is strange?