The Pope tells us to overcome indifference

Pope Francis in his “Message for Lent” tells us to overcome indifference (the lack of interest, lack of concern, lack of sympathy) by making our hearts firm.  What a timely message to the world and quite a significant one for our country and our leaders.

The first part of Pope Francis’ Message: Lent is a time of renewal for the whole Church, for each communities and every believer. Above all it is a “time of grace” (2 Cor 6:2). God does not ask of us anything that He himself has not first given us. “We love because He first has loved us” (1 Jn 4:19). He is not aloof from us. Each one of us has a place in His heart. He knows us by name, He cares for us and He seeks us out whenever we turn away from Him. He is interested in each of us; His love does not allow Him to be indifferent to what happens to us. Usually, when we are healthy and comfortable, we forget about others (something God the Father never does): we are unconcerned with their problems, their sufferings and the injustices they endure… Our heart grows cold. As long as I am relatively healthy and comfortable, I don’t think about those less well off. Today, this selfish attitude of indifference has taken on global proportions, to the extent that we can speak of a globalization of indifference. It is a problem which we, as Christians, need to confront.

When the people of God are converted to His love, they find answers to the questions that history continually raises. One of the most urgent challenges which I would like to address in this message is precisely the globalization of indifference.

Indifference to our neighbor and to God also represents a real temptation for us Christians. Each year during Lent we need to hear once more the voice of the prophets who cry out and trouble our conscience.

God is not indifferent to our world; He so loves it that He gave His Son for our salvation. In the Incarnation, in the earthly life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God, the gate between God and man, between heaven and earth, opens once for all. The Church is like the hand holding open this gate, thanks to her proclamation of God’s word, her celebration of the sacraments and her witness of the faith which works through love (cf. Gal 5:6). But the world tends to withdraw into itself and shut that door through which God comes into the world and the world comes to him. Hence the hand, which is the Church, must never be surprised if it is rejected, crushed and wounded….

All Catholics are in the process of becoming God-like.  We need to develop mercy and compassion in our hearts.  A short reminder I make for myself is to always: (1) Seek God in your pains and sorrows; (2) Seek God in the people you meet; (3) Seek God in everything you do. 

God please help us in our spiritual quest for reformation and use this period of Lent to change our hearts.

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The world mourns the death of Lee Kwan Yew.  His legacy is Singapore.  He raised Singapore from a third world to a first world country. His magic words were: Good government requires most of all leaders who put the public good unquestionably above their own personal interests.  He worked hard and  truly dedicated his life to his country.  What a beautiful story of a leader. 

When my late father went to Singapore in 1960 for the first time, he wrote: The idea of that half-barren, decrepit colonial backwater becoming a potent city-state was a laugh. It was full of smelly canals and cracked two or three-story shophouses, inhabited by former coolies and plantation workers, rickshaw men, weathered Chinese men and women, their crude coffins beside them, waiting in front of Death Houses to die, so their bodies, hopefully, could be shipped “home” to China for burial.

The only swanky place then was Robinson Department Store in Raffles, and place next to which was Change Alley, a small hole-in-the-wall, where you could convert your foreign currency or valuta into local Sing dollahs (that’s how they pronounced those bills). There wasn’t a decent restaurant in town, except one Cantonese joint called Hillman (yes, like the car) on Escarpment Road which was open-fronted and less sophisticated than Ma Mon Luk in Quiapo.

The Singapore River, crammed with rickety sampans, was so (ugh) disgustingly black, smelly and malodorous that, as we foreign correspondents jogged beside it, we coined a name for the city, “Stink-a-pooh.”

Years later, in one of his trips back to Singapore, my dad wrote, “Singapore was squeaky clean. Its wide and well ordered boulevards, including its central Orchard artery are bursting with trees, flowering shrubs, indeed choking in chlorophyll. The traffic, like its painfully legally-abiding denizens, was sedate and well-mannered. Prosperity was oozing out of every pore, determination and purpose projected by every step, the towering skyscrapers; all chrome, glass and granite; were monuments to progress. The toilets were shining with ceramic and virtue. Even “sin”, which exists even in Singapore, was kept discreetly out of sight (and Singaporeans had to zip off across the causeway to J.B. & Johor Baru in Malaysia; and to let off steam for their occasional displays of rudeness and sybaritic revelry).

Where the Death Houses once stood is Shenton Way, the high-polish financial and banking center, a virtual New York Wall Street-cum-Threadneedle street of inner London. Deluxe hotels try to elbow each other for predominance, an efficient subway system zooms you along your way, buses traverse the city with a syncopated hiss, cars; which when purchased cost a fortune and require a special “certificate” for even the right of purchase; have to buy special access to the downtown area (computerized for convenience) and gleam with modernity. The second- and third-generation “Singaporean” is light years away from his rickshaw-puller and street-sweeper ancestors. You feel safe, well-cossetted in today’s Singapore; and, after a while, quite bored. However, it’s a comfortable sort of boredom, a feeling of temporary relief, really, on the part of someone whose career is lived, constantly, on the edge. On the edge of danger, on the edge of adventure, on the edge of stupidity, and even madness, that is.

Would I live in Singapore? Perhaps not. Yet it’s paradise for many, a refuge, an oasis of calm and civility in an Asia teeming with hostilities and frustration.

Can we accomplish the same thing in the Philippines? Not the way our “democracy” is. G.K. Chesterton once called the Irish “the race whom God made mad: for all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.” We must be the Irishmen of Asia. Alas, thus far, we haven’t enjoyed the luck of the Irish. But who knows? Either we’ll get ourselves our homegrown Lee Kuan Yew someday, or else, wise up.