Catholic bishops are like the Cosa Nostra!

WASHINGTON DC – From the looks of it, there should be money to be made in providing public relations consultancy services to local units of the Catholic Church in America and probably even back home. Maybe I should get together with my fellow Green-meadows parishioner Nandy Pacheco to possibly tap this boom market. Nandy, better known for his tireless effort to eliminate public display of guns, was formerly information officer of the ADB and is now active in parish activities.

If Bishop Bacani hogged our front pages the other week, here in America, Catholic bishops also attracted negative attention. Last week, Frank Keating, a former Governor of Oklahoma described as a devout Catholic, accused the American bishops of acting like the Cosa Nostra. He resigned as chairman of the Roman Catholic Church’s US sexual abuse review board, and refused to apologize for comparing the bishops to the Mafia. He insisted that this description is "deadly accurate."

Those bishops, he said, were following the Mafia example in trying to conceal information and hide cases of wrongdoing by priests. He accused some bishops of less than full cooperation with his panel’s investigation. "To resist grand jury subpoenas, to suppress the names of offending clerics, to deny, to obfuscate, to explain away – that is the model of a criminal organization, not my church." The Church, he added, must not "condone and cover up criminal activity" or "follow a code of silence."

Keating’s panel was tasked by the America’s Catholic Bishops to look into the sex scandals involving the clergy that has plagued the American Catholic community. His resignation under this cloud of doubt and anger is expected to make matters worse for the Catholic Church here.

As if that problem isn’t bad enough, police arrested the Bishop of Phoenix for fleeing the scene of a fatal road accident. The 67-year old Bishop was taken to a jail in downtown Phoenix.

Police said the Bishop wasn’t being charged with causing the crash because the victim had been jaywalking. "If the bishop had remained at the scene, in all likelihood he would not have been charged with any crime," a police officer said. The bishop’s resignation was accepted by the Pope.

These are indeed, hard times for my Church! The picture of the Phoenix Bishop behind bars flashed in newspaper front pages and Internet websites hardly gives the faithful reason to feel spiritually secure these days.

Of course we, the faithful are also part of this Church and should be part of the solution. But Church leadership must reform quickly before anything can happen. There is only so much the laity can do. The flock cannot lead the shepherds. Problem is, many of us have become too cynical to want to do anything.

This is a situation we, Filipinos know only too well. I mean, it is like our country too. We feel no responsibility for the community or the nation and its salvation. We have no concept of common good. So long as we are not doing too badly, who cares… Or maybe, we are just overwhelmed and don’t know where to begin.

Supreme Court justice

It is distressing to hear reports that the Judicial and Bar Council included the name of a former congressman among those who will be presented to Ate Glo as a potential Supreme Court justice. Why should a politician be appointed to the High Court, specially now that the high court is being accused of playing politics in an impeachment complaint against a majority of the justices?

Ate Glo’s past appointments were already heavily tainted by politics. This time, she should redeem herself and help improve the Court’s image and quality of output by appointing someone with a reputation as a legal scholar. We need someone who is in love with the sheer majesty of the law and disinterested with power or fortune. There is no shortage of respected law professors at the UP College of Law, for instance, who will do the high court a lot of good and not just in terms of its image.

The other good thing about these legal academics is that they have proven their ability to live within the means afforded by their paltry university salary. This is an important consideration in these days when corruption in our judiciary has diminished the respect citizens have for this vital branch of government. I noticed one or two of these UP professor types were in the original list of JBC nominees. I don’t know if they were dropped in favor of the ex-congressman.

Cheap flights

There was an item in the newspapers here about Singapore Airlines offering a roundtrip fare of just $299 between San Francisco and Hong Kong. Cathay Pacific has its Asia Pass, slightly more expensive but allows travel to 17 destinations in Asia over three weeks.

It is amazing how the airlines are cutting fares if only to get people to travel to Asia again after the disaster of the SARS epidemic. Still, I have not talked to anyone in my more than a week of traveling here who are excited to take advantage of the more than generous offers.

But amazingly, our very own Philippine Airlines is doing very well. When the rest of my family returned to Manila last Sunday, there were three PAL flights leaving Los Angeles one after the other. The lines for the check-in counters were backed up way beyond normal. The international terminal was teeming with homebound Pinoys and their relatives to the point that the few bewildered Americans there are the ones who looked foreign. LAX became NAIA.

Actually, PAL recently announced the operation of an additional direct flight between Manila and Los Angeles from June 6 to 27, bringing total frequencies on the premier trans-Pacific route to 10 weekly. They also added flights between Manila and Vancouver.

PAL now operates 23 non-stop flights weekly between Manila and four Pacific and West Coast points – 10 to Los Angeles, eight to San Francisco, two to Honolulu and three to Guam.

I hope that more than makes up for the loss of traffic between Manila and Hong Kong and between Manila and Singapore due to the SARS problem. The epidemic eliminated the Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean and other airlines who have been poaching from PAL all these years.

Deserter

This one’s from one of our readers, Perla Manapol.

A deserter GI was running down a road escaping from two MPs. He came to a fork in the road and saw a nun standing there. He asked her, "Please Sister, may I hide under your skirts for a few minutes. I’ll explain why later."

The nun agreed to his request.

Shortly thereafter, the two MPs came running along and asked her if she had seen a soldier running down the road. She replied, "He went that way."

After the MPs disappeared, the soldier crawled out from under her skirt and said. "I can’t thank you enough Sister, but you see I don’t want to go to Iraq."

The nun said she understood.

The GI said, "I hope you don’t think me rude or impertinent, but you have the most beautiful pair of legs I’ve ever seen!"

The nun replied, "If you had looked a little higher, you would have seen the most beautiful pair of balls too! I don’t want to go to Iraq either!"

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]