Jaime Cardinal Sin: A modern-day Moses!

His Eminence Jaime Cardinal Sin passed away early yesterday morning at the age of 76 after a long illness. He succumbed to renal failure at the Cardinal Santos Medical Center. Cardinal Sin was the second Filipino to be named a cardinal after Rufino Cardinal Santos. The third and only remaining Filipino cardinal is our beloved Eminence Ricardo Cardinal Vidal.

Filipinos will always remember Cardinal Sin’s legacy as one of the main players who brought about the peaceful People Power Revolt against the Marcos Dictatorship in February 1986, which has been exported worldwide as the EDSA Revolt and copied by numerous countries that were under the yoke of military oppression. Yes, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed when its people came out against their communist rulers... and all this started in Poland, the birthplace of Pope John Paul II. This gives us all a lesson that God often uses his own shepherds to effect political change when things looked hopeless, like in Poland and the Philippines.

After the First EDSA Revolt, little did the Filipino people realize that so soon, Cardinal Sin would also be in the forefront of leading the Filipino people to rally against the corrupt Erap administration, which ended with EDSA Dos, where then Vice President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo took over the reins of the government. It was mistakenly thought that another EDSA would have removed the besieged President Arroyo the other week, but somehow, there was something missing in the opposition’s ingredients to come up with another EDSA in the light of the current problems GMA is facing.

We in Cebu have our own archbishop in the person of his Eminence Ricardo Cardinal Vidal and therefore, we were in no way under the jurisdiction of Cardinal Sin. However, his influence spread throughout the Philippine archipelago and the Filipino people gained courage from him that we could actually remove an unwanted dictator by showing our displeasure in huge numbers. Call it a miracle if you wish and it did happen!

Of course, belatedly we realized or understood that a million people on EDSA actually constituted a small minority to effect a regime change. But in the absence of a working democracy, you can say that Cardinal Sin came at the right place and at the right time in the crossroads of our nation’s history.

There is no question that there are also a lot of people who are probably happy with the passing of the prelate... like those belonging to the Marcos Dictatorship or to the camp of deposed former President Joseph "Erap" Estrada. For them, Cardinal Sin was an interloper, a stumbling block to their dreams of holding on to political power.

There will also be people who would insist that Cardinal Sin had overstepped his boundaries as a man of the cloth... that he should have only stayed on to shepherd his Catholic flock. Well, it has been a long-standing belief that our Church leaders should tend and feed the sheep not just in preparation for the afterlife, but also to assure them a better life on this earth.

Indeed, the prayer for the Holy Spirit ends with "and we shall renew the face of the earth," and that’s exactly what happened when Cardinal Sin urged the throng of disgruntled Filipinos to troop to EDSA to rid us of that cancer called the Marcos Dictatorship, and with his urging, we did renew the face of this nation from a 14-year regime.

Clearly, the prayer for the Holy Spirit is not to renew the face of heaven; after all, there’s nothing to renew there. We do need though to renew the face of the Philippines, especially in these pressing times. With the passing of Cardinal Sin, I can’t help but think that he was a modern-day Moses to us Filipinos. Like Moses, he led the Filipino people from the bondage of the repressive Marcos dictatorship. EDSA, to the Filipinos, was like the Red Sea to the Israelites in the time of Moses.

Our biblical parallels do not end there. After Moses delivered the Israelites from the bondage of the Pharaoh, they still continued to displease God when they worshipped the Golden Calf when Moses went to the mountains. Hence, God punished the Israelites and they roamed in the desert for 40 years although God gave them manna to eat when they were hungry. We, too, have failed on our promises to come up with a better nation through a better system of governance. In the end, we were lured by the false political promises of "walang kamag-anak, walang dayaan" of our current political leaders and so we’re still stuck in our own political turmoil.

Like the Israelites, we thought that after the EDSA Revolt, the Philippines would no longer have any political problems. Alas, we didn’t play our part of the bargain by cleansing ourselves and in the end, old political habits remained. We had jueteng problems then (and still have them today) and so we had another EDSA Revolt, which was also supported by Cardinal Sin.

Today, while the remains of Cardinal Sin lie in state at the Manila Cathedral, the nation continues to suffer from the latest crisis brought forth by the wiretapping issue. The big question in the minds of the Filipino people is where will all this lead to. For sure, we have remained in our political desert because we failed to renew the face of this country! The Cory regime came up with the 1987 Cory Constitution which only returned the hated oligarchy and eventually, the Marcos cronies got themselves back into political power... and in the end, we are worse off than we were before!

Finally, just like what we read in the Bible that while God used Moses to free the Israelites from bondage so he could deliver them to the land that He promised them, it was because of Moses’ lack of faith (it was when God asked him to strike the rock to extract water, but he relented) that he was allowed only to see the promised land from Mt. Nebo and God didn’t allow him to enter it.

In an uncanny similarity, Cardinal Sin passed away without seeing a Philippines run like heaven by Filipinos. But perhaps, he might have seen the coming of the constitutional convention (con-con), which would give us the only hope that someday, all the ugly things about the Philippines would come to pass. May we request the pious readers to pray for the repose of the soul of Cardinal Sin... Requiescat in Pace!

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.thefreeman.com. He also hosts a weekly talk show, "Straight from the Sky," shown every Monday, at 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.