Quality, not quantity

In a Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) meeting held in Dagupan City, Archbishop Oscar Cruz said, "We would prefer a less number of priests who are good and performing righteously to having more priests in the service involved in some immoral acts." We could not agree more. Bad priests are counter-productive. They only serve to discredit the Church. If priests cannot live up to their vow of chastity, they have no business remaining in the priesthood. When a person has sex with someone he is not married to, it is a mortal sin. When a priest does the same it is a sacrilege for what he profanes is his dedication to God.

The CBCP should also look into the fact that there are priests and seminarians that take drugs. They should not wait for a scandal to blow. The truth is that drugs have pervaded all sectors of our society, including the priesthood.

The essence of priesthood as Arthur C. Benson stated "is that he should believe himself, however humbly and secretly, to be set in a certain sense between God and humanity." His greatest achievement is that he has attained as much faith as possible in our skeptic age.

Many people forget that it was three priests – Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora – that really started forming our nation. Priests at that time represented the intellectual elite. They were the most educated members of our community. And Gomez, Burgos and Zamora were the very first to demand reform from the Church because of the abuses of the Spanish friars. They were discriminating between the Spanish and the Filipino clergy.

It should not be difficult for the CBCP to weed out the undesirables from their midst. They can remove the unfit with a minimum amount of publicity, but they should not tolerate them in the church. "To the casual eye," James Cardinal Gibbeu said, "the priest looks like other men, but to the eye of the faith he is exalted above the angels, because he exercises powers not given even to angels." Let us keep it that way. If a reputation of chastity is necessary to a woman, how much more to a priest who is God’s instrument?

What the CBCP should do is to announce just what is the church policy on priests who cannot keep their vow of chastity. Do they keep them as priests? What about those who have actually fathered children? Who will take care of their child? What happens to the mothers of these illegitimate children? This is a problem that goes all the way back to when priesthood started. That is why Daniel Defoe concluded, "Whores and priests will never want excuses."

What we want emphasized is that the great majority of priests have kept their vow of chastity. Let not a few exceptions give them a bad image.