It is important that we cast our eyes further afield than what is being presented to us by the Bacani Scandal. It may be about the allegedly unacceptable behavior of a bishop but the bigger community would be losers, if they were to limit themselves to being curious about what really happened between Bacani and his secretary. After all, even the sexual proclivities of a bishop can be defended. There are enough materials and support for a more compassionate Church to review its celibacy rules. Therefore Bishop Bacani’s case is contributing to progressive thinking within the Church.
Msgr. Nico Bautista has bravely taken up a position for "optional celibacy" which contradicts present Church teaching. Bautista has also criticised the Vatican’s decision on Bacani as "bitin". Moreover he asks why the investigation is taking so long. But Msgr. Nico’s importance to us is not because of his position on celibacy. That is church intramurals. Far more important is what will happen to Msgr. Nico if he "disobeys". When that happens, there will be political implications not just for the Philippines but across the world. Ironically, according to Bautista, the same Msgr Antonio Unson who accompanied the late Mayor Nemesio Yabut to warn him about his attacks on the Marcos regime is also the same Msgr. Antonio Unson who met with him at the Mandarin recently to deliver Cardinal Sin’s warning. He has also revealed for the first time that the military kept him under surveillance during Marcos’ dictatorship. According to Msgr. Nico, former President Ramos told him that he (Ramos) also sent someone to keep watch but this was to protect Nico because with a surveillance order on him, he could have been ‘eliminated.’
Some priests of the Roman Church have done good things but its political incursions have not been entirely good for the nation. It may be time to question. As reader ONSCO@aol.com put it "progress will only come if the people from the top - down will let it happen. Whatever you dress it or call it federal parliament or the current system, the politicians mindset is for power and enrichment for themselves.. These things will not disappear with any system. He opines that it’s well overdue for us to cut that imbilical cord with the catholic church. What has happened to the separation of power between the state and the church?.
For Filipinos as citizens, the issue is not about Bacani. It is argued that the issue is the Church itself , what it teaches and what it does that profoundly affect the Philippines. It is time to pause and reflect on what the Roman Catholic religion is all about, how it came to the Philippines and why it continues its sway on millions of Filipinos. If Rizal were alive today he would see that nothing much has changed since his execution in Bagumbayan. In many ways the Catholic Church has continued the work of Spanish friars who stunted the political and intellectual development of Filipinos. For our reflection we should refer to the literature and history of the Roman Catholic Church both here and abroad as our tools for analysis. This column could not do better than to quote from a letter from Butuan City.
Jim Jensen <jimnan11@yahoo.com> wrote: "I hope that your readers will find the following interesting and informative. I write this not as a negative expose of the Church but to show the positive potential of other Christian concepts that the Church not only fails to employ, but even tries to cover up. I hope your readers understand that and something positive can begin to grow in their religious beliefs. This is a reply to a letter from Rebecca Sanares <rebeccasanares@peoplepc.com> which stated that Gnostic Christianity was derived from pantheism, magic and astrology. While these things were certainly prevalent in the Middle East before, during and after Jesus time, they had no place in Gnostic literature. This is not to say that such surreptitious writings did not exist; only that none of them were Gnostic.
I might also point out that parts of the Bible that we take to be literal and "inspired by God", like the creation story in Genesis, were never intended to be taken literally by the Jews we got them from. Furthermore, Genesis is not unique to the Jews. Evidence today shows that the Jews got their creation story from the Babylonians who probably got it from the Sumerians. Somewhere during all of this, a little Zoroastrianism was thrown in just for flavor. Similar occurrences apply to things like the great flood, the Tower of Babel and other such "stories". The original stories, we now include in our Bible and regard as literal, do contain liberal amounts of pantheism and magic.
You have to remember that the early Church was originally a Jewish sect and not Christian at all. You also have to take note that the early Christian Church was not, much to the embarrassment of Catholic theologians, run from the Vatican by Peter, but from Jerusalem by James the Greater, said to be the brother of Jesus. Many versions or interpretations of what Jesus taught were in existence for the first 300+years of Christianity and the people who had these diverse beliefs lived in peaceful coexistence with what we have now come to recognize as "Orthodox"Christianity. The most prevalent of these were the Egyptian or Coptic Church, the Jewish Church, solitary ascetics and mystics, mostly in the desert near Alexandria, and the Gnostic Christians.
In 367 CE, Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, wrote the 39th Festal Letter which in essence damned all Christian concepts not "orthodox" and called all those who adhered to them heretic. Among others, Athanasius’ letter was sent to Theodore, the head of the monastic community at Tabinnisi. This monastic community was ascetic in the strongest possible sense and was purposely in so remote a place as the Egyptian desert so that all contact with the known world was severed. It was believed that all contact with anything sensual, including food, sex, material ownership and family ties, would prevent one from finding true liberation in the Lord and would put them in control of Satan. Theodore’s authority was not confined to the monastery proper but to the surrounding area as well and included the solitary mystics that lived alone in thesurrounding desert area. These solitary mystics, having no set dogma to follow, worshiped as the Holy Spirit led them and recorded their concepts and feelings in accordance with how they were led.
Further, ancient writings, some of which are known today asGnostic literature, did exist here and there among these ascetics and mystics. Thus, Athanasius sent the 39th Festal Letter to Theodore as a means of instruction that any writings not accepted by the Orthodox Church were to be confiscated and destroyed in their entirety because they didn’t fit in with what the Orthodox Church had authorized or with the Creed that the Orthodox Church had stated was the "true" Christian belief. The thing that is grossly overlooked today is that these "authorized" books that make up the Christian Bible and the Creed that is supposed to delineate "true Christian belief" came not so much out of what Jesus taught but out of world and church politics and a struggle for personal power within the Church. In other words, Christianity was politicized and Romanized, much as it still is today.
Thus, even in so remote a place as the Egyptian desert, solitary ascetics became subjected to the world and all the corruption that existed in it and were prohibited from living and worshipping in true love for and dedication to their Lord. So an attempt was made to eradicate all the documents held by these Christian ascetics and, in some cases,perhaps the ascetics as well. Yet some mystic or ascetic, unknown to us today, risked himself to preserve at least some of the writings of the early Church and these have come to be known as the Nag Hammadi scrolls or the Gnostic Gospels
The Gospel of Thomas, were clearly rejected by the early Church bishops because they rightly challenge the whole foundation of the Roman Church and its authority. For example, in verse 77 of Thomas’ Gospel, "Jesus said, ‘I am the light that is over all things. I am all, from me all came forth, and to me all attained. Split a piece of wood: I am there. Lift up the stone; you will find me there.’" This may have been an instance where your previous writer may have thought she found pantheism. But it is not pantheism at all. It is a statement,directly from Jesus, that he (his spirit) is within even the wood and the stones. If so in the wood and the stones, then all the more in us. We who find total reality in the gross material world are, in fact, finding only an illusion. We are not children of the gross material world, but children of Spirit.The same Spirit that is within Jesus is within us as well if only we can see it. We put our trust in the gross material world and it decays and rots and we with it. We put out trust in the Spirit and we find our true selves and we find that we will never die because we have always been and were never born.
E-mail:
cpedrosa@edsamail.com.ph
(Ms. Pedrosa apologizes for the mistake of having e-mailed inadvertently an uncorrected version or rough draft of her column yesterday.)