Something on separation of Church and State

A senator recently warned Catholic Church leaders against violating the constitutional provision on separation of church and state. Issued at a time when the CBCP was preparing a statement on the bishops' post impeachment stance, the senator must have been afraid that the group would come up with an anti-Gloria pronouncement. What CBCP came out with, however, was supportive of PGMA's government coupled with a veiled rebuff to those who were agitating for mass actions.

Separation of church and state is often invoked by people who feel threatened by the Catholic Church's initiatives in areas that are apparently secular in nature. The thinking is that when it comes to non-religious affairs, the Church should distance itself from them. Like the three wise monkeys, she is supposed to see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil.

This thinking however is oceans away from the Church's idea of separation of church and state. The Church looks upon itself as the Mother and Teacher of all nations, to use a term from the encyclical Mater Et Magistra. She is the "pillar and ground of truth" whose task is to give life to her children and to teach them completeness of self in a higher order of living. Christianity as a way of life traces its founder in Jesus Christ who is God made man. In Him therefore is heaven and earth, spirit and matter, the same attributes possessed by the people for whose salvation he was sewn in the wood.

The Church never forgets as she shepherds her faithful that she is dealing with the whole man, body and soul, intellect and will. She is of course primarily concerned with the spiritual man, but in him body and spirit are one holistic reality, hence her concern includes everything that affects the entire individual spiritually and physically. To quote from Mater Et Magistra: "… the Church's first care must be for souls, how she can sanctify them and make them share in the gifts of heaven; she concerns herself too with the exigencies of man's daily life, with his livelihood and education, and his general temporal welfare and prosperity".

General temporal welfare - does this concept not embrace all activities in the domain of politics and government, economics and socio-civic affairs? Any happenings therefore that impinge upon the lives of the people inevitably get the attention of the Church, and if these are crucial to the life and welfare of the citizenry, she will not hesitate to take an active role in remedial movements that may be undertaken. This happened in the 1986 people power and later in 2001, both of which focused on changes of governance.

To be sure, the Philippine Church received quite a number of flaks from foreign observers on its no-holds-barred participation in both events. But the local hierarchy exculpated itself because its role in them was non-violent in nature. Prayers and flowers were the weapons of the faithfuls when they confronted the might of the dictator's military while in the second people power only speeches and music and a sea of smiling faces brought down a maligned government. Significantly, the Philippine Church's protest strategy in these events was similar to that of the Church of Poland under the pious leadership of then Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, (later Pope John Paul II) who used art and cultural reawakening in confronting the communist government in that country.

The Church of course understands that its primary responsibility is the sanctification of souls to enable them to share in the gifts of heaven. For this reason ordained religious men and women almost always confine their work on activities that directly relate to human spirituality. Using the Gospel, they go out into the world like the original apostles to teach people about God and how they should relate to Him. On this, Pope John Paul II said in his Apostolic Letter of 2000: "To nourish ourselves with the word in order to be 'servants of the word' in the work of evangelization: this is surely a priority for the Church at the dawn of the new millennium".

Yet even as the men of the cloth talk about God, they cannot help but also talk about rice and fish and how to have these on the table. God loves the poor, it is true, but poverty is an indictment against human dignity. The workers of the vineyard simply cannot be deaf and blind to the shame and squalor in the slums. To be so would be the height of spiritual callousness.

Separation of church and state we should have. But not the myopic kind desired by politicians.