What about ‘compassion’ for the cruelly murdered victims of heinous crimes?

A storm of criticism has erupted over the head of La Presidenta GMA for her astonishing "wholesale" commutation of death sentences (to life imprisonment) of ALL convicts in Death Row previously awaiting execution for their horrible crimes.

How could a President with one stroke of her pen save the lives of every criminal and terrorist convicted of heinous crimes – all 1,280 of them at one blow?

This President’s one-woman act makes a mockery of the new anti-Terrorism bill – now on the verge of passage – by taking out its sting. No "death" for mad-dog terrorists? Sanamagan – watch the bombs fly! Suicide-bombers excepted (thus far there have been none in the Philippines), would-be terrorists are now assured of escaping capital punishment – and, somehow, even getting out of jail.

Alas, the dead have their mouths stuffed with earth – mute forever and unable to protest this injustice. La Presidenta has been trying to defend her amazing decision to preempt any Congressional move – if any – to abolish the Death Penalty by doing so herself, without any by-your-leave of our legislature, just by utilizing her power to commute sentences under Section 19 of Article VII (Executive Department) of the Constitution. This article, as we mentioned yesterday, says "the President may grant reprieves, commutations, and pardons . . ." – but can she do so wholesale for every Death Row convict without her having thoroughly studied and reviewed each case?

The Catholic Bishops, as she expected, loudly applauded her move. But the rest of the nation may, in contrast, be shocked. La Gloria’s defense of her move was that it was made in a spirit of "compassion and reconciliation" – Susmariosep! What about some compassion for the murdered victims of terrorists, like the hapless bus commuters who were blown up or grievously injured by the bomb placed by Islamic terrorists on an EDSA bus on the evening of February 14, Valentine’s Day, more than a year ago? And what about the scores of poor commuters, including women and babies, whose lives were obliterated on December 30, 2000, by Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah terrorists who blew up a bus headed for Quezon City, and two coaches of the LRT? Or the victims on SuperFerry 14 which was sunk by an Abu Sayyaf bomber in Manila Bay? Don’t tell us that terrorists and murderers on Death Row facing execution for such crimes are now going to get their sentences commuted to "life imprisonment" – because GMA is moved by compassion for them and seeks "reconciliation" with those merciless mass-murderers.

The only Golden Rule of survival in this homicidal archipelago, where the crime rate is rising (despite government and police propaganda) is: "Do unto others before they do it unto you." Killers whose executions are commuted to "life" – the way our prisons leak like sieves – may escape (or be "released") to kill, kill again.

Capital punishment may be condemned as barbaric by both the Vatican and the European Union (I suspect several European states already secretly wish it could be reimposed) but it works in countries where the homicide rate is soaring. Has capital punishment "failed" in the Philippines as some pious critics claim? How could it fail? It’s never been tried.

It seems to work for China, a nation of 1.3 billion people, because the Chinese government relentlessly follows the one-bullet policy. As soon as anyone is convicted of heinous crime, he or she gets a bullet in the head. After that, the family of the executed individual must even reimburse the State for the cost of the bullet – otherwise they don’t get the body for burial or cremation. Cruel? It’s obviously effective.

There’s only one answer to merciless crime – and it’s the government’s merciless mailed fist. Here, the government whimpers and wants to "reconcile" with the killers, rapists, kidnappers and drug-pushers.

Their victims, mostly in the grave, are forgotten. I guess they can’t vote – even for the "people’s initiative".

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EMBARRASSING ERRATA: The name of the retired Supreme Court Justice who is foursquare against the "people’s initiative" as being pushed by the GMA government was wrongly misspelled in this column yesterday as retired Justice Isagani "Ong." Lapsus mentis – I plead guilty. He is actually Justice Isagani Cruz who stated his position quite clearly in his column in The Philippine Daily Inquirer.

Justice Cruz is an acknowledged authority on Constitutional Law and taught the subject for several years in the San Beda College of Law. He is the author of a much-consulted textbook on Constitutional Law. This volume, along with another on the same subject by Fr. Joaquin Bernas, S.J., are the "bibles" of law students and Bar reviewers on public law.

Former UP Law Dean Raul Pangalangan, who also objects to the government’s "people’s initiative" is, by the way, my godson in baptism. It dates this writer to admit that once upon a time I carried him as a baby – by golly – for his Baptism. Okay – this admission is more embarrassing than any erratum.

Another stupid mistake of mine yesterday was to write that there are half a million Protestants who were inspired by the teachings of Germany’s Martin Luther. This was misspelling, and I hasten, in shame, to rectify it. There are half a billion Protestants – meaning 500 million people who profess the Lutheran and other Protestant faiths.

The saga of this rebel began in July 1505, when a 22-year old student was hurled to the ground when a lighting bolt struck nearby. This was Martin Luther, the son of a miner from Eisleben, in Saxony (Germany), who vowed in that moment of terror: "Help me, St. Anne, and I will become a monk!"

The skies cleared, the storm vanished, and Luther fulfilled his promise by entering the Augustinian monastery of Erfurt.

From the beginning, Luther was tortured by self-doubt and a feeling of sinfulness. "I hated this God," he wrote, "who asked me to do the impossible!"

Luther finally discovered the message of God’s forgiveness in the epistles of St. Paul. He became a professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg, and found special interest in the "revolutionary" Greek and Latin translations of the New Testament written in 1516 by Erasmus of Rotterdam.

In the summer of 1517, Luther was affronted by the fact that a Dominican Friar named Johann Tetzel was touring the neighborhood offering to sell the people "an indulgence" for a few gulden, the currency of the time. These indulgences being peddled apparently had the approval of Rome, as a means of fund-raising for the Vatican – you could purchase, Luther charged, a dispensation from the Church remitting punishment for your sins, or "buying" a deceased member of your family (father, mother, brother or sister) "release" from Purgatory and a ticket to Heaven.

"Don’t you hear the weeping and wailing of your dead parents?" Fr. Tetzel bellowed to the listening faithful. "They cry out in torment, and you, my hearers, could free them with a small alms!"

Luther was indignant. He "learned" that half of Tetzel’s collections went to pay off the Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz’s debt to a gambling house, the Fuggers of Augsburg. The other half, he subsequently charged, went to Rome to help underwrite the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica, a project launched by the new Pope, Leo X.

On All Saints’ Eve, October 31, 1517, Luther nailed his now-famous opus, "Ninety-five Theses Upon Indulgences", on he door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. The theses declared, among other complaints, that the Pope had no jurisdiction over Purgatory, nor was there "any treasure of the merits of the saints" from which the Pope could transfer surplus credits to souls in need of salvation.

Hans Hillerbrand, in his article The Reforming Spirit ("Great Religions of the World," 1971) put it well: "Luther had reached into a hornet’s nest."

The angry Vatican "investigated" this upstart monk’s orthodoxy. A war of pamphlets ensued. The embattled Luther became a hero to priests eager for church reform, humanist scholars, German nationalists, merchants and peasants. His eloquence was so damaging that soon nine-tenths of the people in Germany were crying out for Luther versus the corrupt Roman bishops and clergy, "Death to the Roman Court!" was their cry.

In June 1520, an outraged Pope Leo X issued a Papal Bull Exsurge Domine – "Arise, O Lord . . . a wild boar has invaded thy vineyard."

The Pope declared 41 propositions in Luther’s writings "heretical" or "offensive to pious ears." Told to recant, Luther instead, supported by students, went outside Wittenberg’s gates and cast the Papal Bull, together with a volume on canon law, into a bonfire. In January 1521, Luther was excommunicated. He, thereby, faced a "bonfire" of his own – the threat of being burned at the stake by the Inquisition for "heresy." (One reason given for his excommunication was that he had defended some of the teachings of John Hus, the Bohemian reformer, who had been burned at the stake a century earlier).

After Luther refused to recant at the Diet of Worms, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, declared the monk a political outlaw.

Luther was still tormented by his own self-doubts: How could he claim he was right and all the faithful of 1,500 years in error? He devoted himself to translating the New Testament into German; which turned out to be a masterpiece of popular style. Like Erasmus, Hillebrand pointed out, Luther "wanted the plowman to be able to recite scripture in the field, the weaver at his loom." Luther’s advantage was that John Gutenburg took his New Testament and printed copies of it by the hundreds, making the New Testament available to Germans for the first time, in language they could understand.

Alas for the Roman Catholic Church, the "Reformation" became not just one movement by the rebellious Luther, but many movements.

There’s a marvelous motion picture recently released starring the famous actor, Joseph Fiennes as Luther and including in its star-studded cast Peter Ustinov, which is now available in DVD, "orig" not pirated.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a Catholic, coming from a Catholic family – born and raised, and, while steeped in error, a believer. But you’ll have to concede, as the great Pope John XXIII quietly did, that Martin Luther was right in quite a number of his passionate objections.

The movie brings this out quite convincingly, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it obtains no Nihil Obstat from our Catholic Bishops. La Gloria must not watch this movie in peril of her immortal soul. (It costs only P350 at the DVD kiosk – but enough said already. I, too, may face ex-communication, being half a heretic already. What would my dear Mama in Heaven say?)

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THE ROVING EYE . . . There really is a conspiracy to oust Foreign Affairs Secretary Bert Romulo. I trust La Presidenta will stand by Bert, one of her most admired and trusted (by all) Cabinet members. Would you believe, the rumor-mongers allege that the plot is being backed by Speaker Joe de Venecia – who allegedly wants to install Ambassador Lauro Baja, our present envoy to the United Nations, as Secretary of Foreign Affairs. Why on earth – why? You figure that out for yourself. We await, of course, JDV’s denial. But you already, having read this snippet, have your own theories. (Is one of them the Phillip conundrum?)