Satan and his money

Several quotes coming from known Church leaders, including the late cardinal Jaime Sin, have been making the rounds, all of them saying, in effect, that it is all right for the Church to accept dirty money, even from Satan, for as long as the money is spent for the poor.

 That is no different from saying the end justifies the means, and I am aghast that the Church can accept such a proposition. Have we forgotten that when Satan tried to tempt Jesus with the material riches of the world, the Lord exclaimed: “Be gone, Satan!”

 Consider for instance a hitman who makes a living out of killing people. Or a drug pusher whose livelihood compromises futures and ruins lives. Is the church then saying it is all right to take money from these criminals provided the money is passed on to benefit the poor?

 This Church policy of not caring to ask where the money comes from for as long as it is certain where the money is going is a policy that indirectly condones wrongdoing and puts too much emphasis on the money and loses sight of the morality.

 Putting too much emphasis on the money at the expense of morality defeats the very purpose of giving that money away. It is not the job of the Church to feed the hungry. That is the job of the government. Its job is to nurture morality and feed spirituality.

 What I understand should be the purpose of the Church in giving away money to the poor so they can eat is to make sure they are healthy enough to be receptive to the spiritual feast that is the one and only purpose of Church ministry.

 Hungry people have weak spirits and are unreceptive to God. It is for this reason it becomes necessary for the Church to help minister to people’s well-being. But apparently, from recent Church pronouncements, the Church itself has become confused about its role in society.

 Again, it is not the duty of the Church to alleviate hunger beyond the singular purpose of keeping body and soul together, not for the sake of health, but to preserve human dignity. For the Church to insist on doing the job of government makes its motive suspect.

 And this is precisely the underlying cause for the recent fiasco involving bishops who either solicited or accepted car donations from the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office, the main lottery agency of the government.

 The bishops became obsessed with money, in amounts big enough to buy expensive SUVs, ostensibly in order for them to carry out charitable work for the poor, forgetting that charity is precisely what the PCSO was created for.

 In other words, for the sake of the money, and the expensive SUVs they can buy with it, the bishops unwittingly became PCSO middlemen, a useless arrangement considering that charity work is already the PCSO mandate, not of the bishops.

 Even without the bishops entering the picture as unnecessary middlemen, the PCSO is still duty-bound to execute its mandate of helping the poor, through the various arms of government. The bishops are of course free to help, but why ask for SUVs to do a job the PCSO can do itself?

 Or if the bishops truly felt it in keeping with God’s goodness that they help in charity work, they can still do so without having SUVs to do the job. Less expensive vehicles can serve the same purpose just as efficiently.

Besides, I do not really think bishops would allow their shiny new SUVs to be used to ferry anything on the muddy roads to remote barangays. All they have to do is ask, and I am sure a lot of people will volunteer vehicles more appropriate for servicing the hinterlands.