"Aquino was just telling the truth"

If the truth is you're ugly, would you appreciate it if, in public, I say out loud you're ugly, it's the truth anyway?

In wanting or needing to tell the truth, one must strike a balance. And this balance is so basic it's known through many names: respect, good manners and right conduct, breeding, etcetera.

Those who were brought up well simply know when to shut it.

Apparently, when you're an offspring of two so-called "icons of democracy," you tend to abuse your freedom of speech more than anything else. It doesn't matter that you represent not only your pathetic self but an entire nation. To hell with propriety and decency. Everything else be damned.

Besides, that's assuming what he said was true. The petty president was obviously referring to the "Pajero" bishops who purportedly received SUVs from the previous dispensation. The problem with this allegation is that it's not entirely accurate. According to reliable sources, they were not even Mitsubishi Pajeros. And the vehicles donated were four-wheel drive because these were meant to service mountain communities as ambulances, etc. Is this not well within the PCSO's mandate? (Perhaps the church's double standard, campaigning against the state lottery while soliciting for donations like this to support their charity, is a more solid issue worth threshing - but still not in front of the Pope.) The accusations then were so tinged with malice because the intention of the vile opposition at the time was to project Gloria Arroyo as a leader so evil as to have gone to the extent of bribing the Catholic Church.

The president brings up colonization, the Marcos years, his balding hair and the priest that joked about it, but not the victims of Yolanda. Not even to thank the Supreme Pontiff for his decision to go out of his way to be with the victims of Yolanda who continue to struggle to get back on their feet more than a year since the super typhoon ravaged Eastern Visayas.

The Filipinos were generally well-behaved throughout the visit (kudos to most everyone!), showcasing our very best to welcome our most esteemed guest (perhaps the most special living person we can ever welcome to our predominantly Catholic country), but our president chose it as another occasion to misbehave, missing the grand opportunity to be a statesman like the Protestant FVR who welcomed John Paul II so graciously twenty years ago. This family is celebrated as illustrious (producing two presidents), old rich, Noynoy and his siblings supposedly to the manor born. Yet their behavior is as "pedestrian" as it gets. Asal-kalye.

Even his invocation of the Church's militancy during Martial Law, one he claimed in his speech was absent during the Arroyo years, reeks of hypocrisy and inconsistency. He loves it when the Church interferes with politics only if the bishops and priests criticize his and his family's opponents like Marcos (and hoped they would have been more vocal against Arroyo, but weren't) but cry foul when the same is done to him. In this instance he summons the 'separation of church and state.'

The supporters of Aquino say he was just speaking the truth, "tama naman, maraming abuses ang Church." The thing is, Francis has rebuked the hierarchy of the Church many times, and he is doing his share in trying to police his own ranks, to clean up the Church for over a billion Catholics the world over. But the same cannot be said of Noynoy who is highly selective in his anti-corruption (more like political persecution) drive, coddling his corrupt friends in the cabinet, and personally defending them as their attorney in fact!

He should mind his own chain of command, and leave Francis to his. To brazenly point out to your guest of honor where his organization is lacking, while your own failures in the same department are glaring, exposes to the world how in the subject of dignity and honor you are found wanting!

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I will leave you with this, a dear friend's comment on my Facebook post from whence the above column was expanded:

My wish remains. For this Yellow Ribbon to sit in a table with us. Then we bombard him with truths. The truth about Luisita and Luneta. The truth about GMA, Corona, Abad, Dinky, Abaya, Petilla, Roxas, Napoles. The truth about his cronies, his family's business deals, his Porsche.

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