Church gives rice to win flocks

Man at the Market

Jesse E.L. Bacon II

04/11/2008

hen the leadership of the country’ s Roman Catholic Church opted to cast its lot with the Arroyo administration, understandably because of the millions of pecuniary benefits granted them by the two state-owned gambling firms, they wittingly made the church incongruent with the cries of her flock.

Undeniably, the bulk of the suffering populace belongs to the Roman Catholic faith. These are the people who survey after survey admitted having skipped meals but not for the same reason as the rich. They simply can’ t afford to eat three square meals a day. Abject poverty is the culprit why a good number of our countrymen can’t afford three decent meals a day anymore.

Because of grueling poverty, these people have started to lose hope that this administration will ever address this problem. They no longer look up to the government as their source of hope that someday soon, they will be rescued from their state of hopelessness.

The government as represented by the Arroyo administration is viewed by them as having a different agenda that has nothing to do with poverty alleviation as preached time and again by Mrs. Arroyo herself.

This administration failed them in so many ways than one. It has failed to give decent jobs even to those young professionals whose parents did their best despite their poverty to send to school to get a college degree. And how can this administration ensure employment for its citizens when it is not generating job opportunities locally? It simply relies on the job orders for our professionals, skilled and non-skilled countrymen placed by foreign employers, private or public.

Job opportunities can only be generated if the country engages in a no-nonsense manufacturing effort. But we are not into this thing, so how can we provide jobs for our employable countrymen? This is the problem which is the direct result of this administration’ s devotion to globalization and trade liberalization.

This is one economic design that ensures a continuous stream of workers for foreign employers but doesn’t give everyone a fair chance of landing a job either here or abroad.

Even food security for its own citizens is not given any priority at all by this administration. Those long queues we see on television and newspapers of people scrambling to buy a kilo per day of government price-subsidized rice convincingly proves this point. Truth is, food security is farthest from the mind of this administration but Mrs. Arroyo had the gall to tell the Senate to invest on food instead of investigate, as if food security is the Senate’s responsibility.

All these lead the people to totally lose hope in this adminis-tration. And when the Roman Catholic Church leadership sided with the Arroyo administration despite all its faults, its shortcomings, the scandals and corruption hounding it, it pushed its flock to regard the church as no different than this administration for its lack of concern for their plight.

The church leadership just made the whole institution irrelevant to the cries and longings of the people for their mundane concerns.

And as a means by which the church can regain back the trust and confidence of her flock, its leadership entered into that agreement with the administration it is politically propping up to be part in that shameful extravaganza of distributing cheap rice to the poor in their parishes. This is the logic of this move by the church that many missed in appreciating.

Just imagine how much more the church becomes irrelevant to the flock if it does not involve itseld in this distribution of rice thing to the poor. In reality, this move is simply consuelo de bobo on the part of the church to somehow redeem itself from the folly of its leadership in supporting this administration in exchange for a few silver coins.

E-mail to: jelbacon@yahoo.com (for reactions)

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