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Friday, March 29, 2024

More quakes

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I was on the phone at home that night with a business associate in Jakarta when the floor suddenly began to move from side to side. I remember thinking that sideways tremors are considered more dangerous than up and down. It only lasted a few seconds, but it put a quick end to our hope-filled conversation.

I later learned that the quake was centered somewhere in Pampanga. Relatively mild at 5.4 on the Richter, it nonetheless added to the growing public foreboding that the law of averages is bound to catch up with us sooner or later when “the big one” crashes in. I certainly don’t remember growing up with that many quakes happening.

My friends in the Fatima movement assure me that this is only to be expected, as the centennial of the Fatima apparitions begins with the first monthly appearance of Our Lady to the three Portuguese children on May 13, 1917.

The world is nowhere near—and if anything is even farther from—the reconsecration of our public and private lives to her and to her Son that she humbly appealed for. Perhaps it’s not the quakes themselves that should worry us, but whether or not we’re heeding the message they may be conveying, for the sake of our lives in the hereafter.

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Down in Marawi City, a different quake is currently raging, as the black-flagged representatives of the latest mutation in the violent jihadist strain of Islam sow their patented brand of mayhem left and right.

Over 60 of them have already been dispatched to their paradise—we should bill their families for doing them the favor—but nearly as many civilians and soldiers have also been killed, some of them women, others through the slow beheading method preferred by these professed soldiers of the Prophet (PBUH).

In response, the President put the entire island of Mindanao under martial law. The usual armchair critics objected that it should have been limited only to Marawi, where the present violence is confined. This of course is tantamount to claiming that the caliphate ISIS wants to set up in our country will be confined only to Marawi. In your dreams, gentlemen.

Yesterday Duterte went even farther and said he would rescind martial law only upon the say-so of the troops on the ground, regardless of whatever oversight powers may be enjoyed by Congress and the Supreme Court.

Note the careful language of this provincial lawyer, who in fact has already brought the senators very much into the loop through his initial formal report to them, a majority caucus Sunday night, and a plenary hearing AND security briefing scheduled for yesterday.

Duterte is properly reserving for his office and the military the responsibility of waging war. It’s his Constitutional duty as commander in chief. And it’s evidently a decision that the majority of citizens are prepared to support—especially those in Mindanao, who’ve already been flooding social media with their positive sentiments.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that no abuses will take place. Or that we’re entitled to expect a quick and painless victory. Or that we’re guaranteed that the terrorists’ logistics and support networks don’t extend outside Marawi, or Mindanao—not with this group whose black flags are now being raised over much of Asia and Europe as well as the Middle East.

The war will be as long and as painful as it needs to be. And whatever that means in practice, is something to be worked out between ourselves as civilians and the military who’re prosecuting that war on our behalf.

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Among the notables who’ve expressed support for the President—albeit temporizingly and grudgingly so—are the presidents of the five Ateneo campuses.

In a joint statement, the five Jesuit academics said they “trust the President…that martial law shall only be limited and temporary,” even as they reminded him to “act judiciously” in its implementation.

In the middle of all the otherwise bland language, however, the following statement jumped out at me: “The Supreme Being worshipped both by Christians and Muslims alike is a God of Compassion and Peace.”

I think that’s ecumenism gone overboard. For the plain truth is this, whether you’re reciting the Apostle’s Creed or the Nicene Creed as professed by all Christians: The Christian God is a Trinitarian God, in whom the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit are consubstantially one.

Allegiance to this creed would rule out the Adventists, for example, who to my knowledge don’t recognize the existence of a Holy Spirit. It also rules out all the latter-day followers of Arius who don’t recognize the divinity of Jesus, and that includes—notwithstanding the name they adopted—the Iglesia ni Cristo.

This is not to say that the Muslim God is not also a God of compassion and peace. Neither is it to say that we cannot collaborate and even spiritually commune with every other religion that professes the same compassion and peace.

But in doing so, let’s not discard the boundaries that were originally defined, not by us, but by the One we profess to follow and by the others who followed Him in apostolic succession. And priests who head Catholic schools ought to be the first ones defending those boundaries, not tearing them down.

Readers can write me at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.

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