For Aristotle, friendship did not just refer to the “bonding” of two people, the union of kindred spirits. It had to do with the life of society and was allied to what we consider today to be concepts distant from it—law and justice. It is friendship of the Aristotelian genre that the Catholic Church has for government. On the level of persons it is the relation to which bishops invite leaders of government and of society.
Now, that might be the last thing in the minds of those who have listened to the verbal tussle, acrimonious at times, between some bishops and President Digong. “I believe in God, but in no one else.” That is the present profession of faith of the President of the Philippines. Quite clearly, he means that he will not bow to the Church. That is quite all right. In fact, Pope Francis has repeatedly warned church officials against expecting, much less demanding, courtesies, obeisance and obsequiousness. That will not mean, of course that the Church will assume the inertness of a bag of flour, ready to be kicked around at anybody’s whim. Of course, the only problem with President Digong’s profession of faith in One God and his equally fervent profession of non-faith in anything else is the elementary proposition that God is not to be worshipped as may suit our fancy, but as he demands that he be worshipped. That theological point can be taken up at another time.
The maturity of the Church should be manifest in its offer of friendship even when there is hardly eagerness on the part of the other for it. And friends tell each other the truth. There lies the crucial difference between a friend and a sycophant. And it should not be too difficult to understand why Aristotle saw in friendship the foundation of society organized by law, one that aspires through its institutions to be just. And the Church’s offer of friendship consists fundamentally of offering to tell the government the truth—from the experience of parish priests assigned to the farthest reaches of the archipelago, and the eternal truths expressed in its stories and narratives of its Scriptures. The Bible is outdated for one who does not know how to read it. Fortunately, though, much of humanity has had the wisdom to see beyond the myths and legends, its cultural boundaries and the datedness of its forms into the “truths that God wanted to reveal for the sake of our salvation.”
Is the Church willing to listen to the ugly truths by which its detractors hope to shame and silence it? Without a doubt. John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis have apologized for the abuses of clerics and for their sins especially against children. Is the government willing to listen to the Church? If that ignoramus’ chant about the “separation of church and state” is again intoned, it should more than do to insist that a government that does not listen invites less placid, more agitated and certainly more perilous eruptions of discontent.
On Sunday, Archbishop Soc Villegas preached a homily at his Cathedral at Dagupan City. The choir I direct, the Coro de San Jacinto, sang for the 10 o’clock morning Mass, and we listened—listened well—to what he had to say. Jesus commissioned his disciples as servants of the community, and their service consisted of preaching the Kingdom that in many ways relativized the kingdoms of earth and in healing the infirmities of body and soul. But disciple and community alike must be ready for the cross, because it was no walk in the park for which Jesus came into the world. The Church in the Philippines offers a friendship that treads the way of the cross. And to be silenced and cowed by slur and insult is to refuse the cross that it must carry. And the candor of friendship insofar as the Church is concerned will be the ceaseless call to conversion—her own conversion and the conversion of those to whom she is sent as friends. Each day that the ministers of the Church say the Official Prayer of the Church and offer the Eucharist, they strike their breast in the ancient words of contrition…Miserere mei Deus, secundum magnam miscericordiam tuam…Confiteor Dei Omnipotenti…Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. But this consciousness of frailty, the experience of the weight of sin that she bears will not diminish her friendship for government to which, in candor, she will always preach the need for conversion.
rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph
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