There are four things Pope Francis taught us during his five-day pastoral and state visit: Love your family, love the poor, care for the environment, and fight corruption.
Love of family was the overriding theme of two major speeches or homilies, at the Mall of Asia on Jan. 16, Friday, and at the Luneta (Rizal Park) on Jan. 18, Sunday. Poverty was the theme of his UST homily, Jan. 18.
The Philippines has at least 22 million families. Of that, a third have single parents. One in four is poor. One in ten has an absent parent, an OFW.
At the meeting with families at Mall of Asia, Pope Francis said “you can’t have a family without dreams.” He explained:
“Once a family loses the ability to dream, children do not grow, love does not grow, life shrivels up and dies. So I ask you each evening, when you make your examination of conscience, to also ask yourselves this question: Today did I dream about my children’s future? Today did I dream about the love of my husband, my wife? Did I dream about my parents and grandparents who have gone before me? Dreaming is very important. Especially dreaming in families. Do not lose this ability to dream!”
Another thing a family must do is rest. As we pause from our daily obligations and activities, the Pope explained, God speaks to us, not just in our prayers, but “in the quiet of our hearts”. Besides, rest is good for our physical health as well as “for our spiritual health”.
And a family must pray together, says Francis. This is quite impossible to comply with, especially in Metro Manila where the breadwinner spends three hours going to work and another three hours going home, thanks to the Philippines’ decrepit infra. When the father arrives, his family is already asleep. When he leaves for work, his family is still asleep. The Pope is painfully aware of that. “The economic situation has caused families to be separated by migration and the search for employment, and financial problems strain many households,” he said in his homily.
The Pope also warned families against “colonization by new ideologies” out to destroy the family. He gave examples of this colonization, like “growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage, by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life.”
In effect, Francis harked back to the Church’s age-old doctrine – marriage is a union of a man and a woman, not of two people of the same sex. No abortion. No contraception. Pope Francis first said it in Manila in Malacanang, when he met President Aquino and his cabinet and the diplomatic corps.
“We know how difficult it is for our democracies today to preserve and defend such basic human values as respect for the inviolable dignity of each human person, respect for the rights of conscience and religious freedom, and respect for the inalienable right to life, beginning with that of the unborn and extending to that of the elderly and infirm,” Francis said in his palace speech.
The Pope tackled poverty in his homily at the University of Santo Tomas, before some 50,000 youth. He denounced “useless compassion”. “It’s a compassion that makes us put our hands in our pockets, give something to three-four poor people, and then walk on.”
Compassion requires that we cry so that we feel the pain of the poor and understand them.
“Certain realities of life we only see through eyes cleansed by our tears,” Francis explained in one of the most eloquent passages of his UST homily. “Have I learned how to weep? Have I learned how to weep for the marginalized or for a street child who has a drug problem or for an abused child?,” the Pope asked of his listeners.
The preferential option for the poor is a very old Church teaching. It was enunciated by all Popes who came to Manila before Francis. The irony is that in the last 30 years that this was gaining resonance, the number of poor, instead of declining, even doubled. Today, we have more than 25 million who are poor, per government statistics, and 54 million who are poor, per private surveys.
Meanwhile, Pope Francis seems to link corruption and poverty. He tackled corruption in five of his six homilies in the Philippines. He thinks that for as long as millions are poor, there cannot be social justice and respect for human dignity.
There are two kinds of corruption – corruption by our political leaders, and corruption by Christians in general.
The 140-strong Catholic Bishops of the Philippines (CBCP) has declared 2015 as the “Year of the Poor”. This sounds to me like tokenism, an example of useless compassion. But with the Pope monitoring the theme, the Year of the Poor might just give meaning to compassion to the poor.
“I hope that this prophetic summons will challenge everyone, at all levels of society, to reject every form of corruption which diverts resources from the poor,” Francis said in his first official act, a speech at Malacanang on his first full day of visit. “May it also inspire concerted efforts to ensure the inclusion of every man and woman and child in the life of the community.”
Addressing the biggest thieves in government in the land, the Pope said:
“It is now, more than ever, necessary that political leaders be outstanding for honesty, integrity and commitment to the common good. In this way they will help preserve the rich human and natural resources with which God has blessed this country. Thus will they be able to marshal the moral resources needed to face the demands of the present, and to pass on to coming generations a society of authentic justice, solidarity and peace.”
Pope Francis’s stand on climate change seems to me an extension of his teaching on the poor. The earth is a beautiful garden for the human family. The Philippines is among the most susceptible countries in the world to climate change. When disasters come, it is the poor who suffer most.