Shrine for the poor

Call it congruence, synchronicity or what, but this week brought a couple of church-related news that are good news.

Rising fast in Tandang Sora in Quezon City is a shrine, Santuario de San Vicente de Paul, dedicated to the cause of the poor of the city. It is named after the 17th-century French saint who dedicated his life to the very poor.

The Santuario’s raison d’etre sounds best in Pilipino: ``Ang tunay na esensiya ng Santuario de San Vicente de Paul ay hindi tumutukoy sa malamig na semento at matayog na pader. Ang Santuario ay ang mga taong bumubuo nito. Ang mahihirap ang tanging buhay ng Santuario, at ang mayayamang nais magbahagi ng kanilang biyaya sa mahihirap ang magiging katuwang nito na magsisilbing kamay at paa para sa patuloy na paglago. Ang Santuario… ay yayakap sa lahat ng uri ng tao, mayaman man o mahirap. Misyon ng simbahang ito ang bigyan ng sapat na atensiyon at pagkalinga ang mahihirap at kulang palad.’’

For those who don’t understand Pilipino: ``The essence of Santuario de San Vicente de Paul lies not in the cold concrete and the high walls. The Santuario is the people who form it. The life of the Santuario draws mainly from the poor, and the rich who want to share their blessings with the poor are the partners who would serve as hands and feet so that it will flourish. The Santuario will embrace all, both the rich and the poor. This church’s mission is to give attention and care to the poor and the less fortunate.’’

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VP Noli writes re `riles’

Very welcome is the letter to this column from Vice President Noli de Castro in response to our concern about the poor families living along the railroad tracks. Tens of thousands of these families will have to go when construction of the modern railway system (the North Rail) starts in a couple of months. The railway project is part of the Strong Republic Transit System, a flagship project of the Arroyo administration.

VP de Castro’s letter is welcome because it would be a gauge for those in the ``Bantay Riles’’ (non-government and people’s organizations) in monitoring how the government handles the human side of this project that will change the landscape and they way people live and travel.

Sure, we all need new ways of doing things and the long awaited modern transit system is welcome but we also need to preserve the dignity of human beings, the poor most especially, who live dangerously along the tracks.

As to the big illegal structures built along the way by the non-poor who wanted to free-load, bulldoze them tomorrow.

Note that VP de Castro does not use the word squatters. He uses the word settlers.
``Thank you very much for your concern over the plight of `riles’ settlers who will be affected by the railway rehabilitation project, which you wrote about in your Sept. 9 column, `Bantay Riles.’

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1,347 unfound

They went missing and have not been found until today. They are the 1,347 victims of ``enforced disappearance’’ from 1971 to 2003. They are the so-called desaparecidos (disappeared) who walked into the darkness and were never seen again.

Sept. 21 is upon us again. It will rake up painful memories and open wide the wounds that never quite heal. It is a time to pause to see where we have healed and where still we bleed. Justice still eludes the countless who had suffered while those who caused the suffering walk with their heads high.

Thirty two years ago on Sept. 21, 1972, when Pres. Marcos declared martial law, many people feared for their lives and their loved ones. But that day, they could not have imagined the greater horror, the sorrow, the darkness that would later visit countless lives.

Although some families already had a foretaste of what was to come the year before (the first case of disappearance happened in 1971) they had no inkling of what still lay ahead. The Reign of Terror would later cut a wide bloody swath across the land and for 14 years the dictatorship would hold the nation in its tight grip.

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Bantay riles

So what is everybody waiting for, the President wanted to know.

There’s no stopping the North Rail project, we are told, and I couldn’t help thinking of ``The Runaway Train’’, the 1988 bone-rattling movie that left viewers breathless and all shook up.

Ten hours after she returned from her state visit to China, Pres. Macapagal-Arroyo expressed impatience over the slowness of the North Rail project that would span the Manila-Clark (Pampanga) distance. Actual work on the ground has yet to start. China had already released the $400 million for the first phase that would connect Manila to Malolos, Bulacan.

Ms. Arroyo’s trip to China had a lot to do with this project. The Chinese Eximbank has also approved the second phase. During her pulong bayan held at the Cubao LRT station, the President, reports said, was impatience personified. She even called for North Rail president Jose Cortez Jr. who was having coffee in another LRT platform. Start now, she ordered. There were no reports about Cortez spilling his coffee and getting scalded.

The Strong Republic Transit System is one of the President’s flagship infrastructure projects meant to boost economic growth and employment. Who does not want to have a modernized railway system that would get people and products faster to their destinations and minus the hassle of road travel? Who does not want a clean, well lighted train speeding with a humming sound, minus garbage bags piling on its roof?

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Asian idols, Asian stars

Star-struck, star-studded, star search, star quality, star factor, star complex, star potential, star in a million, stardom. It’s all about stars. The young are bombarded with star images, dazzled by star dust, enticed with the possibility of becoming instant stars themselves.

TV shows like ``American Idol’’ surely spawned a lot of ``idol’’ contests all over the world. The local electronic media networks are trying to outdo one another in flaunting their latest finds, showing the mesmerized world how good they are in their business of entertaining you and me.

But what’s a star?

If we go by the pop searches and contests on TV here and abroad in the recent past, the stars are those who have captivated their audience and, of course, the ``star’’ judges, with their vocal talent, originality in projecting themselves, persistence, never-say-die attitude, physical stamina and beauty, the quality of their delivery. One could go on and on.

It’s a battle of nerves too and those who endure and survive to the finals, even if they don’t make it to the top three, are stars too. You have to give it to them.

It all looks so open too. The audience is sometimes even privy to the physical make-overs. People listen in to the judging, the cutting remarks, the grudging compliments of the judges. They are witness to how these star wannabes go through the wringer. Why, the TV viewers even participate in the star-making through the use of their thumbs, by texting, that is.

Then, suddenly, a new star, a new idol, is born. The star-making machine continues to churn out more. Some of these finds stay long in the limelight, others fade away too soon. Not a few become victims of their own celebrity status.

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Ben of the lumads

His search for meaning, his taking to the less-traveled road, and his encountering the light at last, among mostly forgotten people—these could only be straight out of a continuing divine plot that has yet to fully unravel. The experience thrills him, fills him with awe and thanksgiving.

Benjamin ``Ben’’ Abadiano, 41, is this year’s recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership. In electing Ben, the RM Award Foundation ``recognizes his steadfast commitment to indigenous Filipinos and their hopes for peace and better lives consonant with their distinctive tradition and hallowed ways of life.’’

I met Ben last year when I interviewed him for a front page feature. I had learned about him from Sr. Victricia Pascasio of the Holy Spirit Sisters whose work among the Alangan Mangyans Ben had helped expand.

Twice I had been among the Mangyans before Ben went there to stay, and I had seen what it was like. Now, I am told, things have changed for the better I wouldn’t recognize the place if I wandered into it.

Born in 1963, Ben was raised by his grandparents. The circumstances of his birth are stuff for primetime TV dramas but that is another story. Ben finished sociology in Cagayan de Oro’s Xavier University where a Tingguian anthropologist, Dr. Erlinda Burton, opened his eyes to the world of the lumads or indigenous peoples (IP).

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Woman, religion and spirituality

Every woman who cares about the future of the women of this world and other planets should read this book. So should every caring man. And the befuddled, benighted ones—may they stumble upon this book in the most unlikely climes, at the most unlikely times, may someone care enough to shove it into their path or gift them with it, beautifully wrapped and scented, so that they may look upon it with curiosity and awe, and having read it, be filled with enormous regret that could turn into tremendous resolve to change things for the better.

The good news is that ``Woman, Religion and Spirituality in Asia’’ (Anvil) by Sr. Mary John Mananzan OSB was launched last Sunday at the National Book Fair. Mananzan, president of St. Scholastica’s College for six years, was recently elected Prioress of the Missionary Benedictine Sisters in the Philippines.

The better news is that there is no better time than now for this book to come out. It comes in the aftermath of the tempest caused by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s letter on women which caused women (hmm, like me) to answer back.

And the best news? The book is easy to read. Surprisingly simple but engrossing, I would say, coming as it does from a scholar and activist nun whose doctoral dissertation at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome (where almost all the popes studied) was pompously titled ``The Language Game of Confessing One’s Belief: A Wittgensteinian-Austinian Approach to the Linguistic Analysis of Creedal Statements.’’ A journalist would write, tongue in cheek, ``Ways of Saying `I Believe’’’. But I digress.

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Rep. Hontiveros takes on Cardinal Ratzinger

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had it coming.

The author of the Vatican’s ``Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and the World’’ has shown once again how the powerful patriarchy in the Catholic Church views women’s struggle for equality and emancipation. How is the how? With suspicion bordering on paranoia, that’s how. Ratzinger, famous for being an archconservative, should expect a fallout.

Part of the fallout comes from Rep. Anna Theresia ``Risa’’ Hontiveros-Baraquel, a first termer from the Akbayan Party who delivered her maiden privilege speech (``Feminism is Humanism’’) in congress last Tuesday. Hontiveros tackled Ratzinger’s heavy treatise that warned against the rise of antagonism between the sexes, woman power, and other imagined abominations.

I imagine the Lord Jesus Christ, whom I believe to be a thoroughly masculine feminist, befuddled by all this anti-feminist to-do in the Vatican. Jesus posed a counterculture and defended and upheld women so many times. I don’t know why many modern-day high priests could not do the same without being patronizing and suspicious. (Ha, and what would Jesus say about their wearing jewelry and princely raiment embroidered in gold?)

Ratzinger rants: ``Recent years have seen new approaches to women’s issues. A first tendency is to emphasize strongly conditions of subordination in order to give rise to antagonism: women, in order to be themselves, must make themselves the adversaries of men. Faced with the abuse of power, the answer for women is to seek power. This process leads to opposition between men and women, in which the identity and role of one are emphasized to the disadvantage of the other, leading to harmful confusion regarding the human person, which has its most immediate and lethal effects in the family.

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Mody with the smiling soul

She did not paint with her mouth or strum the guitar with her feet. She did not write verses or propound mathematical theories. She was no savant, but she was no sorry saint either. She had no spectacular talent or stunning achievements to speak of that could make her a celebrity worth all the fuss.

What she had were syringomyelia—and her immense capacity to take in life and be joyful. And to infect others with her joie de vivre. And to draw people to herself. And to be drawn to others.

Her story is worth retelling, my former editor at the Sunday Inquirer Magazine said to me the other day. I told her that Cecilia ``Mody’’ Chuidian Jurado, whom I had written about in 1991, passed away last Tuesday morning after a bout with respiratory illness. Mody’s body was cremated immediately. She was 46.

Mody had been bedridden, wheelchair-bound for 37 years. Only her head could move normally. And except for her upper limbs that could make slight, difficult movements, the rest of her was practically immobile. Mody was a quadriplegic. What Mody could not do for herself, others had to do for her.

Mody had been that way since she was nine years old. She was stricken with syringomyelia at that age when girls romped about and beat boys their age at their own game. One day all that energy came to a sudden stop. After four months in the hospital, Mody was brought home, never to move freely again and to start life anew.

Syringomyelia is a blister in the spinal cord that results in a chronic and progressive condition associated with sensory disturbances, muscle atrophy and spasticity.

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Gracia returns

Avalanched by news stories on the State of the Nation Address delivered by Pres. Arroyo last Monday was the first brief news item on Gracia Burnham’s return to the country and her scheduled appearance in court today at Camp Bagong Diwa.

Sources were quoted as saying that Gracia’s testimony was facilitated by a mutual legal assistance treaty between the U.S. and the Philippines.

As most everyone knows, American missionary couple Gracia and Martin Burnham plus several others were taken hostage by the Abu Sayyaf, while they were on holiday at the Dos Palmas resort in Palawan in 2001. The hostage takers beheaded one of the hostages and kept the rest in the jungles of Mindanao for one year. During the rescue operation, Martin and Filipino nurse Ediborah Yap were killed, Gracia was wounded but survived.

Gracia now returns in the wake of a different kind of hostage crisis which involved one of our OFWs in Iraq and put the name Angelo de la Cruz on everybody’s lips. Gracia returns as Philippine and US troops start anti-terror war games in North Cotabato and in a rebel area at that. The locals are apprehensive.

`In the Presence of My Enemies,’’ the book Gracia wrote (with Dean Merrill), is a gripping account of the hostages’ ordeal in the Mindanao jungle while in the hands of the Abu Sayyaf. The book’s title is a line from Psalm 23, the shepherd psalm.

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How green is the SONA?

Environmental lawyer Antonio A. Oposa, Jr. whose green opus (two huge colorful books on the Philippine environment) I had featured here, is shaking the ramparts on behalf of all greenies.

Says he: ``In all of Pres. Arroyo’s three State of the Nation Addresses (SONA), she never said a single word on the environment. Repeat, not a single word was said on the condition of the very natural elements—land, air, water—upon which all life in this country depend.’’

Oposa’s little grievance paper is titled ``The President is an Environmental Ignoramus.’’ Ouch. ``Sometimes words have to be a little wild,’’ Oposa says, quoting JM Keynes ``Because they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking.’’

In painful silence the greenies listened to the past SONA, they waited for those few little green words. But they heard nothing.

After Pres. Arroyo won a mandate in the recent elections, she laid out her 10-point agenda. Again, not a single word on the environment. (Well, at least she wore green for her oath-taking.) This says something about the President’s level of awareness of the importance of air, water and land resources, Oposa points out. This is a symptom that she is suffering from a severe case of environmental ignorantia.

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Psalm for Angelo

Are we speaking as one? Are we standing as one to save his life?

Here is a puny man, a truck driver crouching on an immense world stage, awaiting his fate, his hands tied, knowing next to nothing about what is going on, his heart crying out, why am I here, what is my sin, what is my sin?

They don’t shoot their hostages over there, they prefer to sever the head from the torso. I don’t know how many more hours or days it will take before Angelo de la Cruz is either set free and allowed to go home to the Philippines or beheaded by his Iraqi captors.

I don’t know how many more hours or days it will take before the Philippine government accedes to Angelo’s captors’ demand that Philippine troops be withdrawn from Iraq. (While I was writing this, news came that troops will be withdrawn soon. The US government wasn’t pleased. FU!) I don’t know how many thousand candles have to be lighted, how many more prayer rallies and protest marches have to be staged in order that those who hold Angelo’s life in their hands would make the move to pave the way for his freedom.

Here at home, so many brutal words have been said, so much blame has been hurled. Name-calling, labeling, finger-pointing. The softening ingredients have all but been forgotten. One can’t help thinking—sure, everybody’s really trying to save Angelo’s life but... Are we speaking as one, standing as one, uh, doing prayer rallies as one?

Angelo waits while groups from a broad-spectrum of Angelo savers fall over each other. In the meantime, Angelo’s captors are getting more emboldened.

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