A society, any society, is indeed in trouble, when double talks reign or when saying something yet doing another becomes the norm. Society’s first and best antidote is to subject to truth fire those who claim moral ascendancy over the populace.
This is the very context upon which Jesus’ powerful teachings rests, that those who exact and demand moral uprightness should not be found wanting. Otherwise, they have no business standing on a pulpit of morality because the whole exercise is simply hypocrisy.
Thus, if you demand and cry foul to any form of vices, you should not be found going to casinos to gamble to your heart’s content. Worse, you have no business calling a leader of a nation to step down because of ineptness and vices, when you fully know that the very car, or the car that your diocese use, comes from the very vices you so abhor.
This is the dilemma of some of the princes of the Church, namely the politically involved Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP).
This respectable institution has, time and time again, calls the playing of lotto a moral crack, and thus people have to stop patronizing the idea of a quick-rich. Yet, some members of this politically-willed structure send letters of solicitation, and even receive indulgences from the very gambling game the entire CBCP has time and time again asks to reject.
CBCP’s rejection is primarily due the lotto’s inherent source of moral decadence and the supposed destruction that the lotto brings to people’s lives. The CBCP or any member thereof should not be found playing or even receiving support from lotto. Doing so is plain and simple hypocrisy.
The Bishops who are involved in this Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) pajeros’ scam can’t play possum, claiming among other things that they were not able to read the proposal letters bearing their signatures, asking for PCSO support.
In fact, anything that comes from the PCSO, as far as the Bishops are concerned should be returned back, preferably with the message: gambling is a sin. If you do otherwise, the act is simply hypocrisy.
Neither can the involved Bishops claim to be practical about the whole affair, saying that the sports utility vehicles (SUVs) they received from PCSO are used for charitable purposes anyway. If this is so, then Robin Hood has been right all along: the means justify the ends.
The CBCP headquarter has released an official statement to this dilemma, claiming among other things that they cannot police their ranks, and thus, individual members (meaning the six or seven identified Bishops involved in the P 8.3-million scam) are only responsible and accountable to the Pope.
Seriously, the reprimand, if you can call it that, should also state that the Bishops should not only be responsible to the Pope living in Rome, but should be responsible to their conscience, to their flocks living in the Philippines and most importantly, to their God.
When CBCP as a body claims that gambling, including lotto is a sin, the assumption is that the Bishops, all the Bishops are in accordance to this moral stand, and anything that comes from these vices should be morally abhorred. No ifs, no buts. Otherwise, the whole enterprise is simply that: hypocrisy.
This whole PCSO solicitation becomes even darker, given that the scam happened at the time when the ex-President was ravaging the moral fibers of this nation, cheating most and foremost during the national elections.
And suddenly, we all remember: Didn’t the Bishops leave us in the cold when the clarion call of presidential resignation was raised? Now, we can ask, seriously: Why? We might not have a moral conundrum knowing that some congressmen apparently receive 17 or so emergency vehicles (that many!) for provinces with one or two hospitals.
Congressmen, after all, only cry politics. And we know that politics in our Banana Republic is quite often defined bereft of any moral ascendancy of any kind.
But we are in serious trouble if we ignore the princes of the Church taking that same crooked route. We should as Jesus did: curse them.
You can connect with me at tobe_wtdpoor@yahoo.com
