Practice what you preach
Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle and other Church officials have called on Filipino Catholics to help victims of Typhoon “Glenda” in Luzon and some parts of the Visayas.
Instead of making the call, why don’t Cardinal Tagle and other members of the Catholic clergy lead in relief efforts such as distributing basic commodities and implementing mass feeding programs?
Why can’t they imitate Jesus of Nazareth who mixed with the poor and the depressed?
Is it difficult for the clergy to go out and help alleviate the suffering of victims of natural calamities like typhoons and earthquakes?
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Why can’t the Catholic Church give back a little of the huge donations it receives from the faithful by spending part of that money on calamity victims?
What’s Caritas, the Catholic charitable organization, doing?
Some poor people who came to “Isumbong Mo Kay Tulfo” for help told me that Caritas sold to them relief goods it received from foreign and local donors instead of giving the goods to them.
Please tell us it isn’t true!
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How ironic that in this predominantly Catholic country, a Buddhist group, Tzu Chi, is always in the thick of the relief efforts in the wake of natural calamities.
Tzu Chi members, dressed in blue shirt and white pants, are the first to arrive at the scene of natural calamities, along with Red Cross volunteers.
I’ve seen them in Cagayan de Oro City after the floods generated by Typhoon “Sendong” that killed several hundred people in 2011; in Bohol after the 7.2-magnitude earthquake last year; and in Tacloban City after Supertyphoon “Yolanda” late last year.
Tzu Chi helped clean up Tacloban City of millions of tons of debris when it hired 300,000 Yolanda victims at P500 each for 19 days after the worst strongest typhoon Yolanda.
While Tzu Chi practices charity by being in the thick of relief efforts after every natural disaster, the local Catholic Church just preaches charity from the pulpit.
Tzu Chi is a doer while the Catholic Church is just a talker.
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Another group that practices charity by deed is the Iglesia ni Cristo (INC), a home-grown religious sect.
The INC has been doing medical and dental missions in different places for its poor members, as well as nonmembers.
You know that the money INC members give to their church is well spent because of their beautiful places of worship, magnificent in architectural design, which have sprung up in all parts of the archipelago and in the United States.
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I noticed how the Catholic Church manages the money it gets from donations when I was a crime reporter.
Sometime in the late 1970s, a priest was killed in his room beside the Quiapo Church.
I was with the Manila Bulletin then and accompanied a team of detectives from the homicide section of the Western Police District (now the Manila Police District) that investigated the killing.
As my colleagues and I were poking around the victim’s room, we saw sacks under the dead priest’s bed. We told the police to look under the bed to see for themselves what we found inside the sacks.
The sacks were full of coins and paper bills.
