It seems a devilish twist that the prepositional phrase “from the devil himself” should suddenly come to the fore of people’s attention quite so suddenly. It is a phrase attributed to the late Jaime Cardinal Sin. In its original context, it was only a mere rationalization for accepting anything at all from the Marcoses back in the time of martial law. In its current use, it refers to the act of having accepted anything from the former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, her reign marked as it was by similar levels of corruption seen in that darkest period of Philippine history. The phrase has now been used to rationalize why some bishops should have requested and then accepted assistance in the form of SUVs. The idea being that if the final outcome is to help the poor in this country, then bishops should accept help even “from the devil himself.”
Admittedly it is a phrase worthy of the most colorful interpretations, each one expressing layers of meaning that reveal us, Filipinos, to ourselves. Take for instance the phrase “devil himself.” From his seat inside a theater up in Heaven and watching all these, the late former congressman Ysmael Bukad wondered, “Why do we think the devil is a he?” Why not a she? Does the devil have any gender at all? Not that Bukad has seen the devil. He presumes they stay away from this place. At odd times, Heaven becomes a place of prayer. Since the residents here cannot at all by direct acts intervene in the “real” world even as they watch it with great care and love, they have nothing else to do but pray. They pray that all goes well finally in the end. They pray both personally and collectively. It is something to hear, from silence the slow rising of chant inside the theater where “the saved” watch what transpires in the real world as their heroes go about their own redemption and by that course do battle against the forces.
In Heaven, they watched as the issue of the SUVs revealed cracks in the body of the “Mother Church.” The CBCP apologized collectively for the SUVs in the form of a pastoral letter. Yet days thereafter some of the bishops involved came out in the papers asking for the PCSO head Margie Juico to resign. They asked for an apology from no less than the President of the Philippines himself. They claimed he should do this for bringing the church into ignominy with the issue of the SUVs. They claimed Juico should resign for using the allegedly wrongful term “Pajero.” By these statements, Bukad felt the bishops negated whatever the CBCP might have achieved with their original apology. Not only that, they revealed to him a bothersome break somewhere. Are the bishops as united as we once thought they were? Is something tearing apart somewhere? Is it tearing apart because of unresolved issues of poverty and corruption in this country? The RH bill? After that sorry ordeal with the SUVs what was finally resolved with the question of whether or not the Mother Church should accept anything at all from the PCSO or “the devil himself”?
And so the Heavens prayed. And the late former congressman Bukad, having had served in government, prayed a particular personal prayer. He prayed someone in the CBCP would dwell on this question: What if the head of another religion, not the Catholic Church, say someone like Ruben Ecleo of PBMA, received SUVs for his work with the poor? What would the Catholics do? Stay silent? What should the Senate do? Treat the person with kid’s gloves and with a light tap on the wrist absolve everyone for a mere lapse of judgment? Nothing in the constitution says it is illegal or even improper, or so claims Enrile and Santiago. No need to legislate?
Of course, the current situation is more complicated than that. Bukad thought. But situations are always complicated. Unfortunately, not so consequences. Consequences are always more simple and by their very nature more abject and real. By sweeping the issue under the rug, so to speak, the Senate and the Mother Church lost an opportunity to clarify a blur in the culture of church-government relations and what they do or do not do together to alleviate, if not solve entirely, the problem of corruption and poverty. Since nothing was resolved, so it continues. Even now it burns like an insidious and eternal ember straight from Hell. Nobody wants to think about it even as they know with a divine certainly it will rise once again, perhaps as a conflagration, someday soon.
It was in prayer that Bukad espied a priest in the background well away from the spotlights trained on the the bishops. The priest had something at his feet, which Bukad recognized. It was something more powerful than an SUV if the problem was to travel to the farthest and most back-breaking reaches of the country. He wondered how it ended up with this man of the cloth. He wondered who the priest was and what adventures awaited him if Bukad followed his life. Thus, while everyone else stayed in the theater showing the travails of Philippine bishops, Bukad walked away and searched instead for the theater that showed this unknown priest’s life. When he finally came to it, he found he was not alone. There were already a few others there. He was all the more curious.