Priestly luxury

Netizens and Facebook users went viral over the weekend when people started posting the interview with Msgr. Achilles Dakay, the Cebu archdiocesan medial liaison officer, regarding reports that Pope Francis, while still Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio, rode buses and trains in lieu of a chauffeur-driven limousine and had lived in an apartment, in lieu of a mansion, cooking food for himself and an ailing priest he was taking care of.

In that radio interview, Monsignor Dakay was reported to have expressed disbelief and even went to the point of telling listeners that it was asking too much of priests to take Ceres Bus liners to their parishes and their chapel visits. The monsignor should have replied that the inefficiency of public transport and the absence of a public mass transit system in Cebu prevents anyone—including priests on call when someone is dying—to reach their destinations on time.

Lost in the whole fiasco of the interview is the fact that there are many reasons why a priest gets to have a brand new car. Monsignor Dakay won his BMW sedan in the San Pedro Calungsod fund raiser raffle of the Cebu Archdiocese. Although it would have been better had he sold the car and donated the proceeds to Caritas, he did not do so and many people find that regretful. But the monsignor has his reasons known only to God and himself.

I also know a few priests who come from very wealthy families who apparently do not want their priest siblings to follow a strict path of utter absence of luxury. Then there are those who are gifted by wealthy parishioners, perhaps thinking that this will buy them a place in heaven or because they see this poor priest just riding a beat up motorcycle to the hinterlands and they want to help. The priest, on the other hand, does not want to turn down the donor because the latter might feel insulted and will not donate in the future. And finally, there are those who have cars after barely a year or two as parish priest.

What makes all these cars scandalous is if the priest drives a brand new one while his church and convent is dilapidated, he cannot pay for his staff running the parish and the food that his staff eats is barely edible. What is scandalous is if the priest drives his brand new car in a parish where people barely make a living, where informal settlements crowd around the parish church and where unemployment, crime and poverty are as real as the church standing around them.

Perhaps it is time for the Archdiocese of Cebu to follow the example of the Diocese of Tagbilaran, where priests are paid their monthly salaries, aptly called SLA or Standard Living Allowance, and begin centralizing all the proceeds from offertories in church Masses and all donations big or small. Let the archdiocese do the buying of cars for whoever badly needs them, much like those of religious congregations where, after your leave your assignment, you leave behind all the trappings of your life there, including whatever car your drove. Then you move on and allow the others to take over your community possessions.

The ascendancy of Pope Francis has been long awaited by a church that will have a pastoral face, one that can identify in real time with the poor and the downtrodden, not just up there in the chancel or at the pulpit when delivering sermons about the poor, but right out there in the communities where being poor is real and very much alive.

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Congratulations to the Anthropology Program of the University of San Carlos Department of Anthropology, Sociology and History (DASH) for having been designated one of only two Centers of Excellence by the Commission on Higher Education (CHED). The other recipient was, expectedly, the Department of Anthropology of University of the Philippines Diliman. More power to my colleagues and fellow anthropology and archaeology faculty members!

For those still interested in joining the 2013 Summer Field Training in Archaeology, kindly e-mail me at the address that you can find on this column below my picture. We will begin on April 2 at the same site at the Lapyahan Public Beach in the municipality of San Remigio and will close the dig on April 27, 2013.