Is Catholicism Failing in the Philippines?

Quite a number of wonderful things make me proud to be a Filipino. My country is known for being the bastion of Catholicism in Asia. Of the total Philippine population (around 100 million), almost 80% are Catholic.

We’re renowned for our fervent external expression of piety. Even Pope Francis was in awe of the “sea of humanity” whenever he addressed audiences or said Mass on his first visit to the Philippines in 2015. The same can be said of the two other popes who visited the country – Pope Paul VI in 1970 and Pope John Paul II in 1981 and 1995. (Filipinos always put their best foot forward whenever popes come to visit.)

Religious Customs and Rituals

Nothing beats our ardent devotion to the Blessed Mother. We organize fluvial processions in her honor every year. The greatest tradition is the Flores de Mayo (a tradition of offering flowers at the church altar each day in May), which culminates in the Santacruzan, a religious historical pageant depicting St. Helena’s search for the Holy Cross. Another time-honored tradition that speaks of our unique religiosity is the simbang gabi (a nine-day dawn novena of Masses preceding Christmas day).

I can’t say I’m proud of our brand of popular piety that borders on the cultish, but the most impoverished among Filipinos wear their faith on their sleeves. It is particularly manifested in a spectacle on the feast day of the Black Nazarene in Quiapo, Manila in January each year when hundreds of thousands of barefoot devotees (mostly men) risk life and limb scrambling to touch the miraculous image of Christ as it is carried in a procession along city streets.

Extreme forms of religiosity are mostly a yearly extravaganza such as flagellants walking barefoot around town and even some men being physically nailed to the cross on a Good Friday!

Resilience

We Filipinos are also noted for our resilience – the kind that shocked CNN anchor Anderson Cooper when he covered the devastation by Typhoon Haiyan of central Philippines in 2013. He was in awe of the survivors’ courage and resolve to move on with their lives in the face of tragedy and loss. He even thanked the Filipinos for “teaching us how to live.”

I can tell you this much: we Filipinos have long been used to natural hazards and disasters every year – typhoons (averaging 20 a year), floods, earthquakes, you name it!

We have so resigned ourselves to our fate with weather that it is not uncommon to see Filipinos wave and smile at cameramen even when shivering in the cold on the rooftops when our homes are submerged in nine feet of floodwater! Hope springs eternal – we can find humor in just about everything, even among those of us who have nothing but the clothes on our back. It would probably take a hundred Hurricane Katrinas to drive us mad.

Ritualistic and Warped

But there are also quite a number of things about Filipinos I cannot admit to being proud of, particularly, our piety. It is generally ritualistic, or worse, warped. The Santacruzan, for instance, has become a mockery of a religious and historical event that should have profound meaning to Catholics – but no. It has been reduced to a cheap parade of beauty queens, if not cross-dressers and transvestites.

In many Catholic churches you can see Marian devotees, after praying the novena to Our Mother of Perpetual Help, leave the church just before Mass begins. This is a country that is predominantly Catholic, but sadly, many Filipino Catholics have not quite understood the value and meaning of the Eucharist, “the source and summit of the Christian life” (Catechism, 1324).

In countless parishes, members of church organizations are more concerned about how many marching bands will perform at the feast day of their patron saint; what kind of food will be served to guests; what decor will be used to adorn the church patio; what local delicacies will be prepared by each household; or which celebrities have been invited to entertain people in a mini-concert that stretches until midnight. For them, these trappings seem to be more important than attending Mass.

In many government offices where the images of Our Lady and the Santo Niño are prominently displayed, old timers (mostly women) gossip about one another, their bosses and new recruits. But you’d be surprised – these “pious” employees regularly say the Holy Rosary together right inside their offices!

Nepotism

Filipinos are also known for their close family ties. Better-off members are obliged to take care of their less fortunate relatives. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, of course, but the flip side is extremely destructive.

The late Teodoro A. Agoncillo, one of our eminent historians, sums it up in his book History of the Filipino People:

This custom of taking care of the poor relations is so deeply ingrained in the Filipino character that one may trace the root of graft and corruption to the closeness of family ties. Right or wrong, the family comes first. Hence the Filipino who rises to a position of power is confronted with the problem of providing for his relatives, whose number increases in proportion to the power and influence one exercises.

The Filipino trait of pakikisama (broadly translated as the “spirit of brotherhood and comradeship”) also helps nurture the culture of corruption, especially among those in power. Agoncillo writes that “pakikisama has been debased into an attitude that makes an amiable crook well-liked…the most popular and highly respected people are not the honest intellectuals and artists, but the ‘respectable’ robbers in high public positions…and the unprincipled politicians who have never heard of decency and honor.”

In the most recent Corruption Perception Index (CPI) of Transparency International (which ranks countries “by their perceived levels of public sector corruption”), the Philippines ranked 113^th out of 180 in 2019 – dropping 14 notches from its 99^th rank the previous year. (The lower the rank, the worse the corruption.)

Corruption

This is the reason my country has remained “the sick man of Asia”, a term given to it when strongman Ferdinand Marcos ruled the country in the ’70s and ’80s. Corruption is high in many of our government institutions where bribery and extortion are the norm. Transparency in transactions is a joke. Not only do the rich and powerful steal from our coffers, but even low-salaried employees ask for “gifts” (discreetly or otherwise) to process or facilitate a business transaction.

Consider these: our city streets are filled with potholes because they were built with substandard materials. Our countryside and far-flung areas don’t have the necessary social and economic infrastructure like roads and bridges or water supply and sanitation systems. Our forests and water resources have dwindled significantly because some government crook has allowed mining companies to evade state regulations. We honest and diligent taxpayers wonder where our taxes go!

And because a large percentage of our population is uneducated – as of 2017, five in ten families lacked access to basic education – we keep voting for the same crooks and wily politicians in Congress and in our cities and towns.

Freedom of the press is under attack in our country. Our current government has the propensity to silence its critics or jail them on trumped-up charges. Its anti-drug campaign has snuffed out many innocent lives in what is known as “extrajudicial killings”. A world report of Human Rights Watch placed the death toll at 27,000 over against the police’s estimate of 5,526 as of 2018.

Scams and Scandals

Many of our elective and appointed officials are often involved in scams and anomalous government transactions, if not scandals whose sordid details you don’t want to know. A number of local politicians own private armies. And these public officials are usually outward devotees of the Santo Niño, the Black Nazarene, and our Blessed Mother! Obviously, their religiosity has nothing to do with their day-to-day life or how they should perform their duties, or how they should conduct themselves.

I often wonder how we Filipinos – Catholics for almost 500 years – can spread the Good News in non-Christian nations when we can’t even get our own act together. It remains to be seen if self-discipline and fear of the Lord will ever be ingrained in our culture. Lacking these, we hamper our own Christian witness.

The Japanese (where corruption in the public sector is very low) would probably have a field day asking us: why should we listen to you Catholics when we’re the most disciplined, most polite, and the least corrupt among Asian cultures? The failure of Catholicism in our country is a grim reality staring us Filipino Catholics in the face.