The Voice In The Wilderness

Finally, the bishops have spoken!

For the longest time, the bishops have remained tentative owing to the fact that the dislike for GMA was not necessarily a question of good and evil. What they got enmeshed in were technicalities of the Garci tapes that they forgot that cheating, lying and stealing in the presidential elections was a moral transgression.

But this time, nobody can doubt the immorality of the congressional exercise of ramming the Cha Cha train over people, over laws, and even over the Constitution itself.

The immorality of it all is not the tyranny of numbers. After all, that is an essential bedrock of democracy. It is the willingness of bright men and women to change the rules to suit their personal interests and convenience, the brazenness of lawyers who are willing to strain the interpretation of the Constitution to advance their personal gain, the intellectual surrender of their own consciences for the price of twelve pieces of silver and the haste upon which all these events are taking shape.

Lawyers like Congressman Douglas Cagas, a human rights lawyer kuno, who seemed to have forgotten his roots and is now preparing to foist and install a dictatorship. On the other hand, Congressman Luis Villafuerte has never taken the path of straight and narrow. A lapdog of the former President Marcos, he sides with whoever is in power, and now sponsors a resolution which will earn him platitudes from GMA and JDV but will harvest a eternal caboodle of curses and cusses from the people.

This time, the Church has finally risen to its calling as the Good Shepherd.

But the rut that we are in is partly the fault of the bishops. The administration has taken advantage of the apathy and division among the bishops and used their dense behavior to put forward all the train of abuses that we have witnessed. There was no cry from the bishops to demand the resignation of the president in the light of the cheating, lying and stealing. There was no voice in the wilderness condemning the dismissal of the impeachment complaint. There was no collective anger from amongst them even when some bishops were being identified as harborers of coup plotters. And there was nary a whimper when the Calibrated Pre-emptive Response and P. P. No. 1017 were invoked to abuse civil liberties. The apathy of the people is largely due to the absence of a voice crying in the wilderness. The bishops have abandoned its flock.

But today, that voice has been found again. Let the churches ring their bells of indignation on Sunday, let a thousand pastoral letters be read on Sunday Masses, let a million people gather on December 15 at the Luneta Park to show our disgust and utter dismay over these lapdog congressmen of the president. A stab on the House is a stab on the president.

The bishops have finally found their clothing. No longer are they wolves in sheep’s outfit, they have put on ashes and sackclothes and they ask us as well to repent for our apathy, indifference and tolerance of this evil that is hovering over us. Let us stop this descent into madness. Let us show this administration, its allies, lapdogs and ass lickers, Tama Na! Sobra Na!

And yes, it feels like 1985 once more when Cory, in the presence of the bishops, called for civil disobedience! It’s déjà vu all over again.

See you at Rizal Park on December 15th! A new wind is a blowin’.