Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 9: The Church at the End of Life as We Know It

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

It is a difficult time to be a Catholic. I find it hard to identify myself with the Church because of the way its apologists are conducting themselves these days. Firstly, there was the whole debate on reproductive health. I believe that many of the people who were advocating for a reproductive health bill, Catholic or not, were acting out of a genuine desire to preserve life. Many of the people I knew who felt so strongly for a reproductive health bill were men and women who spent decades of their lives helping poor women find ways to realize their potential as persons despite the crushing weight of unjust poverty. They are fighting hard for the passage of some kind of reproductive health system because in their conscience, in the very depths of their reason, they judged that such a system would enable women to be come better persons and mothers—if not wives.

Thus, I found it so painful to see how official and unofficial defenders of the Church attacked the persons who, in their best judgment, thought that the reproductive health bill was the best way to save the lives of suffering women and children. Instead of engaging these men and women of good will, the outspoken apologists of the church launched an attack against the proponents of the RH system. There were veiled threats about excommunication. Those who believed in an RH system were labeled haters of life, of families, of children. Lines were drawn so harshly that dialogue was almost impossible. Clearly, this antagonism was first created by the angry Church apologists because they made so many venomous statements. And of course I understand where they were coming from. In their own conscience, they saw that the bill could propagate a prophylactic mentality, promote casual sex especially among the young, and cause the deaths of innocent, unborn children. And they could very well be right. All this time of conflict, they have been projecting themselves in the media as angry, intolerant, self-righteous hounds of heaven who are ready to condemn and excommunicate anyone who did not agree with them.

And then this CCP exhibit comes into the public sphere. It was meant to be offensive and so it did offend. Personally, I agree with the CCP board member who said that the exhibit was aimed not to offend God or to desecrate the Holy but to reflect on the kitschification of iconography. However, I do understand how the placing of a penis on the cross may have been an unnecessary crossing of some line. And often shock art can be adolescent and lacking in profound insight. But again, the reactions from the protectors of the Church are so rabid. There was the immediate labeling of people as blasphemers and anti-Christs. (One logic went like this: They are the anti-Christ because they are anti Christ.) However, the CCP board clearly acted with the best intention to promote the best art. Bad judgment or not, they did not deserve to be labeled the anti-Christs (if a plural could be made of that) or intentional blasphemers out to desecrate all that is holy. Was there no room for dialogue between people with the best intentions and good will on this issue?

Why were the Church defenders so rabid and violent in their hearts? Perhaps it is because they feel that God is being hurt in all this. But this is what we are perhaps forgetting in all these debates: God is bigger than all of us. If the RH Bill is wrong, God will find a way to make it right no matter the outcome of the debates and the passage of the law. If the controversial exhibit did offend God, God can absorb more mud than any iconoclastic artist can fling at him. We shouldn’t worry so much about God and His agenda that we resort to the ways of hate and violence. Because more hurtful to the building of the kingdom than the passage of a potentially dangerous, life-threatening law or the blaspheming of Jesus’ holy image is the losing of faith of the people of the building the kingdom in love. Today, more and more, the people of the Church are presenting themselves as a rabid, intolerant, reactionary, and spiteful. They are coming off as desperate to keep their influence and power over the people—so desperate that they will use the tools of anti-love to achieve what they believe love calls them to do.

People of good will are now being turned away from the Church as a home of their hearts or as a partner in their service to the people of God who are suffering much from pain and sorrow. How can people of good will desire to partner with the Church or draw energy from her if her energy is so negative and draining? Instead of being the beacon of love in the world, the people of the Church have been projecting a harsh, unappealing light.

This is very unfortunate because I remember that it was the Church's face of love that made me want to remain a Catholic. Until I was in my third year of college, I was an agnostic. I wasn't sure if there was a god and I couldn't reject the possibility outright because I had all this Catholic guilt and fear in me. I'm sure most of us remember how we were made to believe in God—there was always a mixture of “believe or be condemned to the fires of hell and Mama Mary loves you so much she'll cry if you don't love Jesus.” However, there came a point in my life when I realized that much of the evil around me was perpetrated by Catholics. The hacienderos who stole land or paid their kasama's an unfair and non-living wage were Catholic. The politicians who supported Marcos and were even the backbone of his dictatorship were the best friends of the Church. The businessmen who broke-up unions and denied their workers their just wages were the ministers of the Eucharist. Even the leaders of the Church seemed to support these perpetrators of injustice and suffering by turning a blind eye to the evil and even gaining in wealth and luxury from this evil. For the longest time, I did not want to belong to this Church and was just waiting to gain the momentum or strength of will to actually reject it and transcend the guilt and fear that this rejection would entail.

The other reason I did not leave the Church so easily was because I wanted to give myself a chance to find God if God indeed existed. In my heart I thought that if there was indeed a God and believing was such a good thing, why is it that the people who believe in him are the worst people I knew? But still, there might be a God and if there was, it was worth finding out. So I stayed in the Church and went to mass because if there was a God, He would probably manifest here.

I had the good fortune of going to a Jesuit university where good Jesuits worked. Here, I met Fr. Ferriols who showed that being a Catholic and being wise were not necessary contradiction in terms. He showed me that the wisdom of the human person ought to lead to an awakening to the Holy and that the gentle quest for truth could lead to the opening to God's presencing. I met Fr. Green who taught me that you ought to call God love for that is what God is. Then (then) Brother Danny Huang taught me that you cannot call yourself a Christian if you did not love God's poor and fight for justice—that being a Christian means establishing the kingdom of God in all you do. Fr. Joel Tabora taught me how to live that loving struggle for God's people and what it meant to concretely build God's kingdom on earth. These were the men of the Church who in my youth taught me that the Church is about love and justice, that it was about wisdom and hope. These were the men whose loving presencing told me to stay—to follow and see.

Because I stayed, because they taught me to look for God where love lay, I found God. Quietly, undramatically, but certainly, I found God in my silences as the embrace that overwhelms, as the joy that wells up, as the calm that says all will be well. And even today, when God is more silent, less presencing, I cannot but believe that Love is for Love was too real to deny.

If the Church genuinely believes that it is God's presence of earth, it must be the presence of love—not vindictiveness, or hate, or anger, or desperation, or violence, or pettiness, or venom. The Church must be love for God is love. Does it want more unborn children to be saved, then it must go among the people who sleep in the streets, who scavenge in the city's decay, who try to harvest in fields that alternate between flooding and drying. They must be there in love’s listening and witnessing so that men will not force their wives to have more children than their wives’ bodies can afford and those that oppress the poor learn to serve God in justice and not just through donations and the sponsoring of Church events. If it wants the lay persons to venerate Christ and honor Mary then its priests and nuns should invite them by showing how such veneration brings forth people with hearts who open to embrace all who dwell in sorrow and loneliness and despair.

In my son's school, every special Mary day, the kids are all made to pray the rosary. For about 45 minutes, 3 to 7 year old children are made to sit and recite words that they seem not to understand or appreciate. The point of course is to teach them to pray and instill the love of Mary in their hearts. In every single one of these sessions, my 5 year old son cries, or he needs to sit with one of the helping misses so that he doesn't feel too disturbed by the proceedings. I thought that my son only acted this way with during rosary days because he was bored or became restless out of his wits. If I were five and I had to sit through 45 minutes of words that did not mean anything to me recited in a toneless monotony, that is probably how I would react. However, I think, aside from that, there is another reason why he gets this way. One day, out of the blue while we were driving somewhere, he asked me if there really were fires in hell. I asked him why he asked. Because , he said, he wanted to know if he would be sent there. My poor son, I thought, his early education into God is through the fires of hell and the valley of tears when it should be love and joy. He continued, where are the people who killed Jesus? Are they in the fires of hell? Because he said, if God is in our hearts and everyone is in God’s heart, why are there people in the fires of hell?

This is not exactly what I told him. But it went something like this, and this is what I learned sitting in attendance to the Love that is in the universe. There are no fires of Hell if the fires of hell means that there is a place where bad people are punished and made to suffer unspeakable horrors by a vindictive god. No one is separated from the love of God. We will always be in God's heart as He will always be in ours. Sadly, some people choose not to love God and turn away from God's love. Despite that, God never turns these people away or rejects them. And He always invites them in love. But if because of the hardness of their hearts they insist on living selfishly or destructively, and they refuse to open to God's love that is flowing toward them, then that is hell. To be in hell is to be in a state where one can see God is all his splendor and love reach out to you and you cannot open your heart to be touched by him because you chose to be that way. That is the suffering of the sinner. And none of it is caused by God because God does hold us in His heart in love even if we are sinners who refuse God's love.

And I ask, if God is so much love, where is all this anger and condemnation from the lovers of God coming from? Are the defenders of the faith channeling God's love by their violence against the other persons of good will? Did they not consider that people who don't agree with them may be acting for the greater good and that the Church may benefit of the insight of others whose hearts are likewise embraced by God's love?

This is why I am so bothered by the way the Church (through its leadership) is projecting itself in public: to know love, you must be opened to love. The only education, before the memorized prayers, before the worship in sacred shrines and the falling before images, before the memorization of the complex doctrines, is the education of the heart to open to love—to see love where it shows, to feel love where it touches, to hear love where it calls, and to dwell in love where it blossoms. A rabid and vindictive Christendom can only overwhelm the delicate presencing of love. Instead of leading confused and doubting hearts to love, they may be sowing doubt with regard to the transcendent presence of love. I almost missed the call of love having grown up with a Church that focused too much on telling me how sinful I was and how I was at the precipice of the fires of hell. This approach hardened me to the love that seemed so contradictory. This angry, self-righteousness projected by the Church against over the top shock artists and men and women of good will trying their best to empower poor women and children and their denying baptism to the children of unwed parents and their calling women without children incomplete is certainly the noise that counters love.

My education in God, the proper education that opened me to God, was an education in love. Memorized doctrine, the repetitious worship of saints, the contemplation of the fires of hell did not lead me to God. They filled my heart with doubt. The passionate witnessing of men and women of love led me to love and then to embrace the doctrine. Perhaps our bishops should lead us in that kind of education.

We are at the end of life as we know it. We need to learn to build a new order of love because we will face civilization changing crises. Who will lead us in this task of rebuilding? This is a terrific opportunity for the Church because it can influence the new world that is emerging so that this mirrors the Kingdom. But who will flock to it when it is so uncomforting? Who will partner with it when it is so bitter? Who will build with it when its words tear down? The Church can and the Church must for it can lead by gathering the energies of charity for the tasks of the Kingdom. The Bishops called for days of prayer and penitence. That is so apt for we must really repent our ways as a Church that has forgotten that Love calls us to presence love and to have faith that love will overcome. This does not mean that we should be complacent in the face of potential evil but it calls us to use the ways of love in faith for only love will save us.

Aquino, Murad, and Levinas

The great thing about being trained in philosophy is it has equipped me with conceptual frameworks that help me quickly understand complex events, especially those that may seem naïve or foolish but are actually profoundly groundbreaking and game-changing. This was my experience last Friday when I first heard (read actually—as I saw it first in Twitter) that President Benigno Aquino III traveled to Tokyo, Japan to meet with Chairman Al Haj Murad of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Being intimately familiar with the Mindanao peace process, I immediately saw the serious implications of the President’s gesture and, for a fleeting moment, I wondered whether President Aquino had lost his mind.

This moment of doubt came and went very fast because right away the Tokyo meeting reminded me of a philosopher named Emmanuel Levinas. I have been reading and teaching the philosophy of this Jewish thinker for 25 years now, including mentoring seminarians who have chosen to write on his philosophy for their masteral theses. But never had I seen as concrete an illustration of his philosophy as in the encounter between Aquino and Murad. In particular, I was reminded by the emphasis Levinas gave to the Face-to-Face encounter, that moment when human beings see each other as Other—not to be hated, mutilated, or killed, but to be compassionate to, in fact to love and serve.

Two weeks ago, I attended the doctoral dissertation defense of a good friend and philosophy classmate Angelli Tugado, who wrote on “The Proximity of the ‘Third’ as the Ethical Basis for Levinas’s Idea of Culture”, and in her opening statement, she quoted from Levinas: “The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other—language is justice. It is not that there first be the face, and then the being it manifests or expresses would concern himself with justice; the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity.”

The above-quoted words capture the essence of the Aquino-Murad encounter. Tokyo was a meeting not just of leaders but of two human beings. While they represent big constituencies and play political roles, in that moment of their encounter, Aquino and Murad became two individuals reaching out in conversation, opening their humanity to each other, and weighing each other’s sincerity and good will. As a veteran negotiator and mediator of many social and policy conflicts, here and abroad, I know there is no better basis for future agreements and relationships than the Face-to-Face encounter that Aquino and Murad had in Tokyo.



The Tokyo meeting came at a time when there were already questions about the government’s sincerity and political will in pushing for permanent peace in Mindanao. The government was already delayed in delivering its peace proposal to the MILF. President Aquino was silent about the peace negotiations in his State-of-the-Nation Address, leading many to wonder if there was an impasse. While I have a very high level of trust in the government negotiators (especially its chairman, Dean Marvic Leonen) and in Aquino’s Peace Adviser, Secretary Teresita Deles, I was worried, too.

The fact is that achieving peace in Mindanao would be difficult. From the Tripoli Agreement in 1976 to the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain fiasco in 2008, the peace process is a long history of betrayals and failures. There have of course been advances that should be appreciated: (a) The 1996 peace agreement with the Moro National Liberation Front, while faced with many implementation issues, has not been abrogated; (b) The MILF has abandoned the goal of separatism and independence, a non-trivial development; and (c) The MOA-AD experience yielded many lessons, including the limitations of what the government could offer in the negotiating table and the importance of consultations with all Mindanao stakeholders.

The Aquino-Murad meeting is a breath of fresh air, a shot in the arm to the peace process. The President’s gesture is not a treasonous act as an unnamed diplomat supposedly called it, or an ill-advised move according to one senator. Tokyo was a pragmatic and sensible attempt to move the process forward by establishing an environment of trust and confidence between the parties. Leonen, defending the President’s decision to meet with someone who is not his counterpart, said: “The President will meet with any Filipino anywhere in the world, in the planet, especially if he is serious enough to talk about an agenda which is important for the country.”



There are of course tough negotiations ahead. Even for someone like me, who believes constitutional change is good and necessary to address some MILF demands, it is clear that a change in governance systems (e.g. a creation of a sub-state as demanded by the MILF) targeted only at Mindanao or some parts of it have no chance of being accepted by Congress or in a national or Mindanao-wide plebiscite. The better option is an overhaul of our national governance system to allow local governments everywhere in the country to freely affiliate each other in whatever way they want, including up to the level of states. I call this federalism “built from the ground up” and not imposed by legal prescription from above. But this is probably not doable in the next five years, and certainly beyond President Aquino to commit as it requires congressional concurrence and a national plebiscite. The vast powers of the Philippine president, however, allow the government to offer many concessions in the negotiations. I hope that the MILF, whose negotiators are brilliant and practical idealists, acknowledge the hard facts and negotiate on this basis.

As a Mindanawon, I consider the Mindanao peace process a personal matter. In fact, the Aquino-Murad meeting helped me remember a forgotten childhood memory. When I was growing up in Cagayan de Oro, when I was in grade school in the 1960s, there used to be an apartment block a street away from our house. That block, painted in white (“balay puti”), was occupied by Moro families. Throughout my childhood, a happy one I must say, I was afraid of that house and the people, including children my age, who lived there. There were even a couple of times when my friends and I had stone-throwing fights with our Moro neighbors. I was already a teenager and on my last year of high school when I summoned the courage to approach balay puti and say hello to those neighbors. I have always regretted waiting that long, conscious of the friendships I never had because of my bigotry. But once I had that Face-to-Face encounter, never again did I fear engaging with my Moro brother or sister, and I am definitely the better for it.

A peace agreement that leads to a divided Mindanao and country is not the result we all want. Indeed, as in all peace negotiations, ultimately, the process should end with what is doable, pushing the envelope, yes, but not too much that it tears it apart. In the next five years, for the remainder of Aquino’s term, why don’t we just work together to achieve exactly that? And let us start as Aquino did with Murad, and as I experienced when I was a teenager, by engaging with each other Face-to-Face.

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