Thanks for the comment!

It’s an issue that has pervaded Filipino society for a long time. Liberation theology finally culminated in the People Power Revolution, but even that was only for a short while. It’s sad when social action is denied us by the Church that we believe in, but life’s like that.

This is also why I can condone Setsuna’s stance. Rather than wait for cowards to change the world, why not change it on your own?

Now I’ve had some bad experiences with church in my time. In one case my Anglican Moore College run school wouldn’t let the FilmBuffery club (the film club) show Brokeback Mountain to commemorate Heath Ledger’s death. The school didn’t really take any responsibility for the banning or tell us why we couldn’t show it. And all this has done is made the students mistrust their pastors and teachers who supported the ban.

But clearly what happened to the Phillipinos was far worse than denying students a Heath Ledger movie. I never knew about this issue but now I care.

I wasn’t merely talking about the Japanese. I was primarily trying to interpret the stance of Setsuna in 00.

While I agree with you that the Church remains to be a body of hypocrisy, it’s sad because they’re the people who are supposed to communicate God’s word. Hypocrisy is not part of His message. And yes, I recognize the trespasses that some priests commit against his word.

I would agree with you, but it’s so bleak!

IKnight:

Yeah, but I can’t help from thinking about these things. Is there no way out?

Baka-Raptor:

Come all you spirits who tend on mortal thoughts unsex thee here.

Though I’m not wrong about the hopeless situation. Sometimes you need to know you fucked up in order to realize a couple of things.

I wish I didn’t paint it so hopelessly and bitter, but I was in quite the funk when I wrote that :V

DrmChsr0’s assessment is more-or-less accurate, though I wouldn’t put it in such hopeless terms because (a) there may be no hope in this world, but then this world’s a pretty limited, contingent, small place, and (b) the church (small ‘c’, body of Christians as opposed to organisation of clergy) seems to have always been like this. I’m no Bible scholar, but I’d guess the reason there’s a lot of stuff about how to get life right in Paul’s letters is because the churches he was writing to were frequently getting it wrong.

I think the drama and theatre of 00’s politics (and real-life national, ‘macro’ politics) does tend to obscure the good things people do on the ‘micro’, interpersonal level. And the bad things too, of course. In the UK the prevailing doctrine is that it’s not really worth engaging with politicians because they’re pretty powerless people in the short term, but that’s because we have a well-established, long-standing state system. How this looks from a country where the Church (large ‘C’) has recently faced a situation in which a gov’t actively oppressed its people I don’t know.

Thought-provoking stuff. Better go to a nunnery to consider it.

The Japanese are largely non-religious. They don’t even trust Shinto.

And you don’t need to see the downfall of the Philippine Catholic church to know that the body of Christ is falling apart. you don’t need a lesson in church history or the Bible codes to tell you that. It’s all there in Revelations 1-3.

The Church was a body of hypocrisy? Bullshit. The Church IS a body of hypocrisy. We have Bible-Presbyterians fighting over which of the fucking translations of the Bible to use instead of telling the pastor who instigated it to fuck off and die. We have Catholic priests touching little boys and other nasty things instead of loving them. and there’s probably a hundred different denominations whose problems shall be made known to me soon.

Instead of loving God and his creation, the church has grown fat and lazy and unwilling to do what God has commanded it to do. Instead of being a shining example to their respective nations they have become like the world itself.

Worse still, there’s no revivalist in sight. No John Sung to raise the spirits. No Billy Graham to correct us all. No preacher with a fire in his heart and a soul consecrated to God to raise flagging spirits. This time around, the Body Of Christ has royally fucked itself and there’s no reinforcements coming.

Then again, what do I know? I’m grumpy and pissed at fucking Greg Ayers and his cult of personality.

Thanks for the lengthy reply.

What’s more regrettable about the Filipino Church is that there were people like Father Hogan (who was American) fighting for equal rights among Filipino Christians only to be told off by a Church behind the times and afraid of facing the truth. He was told off by no less than a Filipino archbishop himself and was told to shut up. For what reason, one may ask? He was forced to shut up because of his push towards the approbation of unions being established even in nonprofit organizations and institutions. He found it ironic that it was the Philippine Church hierarchy itself who refused to pay the minimum wage to its workers! But that was not an excuse: people need to live, and to do that they needed money.

Father Hogan strived for fairness and he strived for social change, not just palliatives to the people. Pity works, sure, and it’s thoroughly supported by the rich to allay their troubled egos, but it doesn’t recognize social sin per se. What happened to him? He was banned from spreading information regarding the creation of labor unions and his pursuit of social balance (not even a communistic social equality); all this was simply because he was unconservative.

The Church was a body of hypocrisy. While I appreciate the actions they have taken to empower the people during the People Power Revolution, it cannot be argued that if they had acted with exigency and with direction Marcos’s madness would have been sequestered.

This is why I can condone what Setsuna did in Gundam 00. He wanted to pursue peace which always slipped from him as an act of contrition and also repentance. If he relied on mere talks, as what can be seen with Marina’s reliance of just diplomacy, there would have been civil war in Azadistan.

Words can only go so far. Actions take people as far as they can go, and the Philippine Church needs more action and less words.

Also, despite having one of the highest number of Catholics in a country by percentage which can be traced back to Magellan and the Spanish, the Catholic Church in the Philippines only became an organized religious force fairly recently. Unless you were in a major city like Manila or Cebu, it’s actually somewhat difficult to find an organized presence of Catholicism. Despite being fairly devout, my dad never actually went to church regularly until he met mom. He grew up with the nearest church about 20 miles away and the local priest would show up about once a month for village mass. Considering the thousand or so islands that make up the Philippines, it was certainly a challenging task to maintain an organized church infrastructure.

I wouldn’t blame the church for the degradation of Marco’s ability to lead a nation. Despite his ability to increase the infrastructure of the Philippines in his first term, Marcos definitely went off his rocker in the second term and desperately tried to hold power. The church at that stage was not going to stop a desperate man and his military. Even with a major vocal religious leader in Cardinal Sin, People Power Revolution was not going to take place until a number of key pieces occured (the lifting of martial law due to a Pope John Paul II visit and the Aquino assassination).

A good book I read on this when I was doing research for my undergrad minor in Theology is “Guided By God: The Legacy of the Catholic Church in Philippine Politics”. It gives a good outline for the history of the Philippine Catholic Church in the context of the religion-state line the church seems to thread.

But what do I know. Stuff like this always seem to be glossed over when discussing in from the stand point of a first gen Phil-am born in NY towards the end of People Power. It’s times like this where I feel like I need to get a time-machine to really understand what happened.