Category: Documents

Posted on August 20, 2017      by Joel Tabora, S.J.

I was seventeen when I decided to join the Jesuits.  Some today may think that that was much too early to make a radical life decision, that there were too many other possibilities in life that I ought first to have explored before deciding for a life involving the evangelical counsels, poverty, chastity and obedience.

For a while, my father felt that way too.  I’d actually wanted to become a priest very early on, when serving Masses regularly in our parish church at 8 years of age introduced me to a love for the altar and a youthful admiration for the diocesan priests of the parish.  When I got to the Ateneo de Manila High School, my class moderator in first year, Fr. Ernesto Javier, noted my desire.  He told me to join Challenge House, which I did.  For two years, during my second and third year high school days, I’d left home to explore the challenge now of becoming a Jesuit priest.  It was a good experience. But I left Challenge House because my father felt it was unhealthy for me to be thinking only about the priesthood at that age.  He wanted me to get out, explore the world, interact more with other-thinking people, and “get a girlfriend.”  So that’s what I did.  But after a retreat under Fr. Raymund Gough during my first year of college, I discerned the call to the priesthood undeniable.  Fr. Horacio de la Costa, then Provincial of the Jesuits in the Philippines, concurred.  On July 16, 1965, I entered Sacred Heart Novitiate.

I have since lived more than three times those seventeen years as a Jesuit in the Philippines.  After my ordination to the priesthood in 1983, I began my priestly service in the Resettlement Area of San Pedro, Laguna.  Yesterday, I returned there for the first time in some forty years to preside over the renewal of marriage vows of a couple, Jojo Eduque and Sonny Castro, whose marriage I’d witnessed in that church 40 years ago yesterday.  Jojo and Sonny remembered the dirt floor and the few rough wooden benches that were part of the luxurious setting of their marriage.  The church I’d built in 1988 had meanwhile been totally replaced.  But the kamagong crucifix was still there.  Happily, there were some elderly women who peered into my face and remembered a youthful priest forty years and forty kilos earlier who’d served the urban poor community of San Pedro Resettlement.  One declared that she was part of a livelihood project called “Lovers’ Own” which my father in Beautifont had helped me run for the people.  Awesome.

So much has unfolded in my life because of a decision I made when I was seventeen.  Or, from a possibly more accurate perspective, so much has happened because of a decision God made manifest to me when I was seventeen.  I was only in first year college, but life had already unfolded so richly, and in its further unfolding would take me to doctoral studies in Germany and Austria, teaching at Ateneo de Manila, service of the urban poor community of Kristong Hari, Commonwealth, the rectorship of San Jose Seminary, the presidency of Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo de Naga University, and currently Ateneo de Davao University.

So for me, it is a very personal thing.  At seventeen I was still in first year college.  That today is the equivalent of eleventh grade.  At seventeen, when I was pondering the differences between marriage and the priesthood, between management engineering and joining the Society of Jesus, I was the age of Kian de los Santos on the same academic level as he. That Kian was framed, shot and killed in a police action gone rogue, at a time when his life was yet unfolding, is a matter of deep personal pain for me.  It could have been me at seventeen.  It could have ended all.   In the case of Kian, it did end all.

It has been stated that this is an isolated case.  But even if it were isolated, it is one case too many.  The President has just signed the Universal Access to Tertiary Education Act into law providing real hope for quality education to all Filipino learners such as Kian.  But where are we if the State on the one hand undertakes to promote their welfare through higher education, but on the other hand kills them in senior high?  Where are we if the State on the one hand undertakes at great material and human expense to fight a war against drugs for their sake, but on the other hand kills them.  When a life is taken, describing it as an isolated case rings hollow, if not cynical.   When a life is taken even as genuine collateral damage in a police operation nothing can replace that life.  When a life is taken through abominable police action that frames an innocent person as a criminal and shoots him to increase the statistics of “progress” in the war against drugs, this is a crime that cries to the heavens for justice.

The war on drugs must be fought.  The drug menace is international evil, driven by powerful forces of evil.  This is still the case.  It has for too long victimized our people with impunity.

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Fr. Shay Cullen   11 August 2017

How can it be that a child, eight years old, can seriously sexually abuse a three-year old if he did not see such lewd acts being performed? Well, that is what happened in a town south of Cebu and it seems that the eight-year old boy was allowed to surf the internet in a computer shop in an arcade and was able to view child or adult pornography. He is just one of many, according to a social worker. The adults running the internet shop in the arcade and in malls have to be held responsible. It is illegal and morally wrong to allow children access to the internet on computers that have no filters and no pornography blocking software. The Anti-Child Pornography Act of 2009 otherwise known as RA 9775 mandates this.

It is clear that the anti-child pornography and child protection laws are not known, respected or being enforced in the Philippines. In most countries, it is a serious crime for anybody to access, possess or share illegal images of children. Philippine inspectors may be corrupt and getting paid off by the internet shop managers. For sure, the Internet Server Providers (ISPs), the telecommunications companies that provide internet access, are not implementing the law. The officials of the National Telecommunications Commission are allegedly not doing their job enforcing the law. Are they in cahoots with the ISP corporations? The commissioner is supposed to report directly to the President. Now that there will be free public Internet access who will control the child pornography?

Children and young people are damaged by pornography driving an eight-year old to abuse on a three year old (www.preda.org). Their positive understanding of a female as a person to be respected and untouched is, after exposure to pornography, damaged. They see the female as an object to be abused for personal satisfaction. Pornography is destroying the personality, human development and the future of the children to have a normal relationship when they grow older. Above all there is the life-long trauma suffered by the victim-survivors.

This is a serious social and psychological problem and it is widespread and growing around the world wherever there is Internet. It is driving the increase in rape and incest. It is a grave threat to the well being of children and youth. There is little government or NGO response to combat it. The sexual abuse of children is directly connected to the availability of child porn on the Internet. But also the bad example of adults sexually abusing children in the home is worst of all .The perverted acts are surely known to the younger children in families. The young boys will get the lesson that it is approved behavior because the adult male does it and rarely is the crime reported. Frequently, the mother or relatives do not intervene or report the abuse. But it is widespread and frequent and one in three girls are victims of sexual abuse and one in six boys.

According to one report in UCAN, “children make up 77 percent of rape survivors in the Philippines, a predominantly Catholic country, and the crime occurs at a rate of two every minute. Midyear 2015 data released by the national police showed rape cases surging 63.5 percent to 8,288 from 5,069 recorded in the first six months of 2014.” It is estimated that the reported cases will double by 2017.
Many young people are addicted to watching pornography on the Internet and also violent computer war games and assassination where women are abused. The exposure to such violence desensitize the children and youth to the fact that they are practicing crimes on-line and it makes it all too easy for them to be violent in real life and to condone and approve violent solutions for every problem. This leads to violence in the home and even sexual violence if the games are sexually orientated. Perhaps that is why so many Filipinos approve the human trafficking into the sex industry and the killing of suspects in the President’s war-on-drugs. It has official approval and in a hierarchal society like the Philippines, people unthinkingly follow the leader whoever he may be.

The internet is the greatest communication tool ever invented but this technology is both a blessing and a curse by misuse. The greatest sinners besides the immoral and unscrupulous internet shops are the Internet Server Providers that enable children easy, uncontrolled internet surfing by anybody even children especially when the law says there must be blocking software to stop child pornography.

If you search the websites of the major Internet Server Providers, you will find it hard to see any reference to an anti-child pornography policy or a statement saying they comply with the law RA 7995. The law orders the ISPs to install blocking software and filters on their servers but apparently they don’t. The spread of child pornography and the growth of cybersex crime can be laid at their door. They have a case to answer.

When the heinous crimes of children being sexually abused online by live streaming for money are sent through the Internet Server Providers, we ask who are the real enablers of child abuse,? Who are the real criminals?