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FABC Easter Message in the Age of Anxiety by Cardinal Charles Maung Bo

Easter Message by Cardinal Charles Maung Bo, Archbishop of Yangon, Myanmar

Dear Friends in Christ,

Happy Easter!

Let the hope of the Risen Lord continue to throw the light in our path.  Say with joy “Alleluia! Jesus is risen!”   Resurrection is our faith, resurrection is our hope.  More than any year we need more faith and hope in 2020.

True – these are dark days – a huge, suffocating cloud of fear and anxiety engulfs the whole humanity.  Like the ‘Dark Night of Soul’ experienced by saints like St John of the Cross, the whole humanity’s hope is strangled by the darkness of despair that comes in the name of COVID.  These are tough times, abnormal times, these are periods of faith in which our certainties, hopes for the future, beliefs about God, and even faith itself are eclipsed.   Half a million people are infected, more than 22,000 people have died and 200 countries are affected.   Italy has seen 63 priests and more than 20 doctors perishing in their service to the affected people.  The Four Horsemen of Apocalypse seemed to have arrived.

Yet we proclaim with joy “Alleluia! Jesus is risen!”

COVID-19 is virtually the Way of the Cross for humanity.   Thousands have been crucified to a cruel death by a viral organism that cannot be seen by eyes.  Thousands have been walking an excruciating Way of the Cross in many countries.   We pray that thousands afflicted and walking in their way of the Cross, be strengthened by the faith that the Cross ends in Resurrection.

So let us shout with joy – despite all challenges – “Alleluia! Jesus has risen!”

But COVID-19 challenges our faith.  The Catholic Church is about communion.  In joy and fellowship, in every mass we gather to affirm and celebrate our communion. Our mission is to build communion and yet in this time of crisis, we seem to surrender ourselves to isolation. Paradoxical as it may seem, keeping distance from one another means we truly care for each other, because we want to stop the transmission of the deadly virus.

The most painful reality has been that churches are closed.  Pope Francis once said the Church should be like a “field hospital”, available where human brokenness and the wounded need the healing touch of Mother Church. Yet the places where we sought God, where we shed our silent tears of brokenness and sought human fellowship are now closed.  The Vatican remains closed.   In many countries, the Sacrament of Communion, the Eucharist, is stopped.  What wars and persecutions could not do, the invisible virus achieved without much ado.

This is painful.  This is a long “Holy Saturday”, when the Church waits amidst all signs of death. “Holy Saturday” when the Church “abstains from the celebration of the Eucharist” meditating on the passion of the Lord and awaiting his resurrection.

We, Catholics and all humanity, wait with hope that this Holy Saturday will end with a victorious Easter.   All long dark nights end with the dawn.  Evil has an expiry date. Good has none. The Church is God’s hope-generating agency.  So with joy and hope say:  “Alleluia! Jesus is risen! 

With the Psalmist let us sing with hope in these troubled times:

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom should I fear?
The Lord is my life’s refuge; of whom should I be afraid?
For God will hide me in his shelter in time of trouble,
He will conceal me in the cover of his tent.
                                   Psalm 27: 1, 5

Humanity and the Church have waded through valleys of tears before:  the various plagues mentioned in the Bible, the Black Plague of the Middle Ages, when half of European people perished and nearly half of the church personnel sacrificed their lives, the ‘Spanish’ Flu that took more than 50 million of world population. Nothing new now.

COVID-19 will leave nothing unchanged. This angel of death, like the Seventh Seal of the Book of Revelation, brings a shattering message.  Nothing will be same again. The way we worship, the way we relate with one another, the way we work, will all change.  We are at the dawn of a new consciousness, a radically fresh approach to our life as the human family in a fragile world.   Social distance risks bringing social paranoia – fear of my brother and sister. Instead, we must insist that these measures arise from and lead to new forms of solidarity.

COVID-19, the invisible virus, has already taught existential lessons: the richest and more powerful nations that have arrogantly stockpiled nuclear arms and weapons, are brought to knees by a virus.   World powers that arrogantly negate all transcendent powers, learn with humility that life is fragile and that we all need one another.  More than anything, all powers can learn to acknowledge the presence of a Power that is above all.   With great pain many countries realize that they have more soldiers in their countries in the business of killing than they have doctors who can save lives.   Humanity itself is on the way of the Cross. May this Cross lead all nations to consign enmity and war to fire and, rather, see resurrection in human solidarity. Now is the time for the Church to accompany the world in this resurrection to justice and human solidarity.

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Urgent Appeal for Help for the Urban Poor and Workers’ Communities

23 March 2020

To Our Church Networks:

Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? (Jeremiah 8:22)

Certainly, the poor ones are among the most vulnerable in the on-going COVID-19 outbreak. The recent Enhanced Community Quarantine approach of the government had brought more confusion and deep burdens on the poor. Even daily wage earners who “cross borders” to work as vendors, construction workers, industrial workers, have been trapped in a policy that would turn them into “violators” of Republic Act No. 11332.

People on the ground are not accessing the “promised” relief packages from the local government.  We have received appeals from urban poor and workers communities in Metro Manila particularly Valenzuela and Navotas City.   The community quarantine imposed by the government hinders their daily mobility to work. People are hungry and praying for help.

In solidarity with the urban poor and workers communities which we have our partner organizations, we appeal for your generosity. We plead for immediate assistance in order to respond to families who are not able to meet basic needs of their families.  As we knock at the door of your compassionate hearts, we invite you to share in solidarity with families who live by scavenging, laundry work, construction, selling vegetables, pedicab or tricycle driver, barangay volunteer and other odd jobs. We will continue our efforts to join with them as they continue to seek justice and positive change for their communities. However, at this time, they very much need immediate relief from worries and anxieties and for some families’ pangs of hunger.

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MESSAGE FOR THE NATIONAL WEEK OF PRAYER

Archbishop Romulo G. Valles, DD
CBCP President

[Through RadyoPilipinas, March 25, 2020 at 9:30 am]

The declaration by our National Government for a National Week of Prayer is very much appreciated. It shows that we are a nation that is truly “Maka-Diyos”, a people with a deep sense of God. In the midst of the grim mystery and reality of death, of suffering, of the threats of the Corona Virus Disease that we are facing, deep in our hearts, we also believe in the presence of God in our midst – a God who is merciful and compassionate, a God who is mindful of our sufferings.

And we manifest and express this conviction in these days of trial and suffering by our collective prayer as a nation.

It is a prayer, I hope, that keeps us close to the Lord, and I believe that when we are close to the Lord in prayer, we will realize that the Lord to whom we pray, desires for us to be with Him in looking out for those who are the weakest and the most vulnerable in this time of crisis – the elderly, those who are sickly, the young children, those in the frontlines in the tasks of keeping us safe and well – those in the medical and health frontlines, those in the peace and order frontlines, those who keep social services necessary operating – and those who are suffering in hunger because they have lost much of their daily income that will bring food to their tables day after day.

As we deepen our trust and confidence in the Lord as a nation, may our prayer also lead us to a rediscovery of our God-given capacity to look after others who are most in need in our midst.

As a nation, let us continue praying together. May our Lord Jesus continue to bless us; May our Blessed Mother, the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, keep us under her motherly protection.

‘Proximate Justice’: When hope and history rhyme

Marielle Lucenio, Philippines
December 23, 2019

Filipino journalists and activists mark the anniversary of the 2009 massacre of 58 people in the southern Philippine region of Mindanao. (Photo by Basilio Sepe)

The news of the unspeakable slaughter echoed across every channel when 58 people, 32 of whom were journalists, were killed in the southern Philippines on the morning of Nov. 23, 2009.

I was just 12 years old when the carnage was unleashed. I was old enough to know that it was evil, yet still too young to understand just how far things can go.

It was only when I wrote about the massacre’s seven year observance that I was confronted with what appeared to be the definitive end of press freedom — along with my optimism.

I remember lawyer Romel Bagares, who helped prosecute the perpetuators of the massacre, saying that “ultimate justice is still on the horizon”, even though we don’t have a “God’s eye point of view.”

I found his words frustrating. How can a lawyer believe that one doesn’t get full justice in this life?

Justice it seems, is always proximate. The phrase “proximate justice” was coined by Steven Gerber of the Washington Institute.

He wrote: “When we pray, ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,’ we are yearning for the way things ought to be, and someday will be — even as we give ourselves to what can be in a world where evil persists, sometimes very malignantly.”

His idea refers to the acceptance that justice in this world will always be incomplete.

It is making peace with the reality that something is better than nothing. It is learning to be content with some justice, some hope, and some mercy.

Filipino journalists commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Ampatuan massacre at Santa Pudenziana Basilica in Rome, Italy on Nov. 17. (shutterstock.com photo)

And yet it is frustrating still, because those 58 people who were killed deserve something more.

Ten years after that unthinkable massacre, another unthinkable event occurred — on Dec. 19, a verdict was handed down in the decade-long trial.

Of the 197 suspects charged, 80 still remain at large, while 56 were acquitted and a total of 43 were convicted, including scions of the powerful Ampatuan clan who, witnesses claimed, were the masterminds of the crime.

Eight members of the clan were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole.

It might be “acceptable” for a nation that has been waiting years for the trial to come to an end, but not enough for the victims’ families who were expecting all the guilty to be brought to justice.

All the same, the lawyers for the families see the result as a “victory.”

“Let us not see it through the numbers. It’s true that we can’t get absolute justice. We can’t always take back what we have lost,” said lawyer Rachel Pastores.

“The families will always be incomplete, but we should see that the struggles we had to endure for ten years resulted in good things,” she said.

Theodre Deatherage of the Washington Institute related the yearning for justice to Advent.

“Advent teaches us how to live as we wait. To know that because the world’s brokenness, as well as our own, breaks the heart of God, it must break our hearts, too,” he wrote.

“It implicates us in the way things turn out and teaches us to live differently, to fully embrace values of that kingdom which has come but not yet fully. It affirms our hearts’ longing for rescue, our cry, ‘O come, Emmanuel, and ransom us’.”

It is difficult to make sense and peace out of “proximate justice,” the only justice we can get now.

Yet, there is comfort in the idea of pursuing true justice, the one that is to be fulfilled only by God— to believe that heaven can turn agony into eternal bliss.

It is no small thing to ask the families of the victims and more so, those of Bebot Momay — the 58th victim in the gruesome massacre whose case was dismissed due to lack of “corpus delicti” — to make peace with proximate justice.

There are stories so unimaginable they make us lose hope. Through proximal justice, however, as the Irish poet Seamus Heaney once wrote: “the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme.”

I have come to realize it is through “proximate justice” that we begin again to believe that there’s a much bigger pair of hands working on true justice, and it takes so much faith to know that it is only through those hands that the universe is to be made right.

Marielle Lucenio reports for UCA.News in Manila. The views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of UCA News.

Regent Foods planning ‘run-away shop’ tactic after Mayor Vico warning, workers say

November 20, 2019

Regent Foods Corporation (RFC) management is set to implement a “run-away shop” tactic with its threat to transfer out of Pasig City, the snack manufacturer’s striking workers said.

“The Regent management just proved what we have been pointing out since we started our strike and mounted our picketlines last October 16 — that the RFC management will implement a runaway shop and lockout of its plant in Pasig City to get rid of the issues we are raising,” Regent Food Workers Union (RFWU) president Tita Cudiamat said.

Cudiamat was reacting to RFC’s statement that it is now mulls transferring its business out of Pasig City after Mayor Vico Sotto advised the company to rethink its position of filing charges against its striking workers.

“If you want to have a healthy relationship with our city, I highly suggest you rethink your position,” Sotto warned.

“Moving forward, RFC may simply accept its fate that the Pasig City Administration will unjustly make life hard for it and its 400-strong workforce, and contemplate simply bringing its business elsewhere,” the company said in a statement.

Cudiamat however said that RFC’s reaction to Sotto’s warning proves the company’s “illegal” plans.

Labor group Defend Jobs Philippines echoed the strikers’ accusations that RFC implemented a “long  list of unfair labor practices against their workers.”

“For the longest time, striking workers have been airing out and complaining about the management’s attempt of runaway shop, lockout, union busting, unfair labor practices, contractualization, low wages, unpaid benefits, and violations of the workers right to union and strike,” Defend Job Philippines spokesperson Christian Lloyd Magsoy said in a statement.

Magsoy defended Sotto who also raised funds to allow some of those arrested, including a bystander, to post bail last Monday.

“No amount of defensive statements and baseless attacks against Mayor Vico can justify the long-drawn hardships of Regent workers for almost three decades of existence of this company,” Magsoy said.

Both RFWU and Defend Jobs Philippines warned the RFC management to brace itself for countercharges they plan to file in several legal venues the company’s “unfair labor practices, abusive acts…and the violent dispersal” last November 9 that also injured several workers. “Instead of lying and spreading fake news and charges, the RFC management must focus in addressing our legitimate concerns. If they will remain firm in fabricating lies and stories, then we have no resort but to fight back in whatever legal and just means possible,” Cudiamat said. # (Raymund B. Villanueva)