Apparently, there was a sympathy vote for the late, defeated presidential candidate Fernando Poe Jr. At least that is what many commentators, both professional and on-Facebook-only, assure us is the meaning of Grace Poe’s 20 million votes.
I must disagree with the esteemed Randy David, when in his May 9 column he lumped election surveys together with “political dynasties, religious meddling in politics, [and] corporate financing of electoral campaigns” as obstacles to modernity.
That line is from “The American President,” a political romance starring Michael Douglas which the incumbent American president recently described (for comedic effect, but not inaccurately) as “Aaron Sorkin’s liberal fantasy.”
The various rumors and sightings and reports and postings about “leftist priests” encouraged by the election of Pope Francis took on solid shape the other day, when the Associated Press ran a major feature story with reporting from four cities in the Americas. With the midterm elections looming, I could not help but read the story with the May 13 vote—and specifically with Risa Hontiveros, the senatorial candidate who to me most embodies Catholic social teaching—in mind.
The results of the April 13-15 Social Weather Stations survey are in, and for the first time two nonreelectionist candidates for the Senate have broken into the Top 4. The number of survey respondents who said they would vote for Nancy Binay and Cynthia Villar rose from 47 percent in March to 49 percent in April, enough for them to tie for joint 3rd-4th place.
I see that Brother Mike Velarde of the El Shaddai Catholic charismatic renewal movement is up to his favorite old trick again: preaching to the converted. With the usual fanfare, he named the first six senatorial candidates endorsed by the so-called White Vote, a bloc of Catholic Church-affiliated organizations, at a prayer assembly last Saturday. It is no coincidence that five of the six are doing well in the surveys.
Supporters OF Risa Hontiveros were the first to point this out to me. She was doing worse at this stage of the campaign in 2010, they said, and yet she still came tantalizingly close to winning then.
The retired cardinal archbishop of Manila, Gaudencio Rosales, had a ready answer when asked, upon returning from the conclave in Rome, why the media failed to predict the identity of the new pope. “God does not read social media,” he said.
Manolo Quezon, Malacañang’s resident thinker, was kind enough to respond in detail to my column questioning the constitutional basis or historical warrant for the 5th Republic. Since his reply is over twice as long as our letters page permits, I am running it in this space; however, I have had to delete about two paragraphs’ worth of detail to make it all fit:
I haven’t finished reading Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle’s dissertation, a theological thriller titillatingly titled “Episcopal Collegiality and Vatican II: The Influence of Paul VI,” just yet, but one passage has struck me with the force of revelation.
Among the many commentaries and perspective-setting pieces I’ve read on Lahad Datu and the crisis in northern Borneo, I found five particularly useful. Some conflict with others on crucial points; each has a different emphasis—but all agree that history is alive, kicking dust in Sabah.
I suppose that anyone who has seen Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle speak can testify to his gifts as a preacher: He is a truly engaging speaker, who connects to his audience both because he appears to be thinking on his feet, fashioning his words to suit or reflect the nuances of the occasion, and because his preaching is animated by a very strong sense of structure, and thus of direction. His audience knows where they are at any given moment, and where the good bishop is headed.
