Excommunication

Why am I not surprised? Last week, Pope Francis did another dazzling thing. He excommunicated the Mafia, something that was nowhere near the horizon of his predecessors. “Those who in their life have gone along the evil ways, as in the case of the Mafia,” he told a crowd of 200,000 during a sermon the other Saturday, “they are not with God, they are excommunicated.”

His challenge had the faithful fearing for his life. “Will Pope Francis ‘sleep with the fishes’?” newspaper articles asked the next day. “Sleep with the fishes” being, of course, a famous line in “The Godfather,” a reference to the Mafiosi dropping their enemies to the bottom of the sea. Excommunicating the Mafiosi didn’t just put their souls in peril, it put their bodies in that state as well. The Church has always been a good friend of the Mafia, many Mafiosi being generous contributors to its coffers. In return, the Church has given them an institutional front, legitimizing their activities and giving them respectability in society.

Which caused analysts like John Dickie, a professor at the University College London and author of several books on Italian organized crime, to theorize: “The real audience of Pope Francis’ message was the local Church. There is a very long history of silence and complicity with the Catholic Church and the Mafia. For years many priests have been happy to allow the Mafia to dress themselves up as upstanding members of communities.”

All this had me thinking: The local Catholic Church has always professed an adherence to the Vatican. If that’s so, why can’t the bishops follow in the Pope’s footsteps and do something along these lines? In lieu of excommunicating the sundry criminal syndicates that specialize in robbing banks and jacking cars, and murdering those that get in their way—for all their heinousness, they are nothing like the Mafia—why not excommunicate the egregiously corrupt in our midst?

They are the true bane of our society. They are the one thing that festers and spreads throughout the nation like a cancer. Getting rid of them, or at least pushing them back, is a moral imperative in the sense that Pope Francis interprets moral imperative as something that’s akin to uplifting the plight of the poor. Excommunicating the Mafia is all of a piece with his propoor stance. Crime doesn’t just ravage society, it ravages the poor in particular. The same is true of corruption: It doesn’t just ravage this country in general, it ravages our poor in particular. Fighting it is the stuff of true morality.

Nothing does that better than cutting off the corrupt from the country’s spiritual life, if not indeed excommunicating them, or threatening to. After all, it wasn’t too long ago when some of the bishops and their loyalists were proposing to excommunicate those advocating reproductive health. And doing so in the name of the Vatican, even though even Pope Benedict never thought to go to these lengths. Now, here’s something infinitely worth emulating, and the bishops can always cite the Vatican as inspiration. In lieu of excommunicating the criminal syndicates, our most corrupt. That is the biggest, if not very organized, crime syndicate of all in these parts.

We can always start with those convicted of corruption who moreover never gave back their loot. It should eventually include Ferdinand Marcos and his cronies and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and her cronies, who continue to enjoy the fruits of their exertions. Look at Imelda’s lifestyle to this day. Look at Mike Arroyo’s lifestyle to this day. In fact, I wouldn’t mind seeing them first in line among the excommunicated.

Who knows? Maybe Chito Tagle, the primus inter pares among Church officials and the closest to Pope Francis we’ve got, can initiate this, or something like it.

At the very least, cutting them off from the faithful, who make up most of the population, can’t be very good for their souls or their bodies. We are as resolute a Catholic country as Italy, if not indeed more so, the depths of religious devotion hereabouts often taking fanatical expressions. Most Filipinos take their eternal salvation pretty seriously, the nastiest people in this country, like the Mafiosi, hearing Mass and going to confession faithfully, finding no particular contradiction between that and raping, stealing, and murdering.

Quite apart from that, even if their religiosity is merely put on—have you noticed that the three senators all heard Mass, spoke of prayer, and invoked God as their witness to being innocent, with no great fear about being hit by lightning—their businesses, or rackets, are not, and being officially cited as objects of divine displeasure is bound to impact on them. Like the Mafiosi, their wealth thrives from being looked up to by the community, from being routinely made sponsors at baptisms, weddings, and whatever else needs sponsoring.

At the very most, the excommunication of the corrupt, or its equivalent, should also be a way of reforming the Church. Like Pope Francis’ message, this one can also have for its audience the clergy itself, the priests themselves, the bishops themselves. It’s worlds better than the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines merely railing at the corrupt for their utter shamelessness, which it did only recently. Which is all very well, except that it presumes that the indicters are completely exempt from it. When in fact, as with the Mafiosi, there is a long history of silence and conspiracy between the Church and the corrupt of this country. We do not have to look very far back to see it. It was in full bloom during Arroyo’s rule, involving the CBCP itself, garlanded by the mottos “Everybody cheats anyway” and “Let’s move on.”

Well, let’s move on—without them.