Dark Ages

Ateneo president, Fr. Ramon Villarin, has just made a plug for secular education. You want to fill your kids’ minds with the light of learning, send them to UP and the other schools in the university belt. Don’t send them to Ateneo.

That is what he unwittingly does when he takes the side of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines against his school’s teachers. The parallel that comes to mind is the Ateneo bearing down on its own teachers more than 40 years ago for having the temerity to suggest that schools in the Philippines run by the religious orders, like the Ateneo, ought to be “Filipinized” or have its highest positions turned over to Filipinos. Which was not unlike the demands of the Filipino priests during Rizal’s time for the local parishes to be turned over to them.

Today, that is not just logical, that is the commonsensical, and you wonder how it could ever have been otherwise. That is how Villarin is the president of the Ateneo and not some blond and blue-eyed Jesuit from the backwaters of America.

I would have thought Ateneo would be proud to have teachers like the ones who endorsed the RH bill. Mind-bogglingly, it is ashamed of them. The teachers now face, with Villarin’s cooperation, being sacked for teaching things contrary to canon law. They now face, with Villarin’s endorsement, religious retribution for committing the heinous act of heresy.

Frankly, I never thought I’d hear the word “heresy” again in this day and age. Even in this country, whose current president is arduously, and desperately, trying to pluck it out from obscurantism and superstition.

Where lies the heresy?

It is in believing that we should really be deathly concerned about the real people, or existent flesh-and-flood, who are the men, women and children who huddle in the cold and dark each time they abandon their cardboard shanties by the estero to the floods, and not the unreal and nonexistent Great Unborn who are the phantasmagorical beings that should be there but aren’t because you sent your seed flying to a tissue paper or to a condom, who are real only to those who live in the unreal luxury of their bishops’ palaces.

It is in believing that sex is a wondrous thing, a life-affirming thing, a blissful thing that you ought to be able to experience without the reckless fatalism of a juvenile, bahala na si Batman kung magkabuntisan, or without the fear of spawning mouths you cannot feed; it is not a bad thing, a sinful thing, a punishment for being human whose torments priests themselves often like to endure.

All this reminds us of how the Church has often stood before learning, with its opposition in the Middle Ages to the teaching that the earth revolved around the sun (persecuting Galileo to discourage the belief) and its excoriation in the more Advanced Ages of the teaching that man evolved from lower species and not from Adam and Eve (persecuting Darwin to discourage the belief). It reminds us of how the friars withheld the teaching of Spanish to the indio as they might become uppity and start believing they could be the equal of Spaniards, or heaven forbid, better than them (as Rizal showed), they were better off living in fear of the torments of hell, a destination especially reserved for those who wanted to live lives of less than servile abjectness.

Not quite incidentally, both the centrality of the sun in relation to the planets and evolution are now staple in Catholic universities. Though the way things are in this country, that could always be revoked. The irony is that “catholic” means “of broad and liberal scope.” But what Bishop Leandro Medroso’s CBCP seems determined to do is to turn Catholic schools, like the Ateneo, into parochial schools, in every sense of the word “parochial.”

I’m tempted to suggest in light of the CBCP’s demand that those who cannot abide by Church teachings should get out of Catholic schools, if not get booted out of them, that they in fact do and teach instead in UP and the university-belt universities. Let’s see what happens to “institutions of higher learning” like the Ateneo. But in the end, I don’t see why they should. In the end, this is really not an issue about learning, this is an issue about power.

This is about the Catholic Church wanting us to forget it found nothing sacrilegious about Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo saying, “God put me here,” and bolstered her claims to being God’s gift to Christendom. This is about the Catholic Church flexing muscle, saying conscience has gone far enough, there is only one conscience and it is that provided by the Church, there is only one interpretation and it is that provided by the Church, there is only one truth and it is that provided by the Church. This is about the Church saying divorce is a sin, women priests are an abomination, contraception is corruption, you don’t believe that, get out of Catholic schools, get out of the Church, get out of our sight.

It’s a throwback to the days when to own a Bible was a crime deserving of torture and death, both of which were liberally meted out in Henry VIII’s time until he put a stop to it. It’s a throwback to the days when the faithful were forbidden to have a personal relationship with God, or indeed to presume to interpret the word of God, only the Church could do it, which was why it outlawed the owning—and reading—of the Bible to begin with. It’s a throwback to the time when Martin Luther, seeing the corruption and ignorance and despotism of the Church, led a monumental protest against it to get Christians to know Christ’s teachings directly, for most of them for the first time in their lives.

Short of turning Protestant, that is what Filipino Catholics in their right minds—emphasis on minds—ought to do. Why resign? Fight back.

Or go back to the Dark Ages.