Baby Brandon, Glyzelle and reality
(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 01-26-2015 MON)
Last Friday three-year-old Brandon Emmanuel Lao, who suffered from a hole in his heart, along with pulmonary hypertension and a damaged left lung, died at the St. Luke’s Medical Center in Quezon City. Baby Brandon would have been just another statistic except for the fact that he was the baby at the crowd meeting with Pope Francis at the Mall of Asia Arena over a week ago selected by a Vatican security to be blessed by the pontiff.
According to Rappler, “It was a meeting that was never supposed to happen but Pope Francis’ encounter with 3-year-old Brandon gives hope and comfort to his parents, and maybe even the rest of the world.”
If only Baby Brandon did not die and lived to his fourth, twelfth, sixteenth, and even more birthdays, the Philippine and Catholic media would have most certainly proclaimed him year after year as “The Miracle” of the latest pontiff’s blessing and the hope to the world.
The local Roman Catholic Church, from the bishops down to the laity, would have also trumpeted this as evidence of the “special place” of the Philippines in the Christian world. But was that meeting of Brandon “never supposed to be” or was it a PR opportunity the Vatican staff are always alert to, which, unfortunately this time, did not end up a “miracle”?
Days after Baby Brandon was given a papal blessing, a former street child and ward of a Catholic community-run charity, 12-year-old Glyzelle Iris Palomar, one of the selected youth audience for the papal visit to the University of Santo Tomas, tearfully asked the pope, “Many children get involved in drugs and prostitution. Why does God allow these things to happen to us? The children are not guilty of anything.” The pope, in turn replied, “Let God surprise you,” after which he turned to the audience and said, “She is the only one who has put forward a question for which there is no answer and she was not even able to express it in words but rather in tears.”
Glyzelle was actually crystal clear in her words as she obviously had deep personal reflections of a fellow street child’s plight. It was the Pontiff who was flabbergasted, judging by his failure to comfort and teach. Perhaps in defense of this deflection, some would say, “But would a 12-year-old understand a serious explanation?” Glyzelle’s perceptivity would most certainly have allowed her to. Instead the pope told the audience, “I invite each one of you to ask yourselves, ‘Have I learned how to weep, how to cry when I see a hungry child, a child on the street who uses drugs, a homeless child, an abandoned child, an abused child, a child that society uses as a slave?’”
At my age, I have never, ever encountered a more obscurantist answer--never! Strangely, Francis did not appeal for reforms as people have come to expect, such as in this headline from the UK’s Catholic Herald of May 22, 2014: “Pope Francis warns of the dangers of ‘unbridled capitalism.’” So what cat got the pope’s tongue here?
There are so many evils of unbridled capitalism in the Philippines that have created uncounted numbers of Glyzelles in the country, such as the unbridled electricity industry profits destroying the economy and jobs and the capitalist entertainment culture of sex, crime, and violence despoiling the nation.
The Philippine Catholic Church has been silent on the massive profit gouging inflicting the highest power and water rates in Asia that the poor of this society can no longer afford. I have raised these issues since the late 1990s with church officials to no avail, from Bishops Bacani to Tobias (the latter of whom once agreed that action should be taken but then fell silent on it). A lay Catholic leader, incensed by the profit abuses, wanted to secure a time slot on Radio Veritas to hammer these issues but was told that one of the sacred cows of the radio network is this telecommunications advertiser that also owns a major power utility company. So there you have it--just learn to weep and cry.
The papal visit cost P200 million for security alone, enough for a year of public education for 15,000 children and for feeding 28,571 of the poorest families (as per the NSCB estimate of P7,000 per family) for a month. Three non-working holidays already cost P3.6 billion in economic losses as thousands upon thousands of workers lost billions in daily wages. But the worse impact has been cultural--where reality is swept under the rug, as street children were whisked to “resorts” and blissful insanity wafted even into erstwhile critical, progressive intelligentsias’ brains, so much so that after a week, news headlines still imagine or milk papal “assassination” stories for distraction.
Even if I stand alone, and I hope I’m not, the denunciation of such “nincom-popes” must be waged.
(Listen to Sulô ng Pilipino, 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.; watch GNN Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; search Talk News TV and date of showing on YouTube; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)
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