February 7, 1989
Hold Fast to What is Good
If you were lucky – if the acoustics and
speaker system of your parish church are good, if the celebrant had good
diction and wasn’t in a great rush, and if the length of it failed to lull you
to sleep – you finally heard what the good bishops have to say on the
fundamentalist scourge last Sunday.
Otherwise, dig up last Sunday’s edition of
the papers. They had brought us the story at crack of dawn, with full text or
extensive quotes therefrom as well as background and reactions from both sides.
All agree it was the biggest Church story
to break since the hierarchy finally turned its back on Mr. Marcos in 1986. But
its impact was blunted, and by no other than those it concerned the most – our
pastors. As of the last mass of the day, they had not yet received their
imprimatured copies of the text.
Whatever the story behind the story was,
last Sunday’s reading of the pastoral from the pulpit was anti-climactic. At
best, it came after all the blood from the message had been drained. At worst,
it made our parish priests look like stooges. Which brings me to the point I
deem most needful of stressing.
Hold
fast to what is good, as such Church pronouncements
go, is an outstanding one: elegant, sober and precise. As it should be, for the
doctrinal teachings it reiterates are profound and fundamental, and the errors
it repudiates grave and insidious. But is it enough?
I’m afraid that to see the born-again
movement as being primarily a doctrinal issue is to miss the raison d’etre of
its overwhelming success altogether. And to fight it on that ground is to doom
any hope of a counterfoil ab initio.
For when all is said and done,
fundamentalism is not about dogma or substance, as it is about personal
charisma and form. More precisely, it is about communications skills and
logistics, in which the born-agains are past masters and the Church itself,
frankly, a bungling amateur, in this country at least.
Debate doctrine with the fundamentalists,
and you fall into a snake pit. You may say all the right things, but they say
the wrong things with more flourish and repeat them more often that they
become, excuse the pun, bible truth.
In effect, this is the Thomasites story all
over again. Picture it: the most wholesome Caucasians descending on some
God-forsaken barangay in the boondocks to dispense honeyed words as well as
free medicine, free sandwiches and soft drinks and yes, free bibles. When such
gods come visiting, who can resist?
Are city mice less pervious to such charms?
Just vary the approach a little and yoy get them equally hooked.
To employees, offer group dynamics
seminars, with bible lessons thrown in for free, of course. To businessmen and
professionals, how about a fellowship in a hotel ballroom with your own kind,
where you talk about faith, yes, but also prosperity?
In these fora and on the TV and radio talk
shows the fundamentalists have now pre-empted, the message is always upbeat,
the communicators attractive, voluble, and eloquent, the atmosphere familiar,
joyous and exuberant. If you don’t get what I mean, watch the 700 Club.
Their point, of course, is not theory but
practice – how to acquire what one glossy booklet now making the rounds calls
Power for Living. Success through faith: the born-again phenomenon has thrived
because it has been able to drive home that fundamental equation better than
anyone else.
And what has the Church offered the
bewildered and the wavering as an alternative so far? Not much, to put it
mildly.
Churches that are invariably filthy and
overcrowded. Uninspired services. Meandering, haphazard homilies. Ancient
curates grumpy to be bothered for confessions, baptisms, blessings or funerals,
and younger ones equally averse to taking on such dull routines, busy as they
are teaching the poor to curse their fate.
The nuns and seminarians? A strident,
embittered lot whose notion of holy zeal is to rail on TV shows, man picket
lines and march beneath red banners. Who take care of the classrooms? Lay
catechists, part-timers for the most part, just slightly more enlightened than
their charges.
So there’s the rub as I see it. The Church
has no one to match Pat’s, Ronald’s, Ray’s and Nestor’s winning ways, no
success stories in the league of Gary V. and Jolas (who needs graven idols when
you have the real thing?) to show off, and definitely no free sandwiches, soft
drinks or bibles to bait the masses with.
Hold on to what is good? The Church’s first
job, it seems to me, is to to prove that we, not they, have the goodies. The
battle is now joined. Abangan!
