Editorial
Because Ms Arroyo’s legitimacy has been placed more and more in severe constitutional doubt, the administration has become more and more constitutionally reckless -- undermining civil liberties, banning executive officials from cooperating with congressional inquiries, handing out bags containing hundreds of thousands of pesos to local government executives (God knows where Malacañang gets all that money), inventing nonexistent government items or positions to which she can appoint her supporters to appease and flatter them, and compromising civilian supremacy by appointing loyal military officers to civilian posts.
All these instances of constitutional affront may be traced to her appointment of Benjamin Abalos as chair of the Commission on Elections in 2002, as the nation geared up for what has turned out to be a much-discredited 2004 presidential election. And now Abalos finds himself deeply enmeshed in a scandal involving what seems to be a grossly overpriced multimillion-dollar communications deal.
So should we wonder why the President’s men would go all-out to keep Lozada from testifying at the Senate hearing on the ZTE-NBN deal?
If the administration has become a constitutional wrecking crew, then what should people of conscience do?
If there’s any sector that should have the intellectual sophistication and moral conviction to make clear to the populace what should be done, it should be the Catholic bishops.
But what do we hear from the bishops? Right after nuns and other religious bravely shielded Lozada from the talons of the state, all that the bishops did was to hail Lozada, saying he could save the government from “scandalous and immoral kickbacks.” Could there be anything more lame and shallow than that? Worse, Archbishop Angel Lagdameo, president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, commended disgraced then-Speaker Jose de Venecia for lashing out at the government that the latter himself had propped up.
Lozada at least pleaded “mea culpa” to his transgressions as a government official; his confession was an intrinsic part of his remorse and his resolution to come clean and tell the truth. But has De Venecia even dropped by the confessional box? By now the bishops should have appreciated that the ZTE issue, more than just another instance of corruption, is an episode in a vast tapestry of abuse of power, constitutional deception and subversion -- a stark evil right in the corridors of power.
But still the bishops hem and haw, even deny they have the duty to lead the people. An instance of this is Bishop Francisco Claver’s revisionism of Jaime Cardinal Sin, the bishops and people power. He wrote in a commentary on Feb. 13 in this section: “[Cardinal Sin] wasn’t the real decision-maker for [the] occurrence [of EDSA People Power I and II] ... the real kingmakers are not the bishops but the people.”
Claver’s argument is platitudinous, if not misplaced. It overlooks the fact that in the long dark years of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship, it was Sin who boldly spoke out against the strongman and his depredations, even without the people visibly or resonantly protesting. EDSA People Power I came to pass because of the activism of Sin and later, of the bishops, who kneaded the critical mass. The people may not be marching in the streets now, but it is because they’re waiting for the clarion call of our bishops.
But the bishops seem to have jettisoned their moral and pastoral duty. They’ve become spiritual and moral illiterates. They seem unable to read the signs of the times. Perhaps checkmated by their own prudence and discretion, they’re now inspired less by the Holy Spirit and more by moral stasis. Worse, they seem to have made themselves a party to the grand constitutional larceny. Perhaps Lozada was referring to them when he quoted St. Thomas Aquinas freely, “The worst corruption is the corruption of the best.”
