I must hand it to the Iglesia ni Cristo (INC) leadership the way they mustered thousands of their members to march to the Department of Justice in Manila and then on to the EDSA Shrine in Mandaluyong. The phenomenon of an indigenous religious sect coming out in droves to defend its interests is awe-inspiring; that is, if you discount the hundreds of thousands more who were stranded at EDSA on a Friday payday—people who clearly were not members of the religious sect and who just wanted to go home and rest.
The closest I can recall of a single, united sectarian group marching in droves was during the bloody Sakdalista Uprising of May 2-3, 1935, when about 65,000 Sakdalistas (from the Tagalog “Sakdal,” to accuse) seized many municipalities around Manila in a bid to stop the May 14 plebiscite to ratify the Commonwealth Constitution. The comparison is of course tenuous at best, but one can imagine what might have happened had not cooler heads prevailed and a mob forced its way inside the DOJ compound on the birthday of Justice Secretary Leila Delima.
What the INC has shown to the rest of us non-members is that it can whip up thousands of its members on short notice, believers who will toe the line without question and behave according to the dictates of the sect’s leaders relayed on the field. And when the time came to back down, pack up and go home, everyone followed without question.
Now, imagine if the 92 million Filipinos who are supposed to be avowed Catholics are harnessed in such similar fashion. It is alleged, for example, that the INC is a coveted political machinery all by itself, able to deliver about 80 percent of its total membership to vote according to what is handed down from the leadership. If only Catholics were such a united cohesive group, you can just imagine how the Philippines would look like by now.
All those rants and raves in homily after homily about corruption in government, about delays in the delivery of basic services, about how the poor and the downtrodden remain, well, poor and downtrodden despite the promises after promises of president after president.
And then imagine if the next president and all our elected officials were Catholics and would follow only the dictates of the Pope as it is handed down to the Cardinal Archbishop Luis Antonio Tagle and the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines. Nothing proceeds in government without the approval of this huge religious sector called Roman Catholicism.
The thought is both beautiful and yet dreadful in the same vein. We can look no farther than at the Islamic Republic of Iran and its political leadership closely monitored by a Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to see the result.
I am sure, for example, that all these shenanigans that attend the endless, simultaneous road rehabilitation and repair of all the major streets of Cebu, Mandaue and other cities in the metropolis will become a thing of the past.
And those government engineers with a twisted sense of priority who planned all these repairs to happen in one single year will be hanged for all to see.
But then again, therein lies the danger when a religious sect imposes its interests and its will on the rest. Its system of punishments and rewards will prevail over reason; its vision of the world forced on everyone. And then everyone is monitored, spied upon to ensure strict compliance.
I am sure there are many good things that one can find in one’s religion. But the fact that there are other competing religions is a sign no single religion or belief, no matter how many the believers, is perfect.
That is the reason why humans have to be tempered by laws, by normative prescriptions. Otherwise we end up killing each other in the name of one’s religious convictions. In the end, the INC should be lauded for allowing reason to prevail over emotion and self-interest. No one should be above the law, not even a monolithic sect with an axe to grind, whether valid or not, against anyone, much less a sitting member of the executive branch of this government.
Speaking of road repairs, the general public was told a year ago that all these were being carried out in order to prepare Cebu for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings. So why are these repairs still happening when we just welcomed APEC delegates? Can anyone please explain to us what is going on?