By Modesto P. Sa-onoy
Although the behaviour of the priest or bishop is intolerable, that is not enough reason to leave the Church. Some simply transfer to another parish in terms of the sacraments but remain in the faith. In the past when there was only one priest and one church, the faithful had no recourse but either lie low, that is, skip going to church and wait for a new pastor.
However, Lawler in his book (published by the Catholic Education Resource Center) wrote, “it is wrong to dismiss the importance of the hierarchy. Jesus promised the Holy Spirit would guide the Church always that despite the manifest weakness of its leaders, the Church would prevail over the gates of hell. Popes and bishops have made innumerable errors of judgment over the course of generations, yet the Church still survives, the faith still spreads, while other once-powerful human institutions withered and died.”
Lawler continues. “The very fact that the Church has weathered all storms, regardless of the helmsmen’s, is in itself evidence of the Spirit’s power. As Hillaire Belloc famously quipped, the “Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine – but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted such knavish imbecility would last a fortnight.”
For those who have the patience to study human and Church history, the comparison is apt. How many empires, powerful and seemingly impregnable have come and gone? They have are mere letters in books though their knavery survived.
I recall the famous dare of Joseph Stalin, the dictator of communist Russia arrogantly saying after World War II, “How many divisions has the Pope?” He was still boasting of his hundreds of divisions of men in arms. The Church then was warning the world of the expansion of international communism. Well, where’s Stalin or Adolf Hitler now and where is the Church today even with its scandals?
Lawler noted Belloc’s description. “Knavish imbecility: those are harsh words. But in 2018, loyal Catholics are using that sort of language to describe the shocking malfeasance of bishops, especially in response to the sex abuse scandal. Our bishops have betrayed our trust; deep and pervasive corruption within the hierarchy have been exposed. As a chastened Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami observed in a September homily, ‘Our people still do believe in God; but they don‘t believe in us.’”
That is a sad commentary but true in some parts of the United States. That does not apply here in the Philippines because the bishops have still the loyalty of the faithful even if today they are perceived as unable to confront the challenges against the Church particularly under the Duterte administration and the pandemic.
We have not reached that point of extreme disgust. We still love and honor our bishops because they have lived in accordance with our expectations as holy men of God. But it is important to know that within the hierarchy there is a realization of this problem, the first step in correction.
I don’t know how many had left the Church in the Philippines because there are no statistics available. But in the US, according to America Needs Fatima, “It is truly a sad reflection of the times that more than half (52%) of all U.S. adults who were raised Catholic have left the church at some point in their lives.
“Sadly, many of our youth are no longer receiving the sacraments or practicing their faith; baptized members of the one true Church, for one reason or another, they have left the flock.”
In the 1903 Philippine schism, more than half of the people of Negros left the Catholic Church and joined the Philippine Independent Church, popularly known as the Aglipayan Church for its first Obispo Supremo, a former Catholic priest, Gregorio Aglipay.
The cause of the schism was racial discrimination that gave Spanish religious privileges to rise in the hierarchy to the detriment of the Filipino clergy. The clergy defied Rome by not recognizing Spanish bishops only the Pope. When this was denied, the Filipino priests and their flock rejected Papal authority as well and they were excommunicated.
After hierarchical changes, the Church regained the lost flock.*
