The Roman Catholic Church and Poverty

This topic is very much in the news with the election of a new Pope who projects himself as pro-poor with his adoption of a name associated with a deep love for the poor and the downtrodden. All the media coverage and pronouncements from the Vatican have all been consistent in positioning the new Pope as a seemingly uncompromising advocate for plans and programs that will benefit the poor.

It will be interesting to find out how this apparent adoption of a pro-poor policy will get reflected in programs implemented by Church institutions at national and sub-national levels or more importantly, in local communities more disadvantaged than others. The vigorous media campaign on this new thrust has effectively deflected media noise and public concerns from sex scandals involving priests. Quite a smart move on the part of the Vatican mass media department.

It will be interesting how the new policy thrust (I actually do not know the old thrust, if there is one!) in Bohol, in the province where I have lived for a significant number of years. The province is noted for being religious and conservative; there are chapels or small bisita at village level. It is a place where you can find priests even in remote areas. The province also supplies a good number of priests to parishes in nearby provinces in the Visayas and Mindanao.

Bohol is one of the few provinces, if not the only one, where the public pray three times a day in the various shopping malls: at the opening of the shops in the morning; at 3 p.m. for what they call the three o'clock habit; and during Angelus, at 6 in the evening. Since the 1980s, all the tricycles in the town display Biblical sayings. It is a province where children and young people carry on the tradition of kissing the hand of elders as sign of respect.

You can see the credibility of the Church, including the barangay chapels, on Sundays during the two rounds of solicitations for contributions in each Mass. The response for cash contributions seems consistently significant. In Baclayon, for instance, a municipality of only around 9,000 households, the church raised the staggering amount of Php 12 million in three years for a modern convent where the parish priests live. In the light of the new pro-poor thrust of Pope Francis, it will be interesting to find out if the parishioners' contributions will now go to pro-poor projects of the Social Action Center.

This publicity about the Catholic Church and Poverty has led me to remember some traumatic experiences I had in my home province, Quezon, which profoundly influenced the path I took in my life.

In my second year high in Lucena, at the Quezon Provincial High School, I was encouraged to be an auxiliary member of the Legion of Mary, a popular lay organization involved in both spiritual and social welfare activities. As auxiliary or junior member, at age 14, I was assigned to a community of informal settlers in the abandoned airstrip in Lucena a few kilometers from our school.

My task was collect information from each family, e.g. were the husband and wife married in church; the children baptized or given confirmation; did they go to church on Sunday. I recall being always shouted out of the house. More often, I would arrive in the house and find the father or an adult member of the family drunk and in a foul mood.

By the rude way they answered me, I knew my questions were not their concerns. Eventually, I lost interest in my task as volunteer, but I learned early enough how people could be quite hostile or uncooperative on issues they consider irrelevant.

My other bad experience with the church was when I was in my junior year, at age 15.  As I said in an earlier blog, my father died at 23. I was not able to mention it last time; he died of tuberculosis. He was a calesa driver. I grew up in a family of women, with my Grandmother, Mother and younger sister.

It was not easy growing up in such environment. There were questions you could not ask them. When I got bullied in school, I could not run to them. When I could not buy snacks and was reduced to watching my classmates having snacks during recess, I could not run to them to ask for money.

Whenever I was in such situation or when I met problems, emotional or otherwise, that I could not tell my family about them, I ran to my father's grave and either cried there, prayed or just talked to his grave. Then one day, to my utter dismay and disgust, when I ran up the cemetery, my father's grave was not there. Instead, there was this ornate Chinese tomb in its place complete with all the floral decor, food stuff and big colored candles indicating some people just dug out the grave and put the tomb in its place.

I ran away from the cemetery to the factory where my Mother was working and told her what I had seen. She said very calmly that if we were not able to pay the annual fee of  50 pesos for 15 years , our space would be given to another applicant. I told her that since the church record had our name and address, could not the church at least inform us and then allow us to transfer the bones somewhere else?

I remember running from the factory to the convent to look for the parish priest that to this day I could still recall his name - Fr. Rapinan. I was told he was out of town. It was two o'clock in the afternoon. I was just going to ask the priest where did they put the bones of my father. Did they keep the for safekeeping somewhere or did they just put them in a garbage bin? When the caretaker of the convent turned his back, I promptly unzipped my short pants and urinated around the porch. It was my first act of social protest!

It would take me years to go back to the fold of the Church. That early, I came to know the difference between the rich and the poor and that oftentimes the Church was on the side of the rich and powerful.

More on this next post.

Women in My Life

For all the women in my life, thank you. On this Happy Women's Day, I wish you all happiness, but there are those who are no longer around. For them, much thanks for the memory and to all, I am sincerely sorry for causing everyone unhappiness at some point in their lives. 

It has been quite a journey, the details of which some of our relatives and close friends know. My father died at the age of 23, and it was my mother and grandmother who brought up my younger sister and myself. My mother and grandmother, we called them Inay Bata and Inay Tanda, respectively, were as expected, a powerful influence in our life.

Inay Bata enslaved herself at the Peter Paul dessicated coconut factory in Candelaria, Quezon, which brought us through the grades until we reached college. Inay Tanda spent a good part of her life working in copra-making facility in our village to add to the family income. My sister postponed schooling, waiting for me to finish college, and when it became obvious it would take probably another lifetime to get myself a college degree, she somehow was able to save money from what Inay Bata was giving her and she managed to get an education degree. She was a teacher when she died at the young age of 33.

Through the turbulent years of my life, these three women all provided support, taking care of my children whose mothers were running lives parallel to mine. They bailed me out with familial sympathy each time a relationship withered and died. I must also thank the mothers of my children for bearing with me in those years I was trying to elude arrest under the Marcos regime, and later, serving time in jail and doing so-called rehabilitation work for a number of years in an office in a park.

Those turbulent years seemed to have scarred me for life and again women with motherly instinct provided the warmth and shelter of home that I could pursue efforts to normalize my life after my sister, Inay Bata and Inay Tanda were all gone.

Again, to the women in my life, thank you for all the caring and the patience. You have been part of the continuing quest to define one's life in terms of some higher and more meaningful purpose.

I know you have defined being happy in this context, too. 

Posted: Friday, 08 March 2013; 12.35 p.m. 

Advocacies

In development work, advocacies abound: poverty reduction; environmental management; gender balance; child rights; human rights; indigenous people's rights; health; natural farming and sustainable agriculture; primary health care and so on down the line. Government agencies, donors and those from civil society institutions (NGOs, academic instititutions, people's organizations, private commercial sector) reflect in their structure and programs their respective program biases and advocacies.

Specialization is the rule. In sectoral fields of growing complexity, such specialized focus is quite important so that key concerns can be addressed with competent skills and interventions. The problem is when such biases filter down to the local level, at government and the community, and the local people are not equipped to handle information from highly specialized sources. Rather than result in a systematic and focused way to address development concerns at local level, there is confusion on which projects to implement in limited time to achieve significant impact.

We have seen this trend in local-level planning and implementation. Local governments and communities grapple with how to integrate all the key messages and information from seemingly competing advocacies promoted by donors, government agencies and non-government groups.

Efforts have been tried over the last two decades or so to address this situation:

-creation of local development councils mandated to prepare local plans and budget;
-policy and administrative support to enable local governments and communities to do participatory planning; prepare a common development profile; and prioritize projects;
-adoption of a program approach to facilitate convergence of services to target communities and households based on a consensus on priority problems to be address;
-imparting of skills to municipal planners to bring about more effective planning at local level;
-synchronization of planning at various levels to encourage the linking of budgetary resources to local plans; and the establishment of a common reporting, monitoring and evaluation system for the entire province.

The gains from these efforts have not been significant over the years due to a number of problems or constraints related to the sectoral orientation of the bureaucracy;  pre-packaging of projects or interventions at national levels without regard to local problems; political interference in the planning and service delivery procedures and processes; and the lack of commitment on the part of policymakers and planners to adhere to integrated planning among the sectors based on the local development situation.

To be sure, a few LGUs have achieved this much sought-after convergence of services among the sectors, LGUs and civil society organizations, as well as the local communities. A case documentation of these successful efforts need to be done to see how to deal with key development stakeholders with varying advocacies at local levels.