Tuesday, January 29, 2013

The Relevance of the Church

Since the nineties, the Catholic church has been losing thousands upon thousands of the faithful, and that is not because people are turning Atheistic---most of those who left the Church had their individual epiphanies.

One of them, a young man who aspired for the priesthood once but left the seminario in a hurry, told me that the greatest blunder the Church in the Philippines did that convinced many to abandon the Catholic faith is the Church's political intervention.

Many Catholics got pissed when the Church assumed an interventionist stance at the time of Cardinal Sin's administration as Manila Archbishop.

Now, with Cardinal Tagle at the helm of the Archbishopric of Manila, many hoped that there would be more sermons and teachings about the Bible than homilies about dead babies and the sin of infidelity or the grievous sin of using a condom.

Tagle, by the way, is one of the most prominent theologians of this age, everywhere you go in the Roman Catholic world. He is not just close to the present Pope in Rome, he wields a great power inside the Church as one of its most knowledgeable theologians.

Tagle is supposed to be flexing his spiritual muscle, not posturing or trying to regain the long lost political stature of the Church? For Catholics, the distinction is clear: what belongs to Caesar, is Caesar's and what belongs to God, is God.

The next big disappointment is the sometimes fractured and oftentimes, irrelevant and more personal teachings in the pulprit. The pulprit is being made a culprit of several people in their political action work, hoping to transform it into a seat of power known only to the Kingdoms outside of this country.

Lack of spiritual teaching,more physical learnings. Will the Church survive the next big ten years?

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