Church and State reforms needed for Phl progress

A country’s economic and social malaise can be attributed in no small measure to its dysfunctional institutions. This is true of our principal institutions, the Church and State, constitutionally separate but with interests and acts that often intersect. Deep reforms in both institutions bogged down by misgovernance are called for if the country is to move to a path of sustained economic and social progress.

Reform of the Church is the subject of an award-winning book — As It Was in the Beginning: The Coming Democratization of the Catholic Church (2007) — by Robert McClory, a former priest and currently professor emeritus of journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago. His thesis is that the early Church was actually participative and open and not the hierarchical and autocratic institution that it is today; reform merely entails that the Church revert to what Jesus Christ himself intended it to be.

Several biblical passages substantiate the belief that Christ wanted the Church to be non-authoritarian, consultative, and compassionate. He told his disciples to be servant leaders: “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all” (Mark, 10:43-45).

Such was the paradigm that guided the early Church. Thus St. Cyprian, then bishop of Carthage in North Africa (248-258) — whose leadership style was also that of then Pope Cornelius in Rome — writing to his impatient clergy, says: “I can make no reply on my own, for it has been a resolve of mine… to do nothing on my own private judgment without your counsel and the consent of the people” (McClory, p. 42).

Subsequently, under Emperor Constantine in 313, there was the great controversy about which was the correct creed: the Nicene or Arian creed. After years of bitter debates and despite the weight of virtually the entire hierarchy that favored the Arian belief, the Nicene creed was upheld at the Council of Constantinople in 381. But this could not have happened if not for the majority of the laity who would not yield otherwise, according to John Henry Newman, the most influential theologian in the 19th century. Newman contends that it is a big mistake when decisions on matters of doctrine are arrived at without regard to the sense of the faithful.

The practice of consulting the faithful was largely followed throughout the first millennium. A major shift occurred at the start of the second millennium with Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085), central figure of the Gregorian Reform that set the church on a different path that extends to today.

While the origins of modern democracy are often attributed to the writings of 17th century philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, seminal ideas can be found among the Catholic canonists some 400 years earlier. In this vein, McClory quotes Brian Tierney, the noted historian of the medieval world: “The practices of representation and consent that characterize secular constitutional government are not alien to the tradition of the church. And if in the future the Church should choose to adopt such practices to meet its own needs in a changing world, that would not be a revolutionary departure but a recovery of a lost part of the church’s own early tradition” (p. 71).

An attempt at such a recovery was made with the aggiornamento of Pope John XXIII (1958-1965) under Vatican Council II. But this fell by the wayside with his untimely demise seven years later, such that in the third millennium the Catholic Church seems what it was around the start of the second millennium.

The Church today remains top-down, authoritarian, and dismissive of the voice of the laity. This is particularly so in the Philippines where the laity prefer to stay silent and be seen as submissive to Church authority. A case in point is reproductive health/family planning which the dominant majority of Filipinos have consistently favored, if anonymously, via repeated surveys but would rather be mum about it in public. Similarly, as regards the pending divorce bill that would also benefit the poor who have great difficulty obtaining annulment that can easily be resorted to by the rich. Further, the Church often infringes into territory outside its competence, such as judicial TROs on economic concerns, or the issue of mining, stem cell research, bioengineering, and other scientific endeavors.

The Church, moreover, appears to give inordinate importance to external rites that seem to be taken by many as a convenient make-up for failings in secular morality (e.g., corruption). Said Christ: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness” (Matthew 23:27-28).

The kinds of reforms required of the Church apply virtually equally to the State. Participation, openness, accountability, and servant leadership after all are the very essence of true democracy. For instance, in the case of the judicial system — not unlike the Church’s emphasis on rituals — too much attention is given to form, procedure and technicalities such that the internal meaning of the law gets lost. Which is poignantly exemplified by the tedious proceedings in the impeachment trial of CJ Renato C. Corona. Not to mention the hypocrisy that surfaces in bold relief and resonates eerily with the “whitewashed tombs.

Sans structural reforms, the Church will likely continue to alienate its faithful as it drifts toward irrelevance, while the State watches idly the economy miss its development potential.

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Prof. Ernesto M. Pernia, Ph.D., is with the UP School of Economics. He is a board director of the Philippine-American Academy of Science and Engineering (PAASE), and a former lead economist at the Asian Development Bank (ADB). An earlier version of this article appeared in the BusinessWorld Introspective on Feb. 27, 2012.