God allows ‘pork’ to teach us a lesson

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” ROMANS 1:18

By Alex P. Vidal

We cannot blame God for the acts of men. The “pork barrel” scandal is an act of man; therefore, God has nothing to do with it.

But could God have prevented “pork barrel”? Either he wanted to stop it but He could not, or He wanted to stop it but He did not. Perhaps, God allowed “pork barrel” to unleash its wrath on the Filipino people to teach us a lesson as we have apparently become a nation of apathy, greed and neglect.

We neglected our fundamental duties and responsibilities to elect competent and honest leaders by selling our votes to the highest political bidders. We push these ruffians in government to steal by being in cahoots with them in age-old moral malady called patronage politics. We scratch their backs, they scratch ours. We fool each other.

EXPENSES

We rely everything on politicians and oblige them to underwrite even petty domestic expenses that fall under our responsibilities as members of the working class. Because of our callousness, we created our own Frankensteins and call them “honorable” ladies and gentlemen.

We could see a strongly-worded pastoral letter that condemns the misuse of “pork barrel” in a giant billboard located on the left side when we enter the Santuario Nacional de Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria or Jaro Cathedral in Jaro, Iloilo City.

The pastoral letter considers the misappropriation of “pork barrel” funds amounting to billions of pesos mostly by our lawmakers as “also a sin against God.”

AFFAIR

The “pork barrel” fiasco is supposed to be an affair of the state and our constitution clearly prohibits the church from interfering in the affairs of the state vice versa.

But the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) believes that the separation of Church and State does not prohibit moral ethical values from influencing public policies.

If governance were conducted from a platform that disregards ethics and morality, CBCP says it only exposes our nation to greater peril and “we have only ourselves to blame and we make ourselves the victims of our own amoral conduct.”

BLAME

We are actually partly to blame for the sins of thieves in government because their mandates emanate from us. Sin is a religious term and refers to man’s offense against God. It has no meaning apart from the awareness of God’s holiness and majesty. And since it is essentially not a legal or moral term, there is no sense of sin, no matter what a person may do or fail to do, if there is lacking in awareness.

We can always pray for Divine Intervention to abolish “pork barrel” like what the CBCP is doing when it spearheads the “Abolish the Pork Barrel, Now Na” movement, but we must not forget that we are part and parcel of the king-sized monster that has eaten up the moral fiber of our leaders; and God will help us only if we help our own selves first.