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MANILA, Philippines?A good number of comments I have gotten on my columns have to do with the dissatisfaction of OFWs with many of our government officials.
I admit that there is a great deal of room for improvement in governance both at the national and local levels. Corruption and incompetence continue to be prevalent in government.
To be fair, however, we have to recognize the emergence of younger leaders who are departing from the usual mold of the traditional politicians. There are competent, hardworking, and honest governors, mayors, councilors, and members of Congress who are truly working for the common good of their constituents. I attribute the emergence of this new breed of politicians to the last example and influence of former Present Cory Aquino whose demise the entire Filipino nation is mourning.
A full month before the death of former President Corazon Aquino, Pope Benedict XVI issued the Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate on Integral Human Development in Charity and Truth addressed not only to Catholics but to all people of good will. The ideals contained in the papal document were the very same ones that Cory Aquino worked for untiringly when she was President of the Philippine Republic and after, till the very end of her life. Against many odds, she wanted to attain development for all Filipinos and for the whole person of every Filipino. She understood very well what integral human development is: the development of every man and of the whole man. As a leader in government and in the private sector through the NGOs in which she was active, she worked not only for the material welfare especially of the poor but also for their political, social, cultural, and spiritual progress. She was not only pro-poor but also pro-life, pro-family, and pro-faith.
I thought about Cory Aquino as I read the following passages from Caritas in Veritate: "I am aware of the ways in which charity has been and continues to be misconstrued and emptied of meaning, with the consequent risk of being misinterpreted, detached from ethical living, and, in any event, undervalued. In the social, juridical, cultural, political, and economic fields?the contexts, in other words, that are most exposed to this danger?it is easily dismissed as irrelevant for interpreting and giving direction to moral responsibility. Hence the need to link charity with truth not only in the sequence pointed out by Saint Paul, of veritas in caritate (Eph 4:15), but also in the inverse and complementary sequence of caritas in veritate. Truth needs to be sought, found, and expressed with the 'economy' of charity, but charity in its turn needs to be understood, confirmed, and practised in the light of truth."
She was always in search of truth and never compromised the truth when she found it. But in asserting the truth and exposing untruth, she never offended the human dignity of even the most serious offender against truth. She was very conscious of the Pauline dictum that we have to fight for the truth, but always with charity, condemning the sin in the most vigorous manner but having compassion for the sinner. In this, she was truly a disciple of Jesus Christ who was the paragon in distinguishing between the sin and the sinner.
Although compassionate, she was no sentimentalist. She understood that charity that is not linked to truth degenerates into sentimentality, as Pope Benedict XVI clearly states in Caritas in Veritate. There were those who, in the name of helping the poor, would advise her to give up her pro-life or pro-family stance. But even before the present Holy Father wrote the following words, she had been living the principle of charity in truth: "Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity. That light is both the light of reason and the light of faith, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as gift, acceptance, and communion. Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word 'love' is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite."
The leadership of Cory Aquino has been immortalized in a book written by a European management expert, Alexander Havard, entitled Virtuous Leadership. Together with such famous world leaders as Robert Schuman of France, Karl Franz Josef von Habsburg-Lothringen of Austria, Ronald Reagan of the United States, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of Russia, Pope John Paul II, and Lech Walesa of Poland, Mrs. Aquino was held up as a paragon of Virtuous Leadership. I quote here some of the passages alluding to the virtuous leadership of our beloved former President: "I assumed the powers of the dictatorship, but only long enough to abolish it. I had absolute power, yet ruled with restraint. I created independent courts to question my absolute power, and finally a legislature to take it from me."
Author Havard continues: "Mrs. Aquino's vision was a moral one. She felt that it was her duty to strive for the common good and that this meant creating a just social order for each and every Filipino. She never accepted the idea of democracy for democracy's sake. 'Without the right values in the people,' she said, 'a democracy is only a confederacy of fools.' Mrs. Aquino was a singular example of sincerity, simplicity, and integrity in politics. She served for one six-year term and chose not to seek re-election. Long after she ceased to be President, Filipinos still looked up to her as a leader who united the nation." These words of an objective observer and management expert from the European continent demonstrate the fame of Cory Aquino in the global scene.
The greatest happiness of those who loved her, however, comes from the fact that she died on the First Saturday of the month. She was a devotee of Our Lady of Fatima who encouraged the faithful to practice the First Saturday devotion to the Immaculate Heart, the reward of which is a happy death. Furthermore, she received the investiture of the Scapular of Mount Carmel from her close Carmelite friends. Our Lady of Mt. Carmel promised to take a devotee of hers wearing the scapular directly to heaven on the Saturday after her death. We are, therefore, doubly certain that she is already in heaven. We should, however, continue to pray for the repose of her soul as a duty of piety. For comments, my e-mail address is bvillegas@uap.edu.ph.
