The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
He just couldn’t help it—the endless blaming game.
While Pope Francis listened intently on his earphones, minutes away from delivering his first speech during his five-day apostolic visit, President Aquino went hammer and thongs at unnamed members of the clergy—“once advocates of the poor, the marginalized and the helpless,” he said, but whom he accused of silence allegedly during the previous administration’s abuses.
The President said his administration was “still trying to rectify” past abuses, and thought that the “Church would be our natural ally.”
“In contrast to their previous silence, some members of the clergy now seem to think that the way to be true to the faith means finding something to criticize, even to the extent that one prelate admonished me to do something about my hair, as if it were a mortal sin,” the President said during the Pope’s courtesy call at Malacanang. More than 400 government officials, diplomats and dignitaries were in the audience.
He skipped, of course, the root cause of the new militancy against his administration. The CBCP grew critical only after the acrimonious passage by Congress of the Reproductive Health measure believed to promote abortion. But the protesters, under the new multi-sectoral umbrella National Transformation Council, began calling for his resignation, after disclosure by an opposition senator of a previously unknown Malacanang-conceived lump-sum allocation to lawmakers of both houses of Congress called the Disbursement Acceleration Program.
Critics pointing at the DAP’s evil have accused the Palace of using the intended economic stimulus funds to bribe senators and congressmen during the impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona four years ago. The Supreme Court later declared portions of the DAP unconstitutional. Far from accepting the ruling and bowing to the High Court’s wisdom, repeatedly cast aspersions on the Tribunal. His allies in Congress, emboldened by his strident voice, dangled the threat of impeachment against unnamed justices.
Thus, while Malacanang has kept up its anti-corruption posture, it has been blemished itself by charges of high-level corruption. The scale, critics believe, is said to be more massive than that perpetrated by Mr. Aquino’s perpetual target of his blame game, his predecessor Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Next to the DAP is another corruption-riddled lump-sum allocation enjoyed by lawmakers known as the Priority Development Assistance Fund. It did not help that Mr. Aquino reneged on his campaign promise in 2010 that he would sponsor a landmark Freedom of Information bill that would allow the disclosure of information on all government transactions in the spirit of transparency.
The most outspoken Church leader, Lipa City Archbishop Ramon Arguelles, has said at various multi-sectoral forums that Mr. Aquino must quit immediately. He said the President has lost the moral ascendancy to lead the country.
Apparently having the NTC and Arguelles in mind, the President last Friday turned the occasion of a papal welcome accented by calls for national solidarity and a universal chorus to end “scandalous poverty,” into a shocking public rant against his critics in the Church.
He said, “we found it hard to understand its (Church’s) transformation” from being “at the forefront of championing the rights of all.”
“We were taught that the Catholic Church is the true Church, and that there is constancy, for it upholds the truth at all times,” he said. “Is it any wonder then that they see the glass not as half-full, or half-empty, but almost totally empty? Judgment is rendered without an appreciation of the facts.”
He said that though discomfited by the “trappings of power,” he ran for president so as not to pass up on the “opportunity to effect real change.”
Last Friday, he offered a slight opening for reconciliation, seeing that the “participation of all is necessary.” The President asked, “If we are able to settle our differences, can we not benefit our people quicker?”
It didn’t look like it would be immediately under way. With only slightly less than year a half in office, he may have recklessly squandered this precious initiative. TMM