Church and State Relations: A Theological Perspective in the Light of Recent Ecumenical Social Thought

Chapter IV

CHURCH AND STATE RELATIONS: A THEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT ECUMENICAL SOCIAL THOUGHT

Church and State: Friends, Foes or Sparring Partners?

The government is obviously taking much effort in showing and proclaiming to the world that it is friend of the Church, sometimes sparring partners but never really foe. One can look at this as an honest gesture. After all, "we are," says a high government official, "faithful members of the Church, and we go to mass every Sunday." And yet the constancy and redundancy with which the claim is made can also be viewed as an indication that something is remiss. Husbands, marriage counsellors tell us, who keep telling their wives that they love them are often the ones who are playing "hankypanky" when the wives are away. This is often also true in politics; and from time immemorial, Church and State relations are, for governments, just plain politics. One recalls some months back when President Marcos reiterated that "we have no quarrel with the Church." A few days after that the news came out that the ChurchMilitary Liaison committee, that Committee that was set up to be a sounding board for issues of Church and State, was dissolved because, among other things, Cardinal Sin claimed that "we are being made to look stupid." Not long after that the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) came out with its now famous Pastoral Letter, "A Dialogue for Peace", in which the Bishops laid out if not an entirely conflictive stance certainly a basis of what might be a principled

peace. Not too long ago, President Marcos again stressed, this time before the Washington Fellows — a group of travelling American junior staff of the U.S. State Department — that Church and State relations in the Philippines are in good order. And yet it is now known by all that all the while the government has commissioned various studies and made various investigations into the inner structures of the Churches and how government infiltration of Church activities and decisions might be made. The now-notorious Kintanar paper, which was made by an intelligence officer of the military on radicalism in the Churches and how to deal with it, and its complement, the Banzer Plan, an equally notorious paper that was drawn up to deal with a noncooperative Church in Latin America, are now in fact being implemented by the government to see to it that the Churches fall in line with government policy, or if not, at least to immobilize the various Christian communities from pursuing a critical hue. Both of these well-known "plans" provide suggestions for direct involvement of the government in the inner structures and personnel of the Churches, and strategies of dividing and conquering them. The government, despite its constant and avowed claims otherwise, is not interested in the separation of Church and State. What it is after really is a pliant and malleable Church that, like many other institutions in society, says "amen" to all that is going on, and if it can not say "amen," at least that it must remain silent. The government, in short, expects the Churches to give to it the credibility and moral sanction that it so badly needs and it so desperately seeks.

A well-known writer has indicated aptly recently that when in our history people went to the convento (convent) rather than to the municipio (the municipal hall) in order to air their problems and their grievances, then something was wrong in the municipio. When in our

present situation the municipio keeps saying that it is in good terms with the convento, then one can easily suspect that something is really wrong in the municipio. This really is what the municipio is not willing to accept — at least not publicly — and it is hoping, and doing all it can short of a direct take-over of the convento, that the latter will cooperate in giving it the seal of "good housekeeping" it so badly needs.

What the government is really trying to say when it says that Church and State relations are in good order is that it is doing well in the management of national affairs. There should really be no reason for anyone, therefore, to complain, to raise issues of alternatives, much less to be negative about the current state of affairs. The economy, government spokespeople say, is really in good order, indeed it is in as good a state as it could ever be under the circumstances and it has performed much better than other countries in the world in the light of the overall difficulties that the world economic situation has imposed on everyone (that is why we raised consumer prices of gasoline while world prices of oil had gone down!). Politically, things could not be better and more stable. We have a government and a political leadership that is so popular that it was put into office by more than 90% of the popular vote in an honest democratic election (only in countries like Chile and South Korea could such popularity of political leadership be found; in fact when Richard Nixon won what was referred to as one of the most overwhelming votes in American presidential elections, he won with only a little more than 60% of the popular vote!). The human rights situation is equally laudatory. There are really no political detainees; there are only criminal elements who in their antisocial passion have breached the boundaries of the law, terrorists, murderers, assassins, and arms smugglers. There/is no military brutality, just faithful military servants of the enforcement of law and order,

valiant protectors of the security of the State, whom gossipy writers misrepresent before the public. And the press is really free. There are just some naughty and nasty journalists — mostly foreign — who are prone to malign people of position and power and who do not know the limits of journalistic propriety and spill over into the amorphous realms of libel. The number of libel cases that government people have filed in various courts have multiplied as a result, and much in money, time and effort would be saved if such journalists would learn to do their job well. And what of the social conditions? As one very high government official has put it recently, how can anyone say that there is something wrong with our society when people are smiling everywhere? Only some dour and grouchy clerics, religious workers and pastors do not see this and make bloated reports about people's suffering and oppression, and that could be because they are just natural grouches or they have been infiltrated by some subversive elements. Psychological maladjustment and political conspiracy can be the only reasons why such people raise their voices of complaint.

There can, in other words, be no crisis in Church-State relations when there is such marvelous performance and record of the manner in which the government has managed the affairs of our society and people. The Churches much just be a bunch of awfully meddlesome institutions in insinuating that there is a state of crisis when there are all the reasons for a state of peace. There are really only a few misguided, recalcitrant and unknowing innocents from the Churches, both lay and clerical (although the really dangerous ones are the clerical!) who have been and continue to be unwilling tools of the Communists with their perniciously distortive ideologies and who as a result have been led astray from their true pastoral and ministerial functions; who have lost sight of the true meaning of the Gospel of Jesus

Christ and of the real intent of the Christian life, and who have become an irritating nuisance in an otherwise harmonious and wholesome relationship between Church and State. Indeed, there are some Church leaders who are really no more than "aspiring Khomeinis" (a term referred to Cardinal Sin not too long ago) who engage in "dirty politics" when they should be concentrating their time and effort in up-grading the moral and spiritual life of the people.

Whatever else might be said about Church-State relations in our country, one thing must be said at the outset. The Church was born amidst the hostility, suspicion, cajolery, threats, and even persecution of the State. The Church is not a stranger to the threatening power of the State. It was born, it grew and expanded, in the very midst of it. Moses had to deal with Pharaoh, the prophets with varying shades of monarchs. Jesus died and was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Even Augustine, whose "City of God" has been referred to constantly by this regime, wrote his monumental works on the task of the Christian community in society, while barbarian and hostile forces encircled his diocesan jurisdiction. Peter, we are told, was crucified upside-down during one of the worst and most brutal imperial persecutions of the early Church. The powers of the present, and the politicians of the present order, must know that they can not threaten the Church to submission, neither can they cajole it with accusations of "dirty politics." The church knows that from its birth, and carries in its life and history the scars of "dirty politics." Not that the Churches themselves have remained completely clean, but that they know that faith has deeper roots than the expediencies of political life.

What might be novel in our present situation is that while Pontius Pilate was a pagan ruler, who by definition couldn't care less about faith or the Christian life; while the hordes that beat upon Augustine's diocese were barbarians who couldn't care less about the "City of

God" that Augustine wrote about; while the Caesarean emperors that persecuted the early Church were bent on laying to waste what they considered to be a foreign religious movement that was threatening to their imperial rule, those who now throw mud at the Church, impute upon it all sorts of false accusations, imprison its priests and impune its religious workers are presumably believing Christians, leaders of a country that prides itself as the only Christian country in this part of the world, the progenitors of a "city of man" that is supposed to be built upon the foundations of "the City of God." One of the novel things about the persecution of Church people in this country, says Brian Lovett, is that in the past such persecution happened mostly, if not exclusively, in "pagan" and "mission" fields; here it is happening in a Christian society, supposedly by Christian rulers. "It is not just any priest or religious worker that is persecuted", wrote Monsignor Romero, the Salvadorean bishop who was felled by an assassin’s bullet, "it is the priest or the religious worker who has taken an option for the poor."

Obviously, a gap of faith and understanding has happened, a gap that has created some distance that now erupts into threats and persecution, on the one hand, and active resistance and search for political alternatives by Church people, on the other. Why is it that the Church can never be totally identified with the State and its incumbent government, and why is it that there is a perennial crisis in the relationship between the two that could lead to open conflict and which has established within the main theological traditions of the Church the "right to resistance" against the powers. This gap, in fact, is embedded in the very structure of the life of the Church as a community of faith and is central to its witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And it has been in recent times the fulcrum out of which the life and thought of the world-wide Christian community has been

nourished, and out of which certain very basic expressions of faith have become distilled. I do not think that one can speak of trends in the theological and social thought of the ecumenical movement, in the sense that all or majority of Christians around the world have embraced certain affirmations about Christian existence in society that are considered components of their faith. There are nevertheless important developments which have accumulated through the past decades, and they are developments that will continue to affect the shape of Church-State relations now and in the future.

The Question of Faith and Allegiance

Whatever else faith is about, it is about the question of "who shall hold sway over lives" and "to whom we give ultimate and final allegiance." On this question, the answer of the Biblico-Christian tradition is unequivocal and uncompromising. "I am the Lord your God, thou shalt have no other gods before me." This is basic to the Judeao-Christian heritage. It is the first commandment of the Sinai Covenant. It is the first article of faith. When the chaff is taken away from the grain of what Christian faith is all about, the one thing that is left and the one thing that provides the final divide between faith and unfaith lies in this question of allegiance and to the answer that "there are no other gods save the Lord our God."

The political significance of this radical monotheism (to use the words of H. Richard Niebuhr) has been driven home to the whole Christian community by the experience of the Christian Church under totalitarian regimes. One recalls at this point the Barmen Confession of the socalled Confessing Church in Germany under Hitler. Steeped in the Lutheran tradition of the "two kingdoms" in which Church and State were separated into two spheres, one not interfering with the other, the German

Church remained relatively silent as Hitler began his rise into power. When finally some realized that the Church had to act in the face of the demonic character of Hitler's regime, the realization might have been a bit too late. When they did act however, they based their action upon a very simple and seemingly innocuous statement which is now known as the Barmen Confession. That Confession starts with the very basic words: "Jesus Christ, as he is proclaimed in Holy Scriptures, is the one Word of God to which we have to listen, and which we have to trust and obey in life and death."

This Confession is part of the legacy of the ecumenical movement. For many of us, to have only one God is to desist from making graven images. For the German Church, to make that confession is to say to the political powers that the Church's allegiance to them can never be final; that there is an allegiance transcendent to the state, and that the state like any earthly being or entity must also give allegiance to that Lord. As H. Richard Niebuhr has aptly pointed out, we need not really worry about idols of graven images, or the idols of traditional religion. These after all are quiet and quite dumb. We need to worry more about the social and political idols. These are wiser, and they are more powerful, and often more demonic.

This does not mean that the Christian as citizen is to be treated differently or specially. It does mean that the Christian's allegiance to the political powers is conditional and relative, and never final. And it means more importantly that there is a special sensitivity of the "eyes of faith" to any hint, to any appearance, of a creeping idolatry in political life, to any effort by which the political powers begin to seek uncritical allegiance to their rule from their people, and to begin to assume that their people are responsible to them rather than they to their people. Whenever that happens, oppression inevitably sets in. Indeed, in situations of authoritarian

regimes — and now even our government accepts that it is authoritarian — idolatry, not atheism, not materialism, is the primary counterpoint of faith, the incipient expression of unfaith, and this is true whether the proposed social or political idol is beautiful or plastic as the case may be.

The Concern for the Human

If the political significance of a radically monotheistic faith is an indelible legacy of recent ecumenical social thought, so also, and perhaps even more strongly, is the concern for the human. What is most important and central to this recent development in ecumenical thought is the rediscovery and the affirmation that the concern for and the proclamation of the human is not merely a new phase of Christian social ethics or of Christian witness in society, — not merely something that is peripheral and ancillary to the preaching of the gospel in the present time — but in fact constitute the very substance of the Christian message in the world today. The concern for the human is, in other words, the announcing of the very purpose of God's redemptive work within the political conditions of today's world. The political conditions of oppression and violation of human rights under which we live, in short, have provided the context within which we are able to distinguish between what is peripheral and what is central to the message of the Gospel we wish to bring to the world, and we discover within that that the concern for and affirmation of the human is at the very center of the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Some of the more illustrious thinkers and important declarations of the Church in recent time have underscored this fact. One recalls Karl Earth's little book, The Humanity of God, in which this giant of Protestant theology in the twentieth century who has become

known for his uncompromising insistence of the differentia between the "Word of God" and the "words of man," affirms that however else we might understand God, we should start from sensing that in Him is cradled the meaning of our humanity. God, in short, can not be anti-human. One recalls also the Catholic Jacques Maritain's perceptions of "true humanism" in which he lays down what he calls the parameters of that "integral humanity" which is the mark of the Christian's social and political witness and towards which the Church's work in society must be directed. One recalls another Protestant, Paul Lehmann, who strongly argued that God's redemptive purpose is to be understood as "keeping and maintaining those things that make human life human." And one recalls, perhaps even more importantly, successive Papal Encyclicals in which the teaching office of the Church lays down what it calls "total human development" as the criteria on which judgment is to be made on any effort or form of economic and social development.

What all of these point to is the fact that on the question of the human, there can be no Christian controversy and there can be no Christian resistance. Whenever and wherever the human is at stake, the Christian community can have no choice but to put itself also at stake. The concern for the human transcends any possible divide, any possible obstacle, any possible restraint, whether that restraint is ideological, political or religious. No religious doctrine, or political inhibition, even the inhibition of law, order and stability, can be placed prior to the Christian's involvement and concern where the human is at stake.

There is, to put it differently, a peculiar mode of "seeing" that comes with and out of the "eyes of faith." It was Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, that marvelous prophet of a renewed Christianity, who pointed out so vividly that whatever else faith is about, and whatever

else true human existence is about, it is about "seeing." It is about seeing reality properly and in the right focus. It is about seeing the whole of creation in terms of its movement and the purpose that has been infused into it. And it is about seeing human life in terms of the omega points, the high and pristine ends, of which God as Creator is the source and author.

It is a kind of seeing that goes against the grain of those who want to see only those things that would hold and gain power. It is a kind of seeing that can not accept only those things that make certain people look good. It is a kind of seeing that can look at the stark reality, the deformed face, of humanity and of the social order because it has had a glimpse of that purpose, of that end, to which the Lord of Creation and the God of all people wants his children to move.

This kind of seeing is now, has always been, and will always be one that is threatening to, and possibly subversive of, the prevailing political powers. It is really a kind of seeing that transvaluates prevailing social and political habits. It is a kind of seeing that implies and impels a transcendence of present social and political reality and a possible transgression of its law and order. And it is a kind of seeing that looks at root causes, at the wholeness and totality of human life and of the whole creation so that whole of creation and of human life may be pulled into the stream of that redemption which is destined for all.

It sees people where the political powers can only show statistics. It sees purpose and intention where people are given only programs and projects. It sees creation in its pristine and God-given beauty where government can only look at new industries, new commercial investments and new dams.

Justice and the Social Order

What gives perhaps even greater critical sharpness

and social force to the concern for the human is the corollary realization that one can not really care for humanity unless one raises the issue of justice and a just social order. The human is so ensconced in the structures of society, in unjust social relations and oppressive political systems that one can not really witness to what is human without dealing with what the good and just society might be, and with the even more difficult and explosive question of social and political change.

Thus, when the World Council of Churches was born in 1948, as the culmination of many decades of ecumenical discussion and debate, its main agenda revolved around the theme "Man's Disorder and God's Design." Not too long afterwards, the Council spelled out "the idea of a responsible society" as a possible criteria for Christian witness and action in social and political life, and as a basis on which to judge political and ideological movements. At present, it is in the process of formulating the elements that go towards the creation of a "just, participatory and sustainable society."

The Roman Catholic side of the ecumenical spectrum has not been less active in this regard. Again the Papal Encyclicals have led the way and opened up new vistas of Christian social action. Rerum Novarum and Populurum Progresso earlier in the century, and the later Mater et Magistra, Gaudium et Spes and Octogesima Adveniens all laid down some directions in delineating crucial issues in the social and economic developments of our times. Vatican II, of course, broke so many grounds in posing the transcendence of the human as the criteria for social and economic development and in opening up dialogue and solidarity in a wide variety of fronts. Above all, it laid down the foundations of active social action as a form of apostolate, especially as this apostolate is directed and oriented towards the poor.

What has been most important and most critical in all of these discussions and expressions of Christian concern for the social order and of the social apostolate of the Church is the growing recognition that one can not speak of justice in our time apart from an empowerment and liberation of the poor. Not that the poor are the only and exclusive ingredients of the Christian's social concern, nor even because the poor are righteous, but that the poor as the neediest and the most socially and politically affected constitute the preferential angle from which social and economic development is to be seen and towards which Christian solidarity must be directed. When the Catholic Bishop's Conference of the Philippines speaks of a "preferential option for the poor" as the primary thrust of the Church's social apostolate, or for that matter when Conrado Balweg speaks of "justice" as the "content of Christian spirituality," they have not done so as if such affirmations came out of the blue, or as a flash of social insight. It is a distillation of decades of ecumenical concern for justice and the social order in which some of the best minds of the Church and the most sanguine and dedicated have contributed.

The Diminution of the Red Scare

This brings me to the very sensitive issue of the "red scare" or perhaps more appropriately the "red label." One notes easily that almost anyone who becomes actively involved in the social apostolate of the Church faces the possibility of being labelled "red ". It is however equally noticeable — and for me this is a very positive sign — that the weight that this label used to have in demolishing either the character of a person or of making ineffectual what he or she is doing has considerably diminished over the past few years. Time was when once you are labelled "red," you will have become ostracized, and you might even be excised from the fellowship of the Christian community.

When I was a student, one of the most heated and acrimonious debates we used to have with our Student Catholic Action colleagues was the issue of whether Filipino students should be allowed to attend meetings in socialist-bloc countries and of organizations that were suspected of being "Communist fronts." The summary measure that was used to keep student "rebels" from attending these meetings was the cancellation or non-issuance of passports; and our Catholic friends were the most adamant in defending that such measures were warranted if only they were able to keep our Catholic and Christian society from being influenced by the deadly disease of atheistic Communist ideology. Filipino students, we were told, must be kept from contact with Communists lest their minds be poisoned and their souls overcome by this infectious evil. Church media was used to keep the constant barrage that was needed to insulate Filipinos and Philippine society from the Communist epidemic.

I left in 1963 smarting, as it were, from this theology of insulation. When I returned over ten years later, things had obviously changed. In 1977, when I first arrived back, one of the first invitations I received was to give a paper on theology and ideology and the audience was made up of nuns and priests for whom ideological discussion meant a discussion of Marxism. Various sectors of the Church, both Catholic and Protestant, I have slowly discovered, now use the Marxist framework of analysis, though not necessarily the classical Marxist language, quite freely and openly. And the priests and nuns I hear about most prominently are either being imprisoned for having joined the 'Communist" cause, or being killed as a result of it, as in the case of Father Zacarias Agatep, or still being hunted, with a heavy price, as in the case of Father Conrado Balweg. And the amazing thing in ail of this, for me, is that m the case of Father Agatep the massive and skillful efforts of the

government to discredit him has so far not been accompanied by an official condemnation from the Church!

Are we to believe that such a thing has happened simply and exclusively because the Church and Christian groups have been so skillfully infiltrated by the Communists? I, for one, do not think so. I believe on the other hand that years and decades of reflecting and acting upon the social apostolate of the Church has, at last, led many in the Christian community to give a hearing to Marx and his analysis of society, and while these may not necessarily have taken in Marxism as their social faith, they have nevertheless seen the prophetic character of his thought, and have began to recognize that his analytical acumen has become an indelible part of the Church's and the world's intellectual and social furniture. The horizon of the Church's social analysis and involvement as a result has, I think, been broadened and enriched, and the parameters of its involvement have been considerably expanded.

The "discovery" of Marx did not come quickly or easily within the Church and within the ecumenical movement. By a mixture of many breakthroughs, turning points, experiences of various Christian communities in different parts of the world, and motivations, however, it has come, and it has made many Christians realize not only the rich heterogeneity of Marxism, but also the fact that one can be "freed" from Marxism only by dealing with the problems and issues posed by Marx rather than by passing over in silence the "Marxist" question. Marxism did not create these problems, and Christians among others realize that they have not been solved. Indeed, to the degree that the Church and Christians live out their "preferential option for the poor," to that degree also the question of being "red" or "pink" becomes a significant ingredient in the relations with the State, whose color is neither "red" nor

"pink" but more with the shades of "green" as in the U.S. dollar.

The trouble with the very many politicians who accuse certain workers, priests and nuns as being "red" is that they have not really read Marx and couldn't care less about the dehumanization of the oppressed and about the dehumanizing character of present economic and social structures about which he wrote. Those, I think, who are concerned with the human, who realize that such a concern for the human poses questions of justice and the social order, cannot escape Marx, and I suspect that the creative edges of the Church's social involvement will simply have to bear the brunt of being called "red" for quite a long time;

The Praxis of the Christian in the Social Order

I come to my last, though by no means the least, point. The critical and always conditional allegiance of the Christian to the State, the rediscovery of the centrality of the human in the message of the Gospel, the concern for justice and the social order as an inevitable corollary of the concern for the human, and the "discovery" of Marx and the diminution of the "red scare" — all of these have led many to activate a form of Christian praxis that they feel is rooted in an analogous to the praxis of Jesus of Nazareth. As in all instances in the history of the Church when Christians take seriously their responsibility not only to the Church but also to the world, they are inevitably led back to Jesus Christ, and become impelled to discover and to respond to the radical demands of his life and ministry.

Much has been said about this praxis of Jesus in various sectors of the ecumenical enterprise lately. An Indian theologian has written recently that we must leave our enticement with the Christ of faith and return to the demands of the Jesus of history. Jose Comblin

writes about it in his Jesus of Nazareth, Meditations on His Humanity. And the so-called Minjung theologians of Korea have concentrated much on the question of Jesus and the Minjung (people) in the New Testament. What all of these amount to is a new look at the historical challenge of the life and ministry of Jesus as it has been recorded in the Biblical narrative and draw from it the mode of our own praxis in the present situation.

Bearing in mind questions that a generation of Biblical scholars have raised about the historical Jesus, these and many other writers lead us to grasp the main ingredients of the life and ministry of Jesus by simply reading the Gospel narratives, and see in that light very revealing episodes that touch upon our stewardship of the social order. Many people, especially those in political power, would rather have the "spiritual" Christ, the one who is the answer to questions people often do not ask, rather than the historical Jesus, for the simple reason that the former gives comfort, while the latter makes radical demands.

Look again at the annunciation, the appointment of a peasant woman. Mary, as the vehicle of Messianic fulfillment. Recall the Magnificat that marvelous hymn of praise and thanksgiving of this peasant woman, thanking and praising her God for appointing a person of so low estate for the fulfillment of his redemptive purpose. Mary, as you know, has been a subject of heated doctrinal debate and questioning by us Protestants. And yet the historical Mary, the Mary of the synoptic gospels, of the annunciation and the Magnificat, does she not embody potent affirmations about human liberation, and about the peasant vehicle of God's messianic purpose? Was the choice of a person of low estate accidental or part of Divine purpose? Could it be that the very logic of Divine redemption imply that it can come only through people of low estate rather than

of pompous pretensions? What does this say about the options we should take in the life of society today.

Look again at the unwelcomed birth, the search for an inn, the refusals for admission, and finally the birth in a manger of hay in an animal's shed. Then recall that not long after that birth the order, the decree, was released from Herod's court (shades of an early Presidential Commitment Order!) that the child should be found and put to death because he might be the embodiment of that messianic redeemer who can only be a threat, a nuisance, if not a subversive, to the imperial pretensions of Rome.

Look again at the beginnings of the ministry. There was the purposeful choice of Galilee as the starting venue after the years of silent preparations. Galilee, the periphery, instead of Jerusalem, the center. Was not Jesus saying that in the economy of God's redemption, the peripheries are the center? And then there was the announcement of the ministry itself, after resisting the temptation to wealth and power in the wilderness with the clear and unmistakable words of the Prophet Isaiah:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." And closing the book, Jesus declares definitively: "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

Then from hereon read the Gospel of Mark, the original gospel, the first synoptic, and there you see the account of Jesus spending most of his time among the ochlos, the masses of marginalized, faceless, voiceless peoples of society, identifying with them, listening to their predicament, sharing their sufferings, and offering healing to their woes. As Ahn Byung Mu, a Korean New Testament scholar has put it, in the Markan account of the life and the ministry of Jesus, there seemed to be a peculiar attraction of the ochlos toward Jesus, at the

same time that there was a peculiar attachment of Jesus toward the ochlos.

Then you can more or less anticipate the crucifixion, that final face to face encounter between Jesus and Pontius Pilate, that pompous personification of state power and authority, and the sentence of death by crucifixion, for being a treasonous person, a fomentor of dissent, and possibly even of rebellion.

Isn't it challengingly amazing that in this Jesus who was crucified under Pontius Pilate lies hidden and revealed the "life of the world", that in the life, ministry, passion and death of this historical Jesus, God himself was incarnate, so that Cosmic purpose and Divine intention was historically embodied in his praxis?

If there is any semblance of accuracy to what I have tried to describe as developments in ecumenical social thought, then one simply has to conclude that what the Catholic bishops have indicated as "a preferential option for the poor" is an option that the Christian community as a whole can not avoid to take. I do not see also how in the light of all of these Christians and Christian groups in this country can have a praxis that is not geared towards giving a response to the cry of our suffering people for justice and freedom, irrespective of what sensitivities our government might express on the matter. I do not see, finally, how if we respond to the challenges which all of these affirmations pose to us we can ever avoid a collision course with the powers of the present for the simple reason that, as I perceive it, these powers have become scared of their own people, and our political life is precariously reaching the point where our people are our government's enemy.

The point that I have been trying to belabor, really, is that it matters very little whether Church and State are friends, foes, or merely sparring Partners Neither is the issue a matter of the Church seeking to reestablish itself as a political power and take over the reins of government,

as government people are wont to impute, for example, when they accuse Cardinal Sin as an aspiring Khomeini. The crucial issue is whether government is serving its people well, or merely now seeking to survive at all cost. And where people suffer, whether the Church has the courage and the faith to respond to their cry. This to me is the real issue that needs to be faced in the relation of Church and State.