Wicked! Part 2

Many Filipino Catholics went solidly for Donald Trump last election. I’ll hazard a guess that perhaps they were blinded by the assassination attempts on Trump and his self-serving claim of divine intervention. “Jesus saved me from these attempts” to save America that many gullible Catholics were willing to ignore Trump’s threat to individual freedoms.

This election also exposed zealots in our midst who will impinge on such freedoms, freedoms that give us the right to be happy. My truth versus their truth. But what is God’s or Jesus’ truth? Jesus’ Sermon at the Mount made “loving” as a criterion for good – love God, parents, neighbor – the Beatitudes. Humans were created in God’s likeness, but we don’t know what God looks like.

Jesus became man to be our point of reference. He is the Perfect Man who lived a simple life. As we journey and seek for the kingdom of heaven, we try to be like him or at least the man whom we are all called to try to be as much like as we can. The more we become like Christ, the more fully human we are becoming. He is the perfect archetype of which we are very imperfect types.

The problem is that we are broken images. This brokenness means that we are at war with ourselves – the good and evil in us. We are split personalities. We are divine and yet deviant and that prevents us from achieving holiness, despite what we say to the contrary. God gave us freedom to choose, and we continue to embrace evil and refuse the good, we reject the perfect image of God and continue to worship the image of ourselves.

Pontius Pilate showed mankind’s uncivil war with itself when he showed the crowd the tortured Christ. We continue to inflict scars and crucify our neighbors, the poor, the domestically abused, the refugees fleeing their countries because of war, poverty, violence because we feel unsafe by an open border. We stopped trusting God to keep us secure and we continue to punish ourselves as we punish Jesus, with our sins against human dignity.

Pope Francis has been pushing for synodality as an effort for Catholics to not lose sight of what Jesus wanted us to achieve in our lifetimes. Still, many members of the clergy are not getting it and by extension, the faithful. Journeying together as the People of God is a continuation of Jesus’ journey on earth. As this election proved, many Catholics don’t see the value of human dignity as a critical ingredient to our understanding of Christianity.

Why do many Catholics believe that being tagged as “illegal” strips a person of human dignity and not worthy of being treated as a human being? Remember that during Trump’s first term, so many families were separated by his immigration policies? The idea that immigrants are “poisoning” the blood of America is straight out of Hitler’s playbook and is really a tactic to instill fear among White Americans.

According to the late Pope John Paul II, even disabled people or the homeless retain such dignity because human dignity is infinite. Pope Francis underscored this in his encyclical, Fratelli Tutti (subtitled “on fraternity and social friendship”). Trump insinuated that VP Harris was a prostitute and many Catholics went gaga. This was beyond the pale. Catholics should have condemned the former president’s playing fast and loose with the truth and not just admit that it was a joke, a hyperbole. To dehumanize a person is no laughing matter.

The universality of human dignity is so central to our faith because Jesus himself showed forgiveness to a prostitute who poured perfume on his feet. Similarly, for the adulterous woman whom Jesus did not condemn. “Go and sin no more!” They too have dignity that we often strip from their humanhood because man places them at the bottom of the pyramid along with others that we believe are less human because of their social status.

It is really a simple analogy. We were created in God’s likeness which makes us deemed sacred because of God’s embodiment in us. Human dignity emanates from divinity. No one, except God, has the power to strip away our intrinsic worth, identity, and dignity. True, we don’t have to experience homelessness (as in people who cross the border for a better life) to discern that each of us go through such moments of profound brokenness.

It is, therefore, a moral failure for Christians to lose sight of the Beatitudes, the very foundations for a life of authentic Christian discipleship. Cardinal-bishop Antonio Tagle reminded Filipino Catholics in his book, “I have learned from the least,” that beyond sentimentalism, our faith must be grounded in the Gospel. We must channel the fervor we show with our favorite devotions to our everyday life with the Lord. Else, we exhibit the very danger of syncretism – lack of faith in Christ.

In the Gospel of Mary that never saw print, Mary reminded the apostles to follow Jesus’ instructions to spread the teachings to non-believers. It was Peter himself who scoffs at the idea that Jesus would entrust such a vision of nonphysical interpretation of resurrection to a woman – what Donald Trump alluded to as “the woman who worked on a street corner” meaning VP Harris. Peter would become the Vicar of the Catholic Church and perpetuated the canard that women belong to the weaker sex.

VP Harris epitomized the biblical Mary Magdalene’s adulterous woman character whom Jesus saved from an angry mob stoning. Like Harris, the miscast Magdalene was a threat to some of the macho apostles, thus being sidelined from the New Testament. The Christian voters who gathered for the metaphorical stoning of Harris, elevated Trump to the throne instead of the cerebral Black/Asian woman. Harris was promoting synodality among men and women for a better America.

The Arab American men wanted Harris to genuflect before them and wanted her to disavow Catholic Biden’s support for Israel. They went all in for Trump to punish Harris. Similarly for Palestinian Americans in Illinois, their protest vote and abstaining from the election was another way of punishing Harris. These were the young “uncommitted” people who organized protests on college campuses despite Trump’s vow to ban Palestinian refugees from entering the United States.

Finally, we are humans who make bad choices out of weakness. We know the right thing to do but are afraid of the consequences – of a “baby killer” becoming president because of Harris’ support of abortion and women’s right to choose. It is willful, albeit self-imposed ignorance. Know this that when our mortal journey ends, it is the end of the world, but the end of the world is not the end of us because the election choices we made could have profound impact on others still living it.

If we live the mystery of love, the end will be the most glorious and triumphant for we will achieve wholeness. Such is the deeper paradox of life.