'Good Friday People' Juan Mercado Philippine Daily Inquirer
March 19, 2008
INQUIRER captioned the photo: "The unbearable wait." It depicted two gaunt women staring at an exhumed coffin sealed in blue plastic. "Mothers of missing UP students Erlinda Cadapan and Concepcion Empeño view the casket containing the remains of a female," the caption explains. DNA testing at the Philippine General Hospital may show if she was one of their daughters.
"'Good Friday People" is a phrase I coined for those who find themselves called to powerlessness and suffering," writes Shiela Cassidy in her book which bears the same title. A hospice director in England today, she was tortured by Chilean soldiers for treating wounded rebels. "(These) are men and women, broken in body and assaulted in mind--deprived not merely of things we take for granted," she adds. "God calls them to walk the same road that His Son (trodded)."
"Powerless" men of peace include Claretian Fr. Roel Gallardo, Fr. Reynaldo Jesus Roda of the Oblates and Society of Divine Word Fr. Franciskus Madhu. They poured their lives in self-effacing service for the poorest. Abu Sayyaf tortured, then murdered Gallardo in Basilan in 2000. They killed Roda in Tawi-Tawi last January. And gunmen in Kalinga sauntered away after cutting down Madhu who was vesting for Mass in 2007.
Vulnerable Filipina mothers of "the disappeared" scour morgues, hospitals and prisons, looking for their children. Military camps stonewall their search with denials. Erlinda Cadapan, Concepcion Empeño and Edith Burgos, who's still looking for her son Jonas, feel what the "Good Friday cry"--"My God, My God. Why have you abandoned me?"--means.
Here, "the President (Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) gives an order and nothing happens," noted the Inquirer's May 6 editorial. "Or rather, the same thing happens again and again." The President agrees with what Pope John Paul II told Ferdinand Marcos to his face: "Government cannot claim to serve the common good when human rights are not safeguarded."
But her administration hasn't extended to the families of the desaparecidos, even the balm of pinpointed graves. Neither have the Filipino communists. They shrug aside similar pleas from relatives of the victims.
"We are all potentially Good Friday People: frail earthen vessels who, should the potter choose, could be fashioned for his own mysterious purposes," Cassidy adds. "And we tremble because we too may be called to powerlessness."
Among those called to powerlessness are the sick. Unable to wait for cancer-stricken Beth to die, her man went off with another woman, Dr. Cassidy narrates. And day after day, another patient, Kathie, waited. But Kathie's visitors never came: not her mother, nor her lovers, not even her children. Yet another patient, Catherine, had a tumor spreading to her brain. She has few symptoms. But radiation will only buy time. "I just want whatever is best for my daughter," Catherine said weeping.
"There is rare beauty in selflessness," Cassidy notes. "Some go to their deaths grasping everything. These are people who will call you away from another patient's deathbed to adjust their television."
The Jesuit priest Rutilo Grande, in El Salvador, insisted that seminarians live among slum dwellers and landless peasants. "However much one may know about poverty and oppression at an intellectual level, meeting the poor themselves is something quite other."
Like Archbishop Oscar Romero, Grande helped the poor "rediscover the Old Testament concept of God as liberator of his oppressed people." It was the poor who showed both "what they required of their church," Cassidy notes. "Not just the catechism and sacraments but something much harder: to speak out against injustice." Military goons killed both.
To curb impunity here, the Supreme Court adopted a new writ of amparo. And 99 new courts will handle cases of salvaging and abductions. This is an uphill effort. As in Argentina and Chile, the military here wring impunity for crimes and coups.
"Torturers were transformed into heroes...Death squads of PMA graduates led by their barons" got off scot free, notes the Yale study "Closer Than Brothers." Does this lack of accountability indicate "absence of God" within institutions?
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel captured this "sense of the absence of God," Cassidy notes. Then 14 years old, Weisel was forced, along with other Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz, to watch the Gestapo execute a child.
"Where is God? Where is He now?" someone behind me asked, Weisel recalled in his book: "Night."
"And I heard a voice within me answer him: 'Here He is--hanging on this gallows.'"
"Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and turned my dreams into dust," Weisel added. "Never shall I forget even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."
"Weisel had the look of a 'Lazarus,' risen from the dead yet still a prisoner ... stumbling among shameful corpses," recalled Catholic philosopher Francois Mauriac. In his foreword to "Night," Mauriac wrote: "And I, who believed that God is love, what answer could I give my young questioner whose dark eyes still reflected that angelic sadness which appeared on the face of the hanged child?
"Did I speak to him of that other Israeli, his brother--the Crucified, whose cross conquered the world? ... Did I affirm that conformity to the Cross and suffering was, in my eyes, the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood perished?
"We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word, for each one of us, belongs to Him. This is what I should have told this Jewish child," Mauriac adds. "But I could only embrace him weeping."
