Cardinal Chito’s evangelists

"Will this be a stepping stone for the first-ever Filipino Papacy?"

First off, our warmest congratulations and best wishes to our outgoing archbishop of Manila, H.E. Luis Antonio Cardinal “Chito” Tagle, who’s been asked by the Holy Father to take over the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples (formerly known as the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith).

I’ve been told by a friend that his mandate really only covers Asia and Africa, which are regarded as not yet majority Catholic and therefore the appropriate focus of evangelization. This of course is a product of the historical Euro-centricity of the faith, which by now is unfortunately no longer supported by the realities on the ground in the West: prevalent godlessness, moral relativism, and the reign of proscribed practices like abortion, same-sex unions, and gender denial.

By comparison, the African Church, though still relatively small, is vibrant and fast-growing, as dynamic as the underlying demographics of that long-neglected continent. As for Asia, it’s only the Philippines, together with the much smaller (and by now bemedaled) Timor Leste, that’s home to a Catholic majority, thanks to their respective Iberian heritages.

The diaspora of Filipinos has expectedly produced a wealth of informal missionaries: in the hospitals of Filipina nurses, the work camps of Filipino engineers and technicians, the private homes that employ Filipina caretakers. This is a natural corps of evangelists that is ready to be systematized, supervised, and funded by someone like Cardinal Chito, perhaps after his mandate is redefined to include the newly heathen regions of the world.

Will this be a stepping stone for the first-ever Filipino Papacy? Obviously a lot of us are, and should be, rooting for Tagle. But I suspect that the good cardinal will simply focus on the job at hand, expanding—the Church’s—reach while—hopefully also—shoring up its influence in traditional bastions. At the end of the day, what could be a better path to St Peter’s Seat than that?

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It’s not clear to me why my friend didn’t mention the Middle East as under the congregation’s purview. Perhaps that region is already included with Africa. But even if it were being excluded, that would be perfectly understandable, in view of the entrenchment there as well as the prevalence of non-Catholics among the Christian minority. To put it bluntly, the cost-benefit calculation might not be acceptable.

I can live with that, if the rest of the Islamic world—as most of it already does—follows the peaceable example of our Muslim brethren in the Philippines. The headlines understandably gravitate to the noisy, even violent minority in whatever community we might be talking about. But here in our country—if we take away fractious economic issues like land disputes with Christian settlers in Mindanao and, more recently, the incursion of international jihadists from wars they’re losing in the Middle East—absent these provocations, there really is nothing standing between two major religions of peace.

I was forcefully reminded of this by a radio interview I attended in Tawi Tawi, in the course of DILG’s ongoing roadshow all over the country on behalf of Constitutional reforms. The lady DJ, Sister Dayang Baby Lyn, was decorously dressed in a black nitab, showing only her expressive eyes. But her desk was lit up by a huge Christmas wreath, and the studio wall posters included one proudly announcing their affiliation with CMN, the Catholic Media Network.

The station’s name is DXGD, which I suspect is simply how some conservatives prefer to spell the Divine name, G_D, so it isn’t fully articulated. Much of what the two religions share deserves to articulated more forcefully, especially as the fledgling Bangsamoro autonomous region feels its way forward. In this season of peace, as Cardinal Chito packs his bags for a new assignment abroad, here’s hoping that all of us—whether we believe in Him or not—will be comforted and inspired by the message of the Man of Peace.

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In the Advent run-up to the Nativity, today’s Gospel (Matthew 1: 1-17) simply sets out the genealogy of Jesus, from Abraham—acknowledged as the father of the three great religions to come out of the Middle East—down to Jesus Himself, a total of forty-two generations.

It is a dry accounting, so one must turn to the first reading (Gn 49: 2, 8-10) to understand the significance of Jesus’ lineage. Abraham’s grandson was Jacob, and it was from Judah, one of Jacob’s twelve children, that the royal Davidic line began. It is evident that Judah was one of the—if not the only—favorite sons, of whom the book says: “The scepter shall never depart from Judah, or the mace from between his feet, until tribute comes to him, and he receives the people’s obedience.”

This is what Cardinal Chito’s mission is all about: gathering in people to the heavenly kingdom on earth established by the Son of Man.

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