Discernment

QUICK WERE media in damning the pastoral statement of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines – “Seeking the Truth, Restoring Integrity.”
The newspaper that made the Reverend Governor made the two proverbial monkeys out of the CBCP: “seeing no evil” and “hearing no evil.” Earlier it denigrated the bishops as “spiritual and moral illiterates” because they were “unable to read the signs of the times.”
Shudder. The paper impacted in us the biblical story of King Belshazzar. Yes, the banquet-loving royal who in a spirituous celebration of his father’s grand larceny – Nebuchadnezzar’s ransacking of the gold and silver out of the temple in Jerusalem – found himself confronted by a man’s finger writing on the plastered wall MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN.
Yeah, that which has since become the idiomatic “handwriting on the wall” that none of Belshazzar’s enchanters and Chaldean diviners was able to, well, divine.
It took the Jewish exile Daniel to read the writings thus: “MENE, God has numbered the days of your reign and put an end to it. TEKEL, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting. PARSIN , your kingdom has been divided…” (Daniel 5: 26-28).
Taking the story to contemporary times: Belshazzar fleshed in President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the enchanters and diviners in the CBCP, and the prophet Daniel in the newspaper.
Hallelujah! Spirituality and morality – out of the “illiterate” CBCP – are now that paper’s monopoly.
I take my hat to that letter writer, Dr. Antonio Ledesma, Ph.D, in Thursday’s Inquirer who asked if the Imperial Manila-centered paper’s “reading of reality is in truth better than the bishops’ who receive data on what is happening in every corner of our country from a nationwide network of grassroots organizations, research centers and professional analysts.”
I am especially taken by the Philo-Doc’s quote of Dr. Joaquin Navarro Vals, once director of the Vatican press office, thus: “The problem is that the logic of the Church and that of media are different. The logic of mass media is conditioned absolutely by daily events. On the other hand, the logic of the Church looks at events over a long period of time, where every particular event is seen as part of a holistic context, implying that one does not separate moral teaching from a man and woman’s life.”
Daily events. As in history in a hurry. That is the media perspective. That is bound to collide with the oh-so-slow process of discernment obtaining in the Church.
But in the quest for truth, how will haste fare?
I am reminded here of the great American journalist Walter Lippmann who long ago discerned “news” from “truth.”
“The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.”
As the “divergence between news and truth stemmed from the exigencies of the news business, which limited time, space and resources,” it was Lippmann’s conclusion – wrote the Edward Jay Epstein in Between Fact and Fiction: The Problem of Journalism – “ that if the public required a more truthful interpretation of the world they lived in, they would have to depend on institutions other than the press.”
There, the primacy of the Church as an institution of wisdom that comes with age, as bastion of faith, comes most naturally.
The Reverend Governor’s creator should go into some soul-searching discernment, and discover what it has oh-so-arrogantly arrogated unto itself.
Biased news. Feckless views. Shame.