Archive for February 2018

WHAT ARE WE UP TO

Horacio de la Costa S.J.

When I was younger, and Father [Robert] Gannon was younger still - that is to say, a very long time ago -  mention of the Philippines inevitably evoked in the American imagination a picture of blue skies and palm-fringed shores, with every palm tree held upright by a Filipino leaning against it, strumming a guitar.

Whether or not it had any relationship to reality, that was the image. One wonders what the American image of the Philippines is today. Perhaps none whatever; simply a blank. Why should there be? Americans have a lot more important things than the Philippines to think about these days. But if image there is, it must be a quite different image from that of former years, if only because the realities are different.

Certainly, despite typhoons, earthquakes, and assorted calamities, the palm trees are still there, as befits the world’s largest exporter of copra. But of the guitar-strumming boys, one has probably gone off to manage a copper mine, another is a Jesuit running for the Constitutional Convention, and a third commands a unit of the New People’s Army, and has a price on his head.

It is still possible for an airline (which shall be nameless) to describe the Philippines in a television advertisement as “a lovely cluster of islands peopled by lovelies,” for there are, admittedly, a few lovelies scattered about. But it is no longer possible, if it ever was, to think of the Philippines as the most carefreee of combinations, a land of the morning where it seemeth always afternoon.

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THE CHURCH AND DEMOCRACY

 by Horacio de la Costa S.J.
Paper written in 1954, typewritten original in AdM Archives; published by 2B3C Foundation in the volume entitled “Selected Essays and the Filipino and His Problems Today”
The basis for a discussion of this subject may be provided by endeavoring to define the two terms involved and the nature of the relationship between them.
By the Church is meant, I would suppose, the Roman Catholic Church; if so, our discussion will prescind from other forms of organized religion and even of organized Christianity.
What is the Church? We should first define it non-commitally; in terms which would be acceptable even to the unbeliever. In this sense, the Church is an association which has for its purpose to satisfy the religious needs of its members, or what those members consider to be their religious needs.
To the believer, that is, to the Catholic, the Church is, in addition, a society founded by Christ the Son of God, and by Him endowed with all the means necessary to attain its end, which is the supernatural salvation and perfection of the members in this life and in the next.
What is democracy? All will accept, I think, the sufficiently distinctive yet non-commital definition that it is that form of political organization in which the authority resides in an inherent and permanent manner in the people, that is, the generality of citizens. “Inherentally and permanently”; that is to say, the citizens of a democracy; while designating certain periodically elected  representatives to conduct in their behalf and with their authority the actual operations of government, do not thereby divest themselves of that authority, but retain at all times the power to recall such representatives, replace them with others, and supervise and control their actuations in office.

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TSINOYS AMONG US

THE CHINESE BEARING GIFTS  by Horacio de la Costa S.J.

Somewhat revised from an address to students and their parents at Xavier School, San Juan in 1971.

May I make some preliminary statements about Philippine culture?  The first remark would express an  obvious but important fact, namely: Philippine culture is in the process of development, just as is every aspect of our country. It is not, in other words, a culture which has reached full development, like that of China or Japan, but one that is in the course of development.

There are two ways of conceiving this development, and the course it should take. One way is to claim that it ought to be a process by which we gradually get rid of what we consider alien to our culture, as though we were peeling off the successive skin of an onion, in the end we would be left only with what is truly indigenous and Filipino.

That is one way of conceiving it, and you have probably had experience with or have read and listened to people who conceived of the development of our culture this way. “Let us get rid of what we imitate from other culture,” they say and “hold fast only to what us truly native to our culture.”

The other way of conceiving our cultural development is accept the fact that over the course of time we have borrowed many things from other nations and other cultures.

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