Castro the crusader
Fr. Melvin Castro, executive secretary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines Episcopal Commission on Family and Life, is very pleased with his successful crusade against the evil threat Ronald McDonald. In a statement to the media, Castro says he is glad McDonald’s has seen the error of its ways. And then he rubs it in.
“I do hope it doesn’t reach this point again. It would have been better if they had been sensitive to our culture, and respectful of our faith.”
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The executioners
In 2005, 36,510 Filipinos died from pneumonia. 20,951 died from tuberculosis. In Quezon City alone, there were 3,349 attempted homicides, 69 murders, 55 rapes, and 629 robberies. In the entire country, there were a total of 2,962 recorded rapes, 11,833 major thefts, 44 recorded kidnappings, and 4,352 recorded drug offenses. The impunity index ranks the country third in journalist deaths, with 142 killed since 1986. The number of dead climbs every year, and very little has been done to prevent it. Flood, fever, kidnapping, poverty, pregnancy, robbery—in the Philippines, the danger may be clear and present, but it has little effect on a nation that has accepted survival is accidental.
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Forgetting Edsa
The story of my country begins with a mad king.
There are some who say the king was once a just man, and a wise one, whose heart turned dark at the taste of power. Others say he had always been mad, and hid his madness behind a cunning charm.
The king had a queen, the most beautiful in the world, and again there are those who whisper that it was she whose madness turned the king’s. So they ruled, the black king and his butterfly queen and their army of bloodthirsty knights, from a golden castle built on a lake whose waters turned a darker red with each cruel year.
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Assault on reason
A little past eight in the evening of February 3, 2011, a group of plainclothes policemen raided a high-end relaxation spa in the Metrowalk Ortigas Center on Meralco Avenue. Clients on massage tables heard shouts from the outside—“Dapa, dapa!” One man sweating alone inside the dry sauna, shouted at by one of the policemen—“Nagtatago ka, ’no?”—left the sauna to join the six other men sitting along the hallway. He thought it was a holdup. It never occurred to him that the spa was in any fashion illegitimate. When he asked a woman who stood in the hallway speaking into a police radio, she told them it was a raid.
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The Catholic Republic
Last week, Fr. Melvin Castro, executive secretary of the Episcopal Commission on Family Life of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, denied reports that a Catholic parish has banned supporters of the reproductive health (RH) bill from receiving Holy Communion. He blamed supporters of the RH bill for agitating the public, claiming that it is proof that there is an element of deception behind the bill.
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Method To Madness 2011
The reporter was bored. Her heels were high, her mouth was wide and the cheap green medical mask slung over her neck hung lopsided as she lit her ninth Marlboro in an hour. The reporter had never been a chain smoker, but on the eve of the New Year a little more than 20 centuries after a Jewish storyteller sucked his last gulp of sour wine out of a sponge, the reporter decided that sucking smoke out of a stick while tapping her foot outside an empty emergency room was a slightly better deal than just tapping her foot outside an empty emergency room. Her cameraman agreed.
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Respectfully
AS THIS column goes to press, word is out that President Aquino himself called for the release of the health workers known to the country as the Morong 43. This announcement is both positive news for both families and government, coming two weeks after Communications Secretary Sonny Coloma dismissed the issue, saying the problem was inherited from the Arroyo administration and its resolution, or lack of it, should not be a judgment on the Aquino administration.
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