(Picture courtesy of http://www.thinkphilippines.com/manila/adventure-visit-quiapo.html)
Yesterday once again presented me with an opportunity to drop by Quiapo Church in Manila. The immediate environs of the church was hot, congested, and filthy. You are assailed by the sights, sounds, and smells of too many pedestrians, grimy street urchins, curbside vendors hawking all sorts of folk herbal remedies and other wares, wretched people in pathetic rags cruising past elbow to elbow with everyone else. I got quite a generous whiff of an air redolent with wet market grease and the familiar scent of riverwater brine. Sturdy commercial establishments are the lofty fixtures entrenching Quiapo Church in place on nearly all sides, including a building-size drugstore, fastfood shops, mini malls, and a modestly large transient hotel. And yet, inspite of the trappings of modern urban life which pervade this area, I've always regarded the whole place as a backwater, just another type of ghetto masquerading under a paper-thin veneer.
I spent most of my growing up years in and around Quiapo Church. What never fails to catch my attention every moment I'm there is the stark prevalence of unmitigated, grinding poverty. You won't fail to catch this impression when you're there. It's also a very popular notion that the immediate areas around Quiapo Church are preying grounds for pickpockets, purse snatchers, and wily robbers.
It simply nags me to no end that such a large church would be present in the midst of such a foment of depression without making so much as a difference. Like I mentioned, I've practically spent more than half of my life around Quiapo Church, and the conditions of the people you readily observe just outside of it haven't changed much in the over two decades I've been going there. The same homeless winos sleep against the Church's formidable exterior walls. The same number of dirty, unkempt children peddling cheap rosaries and scapulars gaggle around churchgoers begging them to buy anything, please, I need the money for food. The same wrinkled faces would greet you and offer to sell you herbal remedies or miraculous amulets for a pittance. And the same zombies roam around in drug-induced stupor, bodies bloated in malnutrition and hunger, some of them almost unimaginably deformed because of disease.
Quiapo Church has withstood the cesspool around it with dominating ease. I look up at its ornate and relatively hulking architecture and I think, what does a structure like this tell me about the haughty people who struggle to keep it as elegant as possible and yet obtusely neglecting what stares at them right in the face just outside their walls? It reminds me of tales of medieaval era landlords, who concern themselves with beautifying their own castles and towers and minarets and enclaves, trying to outdo one another for the sake of caprice and pride, while ignoring the oppressed plight of the peasants around them, spending days and nights in wine and luxury. It reminds me of callousness and greed.
It's common knowledge that Quiapo Church requires millions of pesos just for its upkeep every year. It boasts of the best quality concrete, stone, and glass. Its interiors are meticulously kept maintained to immaculate condition by perhaps the best that money can afford. And there is no doubt that the priests enjoy much much more pleasant accommodations and meals in the Church's refectories compared to what scores of peasants have to endure just outside. Just a few steps outside.
Most of these resources, of course, are fed to the Church by the avid churchgoing public, since every Mass held would yield heavy amounts of cash whenever sacristans pass around the bags where churchgoers would dutifully deposit however much money they could give. In short, the Holy Sacrament of Mass is the Church's cash cow. The Church would also receive plenty of donations from businessmen and other financial entities present in the Quiapo area, and there is no doubt that there are simply too many of them here ( including, of course, the SM conglomerate of companies, which has its roots firmly planted in Quiapo and Binondo ). The Church also collects monies for weddings, baptims, funeral masses, christenings, confirmations...the list is endless. It would be hard to picture the humongous amounts of cash flowing into Quiapo Church every month. I would picture it reaching high up to the heavens, perhaps.
Where would most of those resources go? To the upkeep of the Church, maybe? To the meals of the priests? To the decorations of the Church interior? For supplying the voluminous robes of countless members of the clergy? For rennovating the Church building itself?
It seems an insult to me that Quiapo Church, which is supposed to be a glowing beacon of God's Mercy, Love, and Spirit of Giving, remains to be an ivory tower that shields itself from its duty to those immediately surrounding it. Wouldn't it be better if they alloted portions of their property to building a medical center where the malformed derelicts just outside their walls could rehabilitate for free? What would it harm the religious establishment in Quiapo Church to erect another drugstore that sold cheaper medicine right in front of the more expensive drugstore? What if the handouts from the faithful churchgoers were pooled together to establish a food station where the homeless could avail of free meals three times a day? Just where does the flood of money flowing endlessly into this Church end up anyway?
A recent suggestion has cropped up among Pinoy government officials enjoining Pinoy telecom companies to allot around 20% of their income from text messaging into forming a public fund for bolstering education among poor Pinoy children. The idea has been floated around that since Pinoy telecom firms earn so much from their enterprises, it would be a necessary social obligation for them to share a bit of their revenues for the welfare of the greater number of those who are in need. How come no one ever thought of the earnings of even as simple an entity as Quiapo Church as a source of public funding?
Then again, the Catholic Churches in our country have always been shielded from any form of "social obligation" ever since the time of the Spaniards during the 15th to the 19th centuries. Quiapo Church is just one of the multitudes of other buildings that seem to unabashedly siphon money onto themselves without ever giving any substantial amount back to the people who need it more. Thus, the prevalance of poverty around many Catholic Churches in our country. It makes me shake my head. Statistics would still bear out that, however numerous Churches of all denominations are found in the Philippines, our crime rate hasn't gone down any significant bit. It seems that no matter how many Pinoys find more and more buildings to worship in ( it wold appear that a new building for worship is being built every day somewhere in the Philippines ), more and more Pinoys are finding more and more excuses to cheat and steal from one another, to murder each other, to rape each other.
Nope, the Churches haven't been making any difference at all, even if they do virtually number in the millions.
If this is what Churches are actually made of, I'd rather not give a single penny to any one of them.
