FAITH CHASING POLITICS

By Rico Casta Jacoba, Ph.D .

I. INTRODUCTION

• What can we do together that we cannot do alone (or what is the

value and limit of particular communities in relation to other such
groups)?
• When questioned by religious authorities on the law, Jesus explained
that loving God with heart, soul and mind was the greatest
commandment (Matthew 22:37). He added: “You shall love your
neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39).
II. DEFINING POLITICS

• Politics is the ongoing process through which to maintain

commonality and recognize and conciliate conflict in pursuit of
shared, temporal goods.
• Good and wise politics creates the stable environment of rules and
regulations for entrepreneurial activities, the creation and
maintenance of decent jobs, and the administration of justice.
• Politics is the practice and art of governance of the citizens for the
common good. It includes the administration of public resources such
as tax money and public land, buildings and equipment.

• The public work of the church is thus to be an agent of healing and

repair within the political, economic, and social order, contradicting
the prideful, violent, and exclusionary logics at work in the saeculum
and opening it out to its fulfillment in Christ.
III. A spirituality of Social Transformation
(PCP II, 262-282)

Spirituality demands that we live radically what we preach.

It is witnessing to the demands of the Gospels
IV. The Spiritual Journey
Step 1. A confrontation with sinfulness
Meeting Jesus who invites us to face up to and admit our sinfulness
and the sinfulness of the social systems that we have built.
Our Christian conscience need to flinch at the sins committed against
the poor.
Step 2. Conversion and social transformation
The call for metanoia
Conversion is a long and painful process of discovery and change.
Conversion means that we need to leave the world of the known,
with its shadows and darkness and move in the direction of the light.
• Step 3. Following Jesus in Mission.
An enduring and intimate commitment to Jesus
Preferential love for the poor
Sharing the good news
Listening to and sharing the Word of God
V. Laity’s Involvement and Leadership in
Politics
The basic standard for participation be the pursuit of the common
good
That participation be characterized by a defense and promotion of
justice.
That participation be inspired and guided by the spirit of service
That it maybe imbued with a love of preference for the poor
That empowering people be carried out both as a processand as a
goal of political activity.
• The overall value that must be infused into the political order has to
be that of solidarity, which, expressing concretely the commandments
of love, urges the active and responsible participation of all in public
life, from individual citizens to various groups, from labor groups to
political parties. All of us, each and everyone, are the goal of public
life as well as its leading participants.
VI. CHRISTIAN HOSPITALITY AS PROPHETIC AND
POLITICAL

• The Christian practice of hospitality best articulates what valuing a

particular place, while making room for vulnerable strangers (through
responding to the vocation to love our neighbor), entails.

• Hospitality toward strangers constitutes part of the church’s witness

to the Christ-event and the hospitality that weak and sinful humans
have received from God. We who bring nothing to our relationship
with God echo this in our reception of others.
• Thus, within the Christian tradition there is a consistent and special
concern for the weakest and most vulnerable: “the poor, the sick, and the
refugee.”

• Moreover, the focus on the vulnerable stranger will, on occasion, mean

that the church finds itself actively opposed by those who would be, by
Christian criteria of evaluation, inhospitable to the vulnerable stranger.

• Thus the Christian practice of hospitality is often, because of its priorities,

deeply prophetic, calling into question the prevailing political hegemony.
VII. LISTENING AS A POLITICAL RESPONSIBILITY

• Listening is a way for churches to practice humility in their negotiation

of political life, ensuring that they glorify God rather than glorifying
themselves. In short, it is an antidote to self-glorification, idolatry, and
regimes of control.

• Through listening to Scripture and others, so as to discern who is the

neighbor to be loved, a sense of obedience to the Word is nurtured.
• Listening is a therapy for the self-love or pride that is the attempt to
secure oneself outside of relationship with God and pursue illusions
of self-sufficiency both in relation to God and neighbor.

• As a constitutive dimension of hospitality, listening trusts and gives

space and time to those who are excluded from the determination of
space and time by the existing hegemony.
• However, one cannot one hear others if the space is over-determined by a
single voice – for example, that of either the state or the market – that
drowns out all other voices or predetermines how they may speak and
what they will say.

• Instead, listening requires active involvement and commitment to a

particular place and the formation of relationships in that place because
building trusting and stable relationships takes time and personal presence.

• By upholding practices that enable listening, the church, whether

intentionally or not, contributes to the condition and possibility of politics
within the saeculum.
• Without listening there can be no politics, and politics is a condition
of any earthly rule which enables a moderately peaceable order, one
derived from the pursuit of goods in common and not the exclusion
or oppression of others, particularly the weak and vulnerable.

• For Augustine, there can be no true justice in the earthly city because
it is oriented to pride rather than love of God.
• For Augustine, justice is a synonym for love, as one can only give
another their due in a truly public way (as opposed to giving each
their private interest) if we love God first and foremost and so are
able to order one’s own loves in relation to God and others and so
give each their due.

• However, in order to truly love God, and thence love others, we must
be justified in and through Christ as we cannot properly order our
love of God and others without the grace of God. (Being spiritual)
VIII. CRITERIA OR RULES OF ENGAGEMENT FOR
POLITICAL ACTION

•• First, such action begins with listening to Scripture and the various
others amongst whom one lives in order to discern who is the neighbor to
be loved, and what goods in common need to be pursued.

•• Second, such action is, in the first instance, place based, as distinct
from national or global, visualizing the local and regional as the primary
arenas of faithful Christian action.

•• Third, such action is associational as distinct from an over-reliance on

and immediate resort to legal, bureaucratic, or economic procedures that
circumvent the need to develop interpersonal relationships.
• • Fourth, such action involves the church as a legal, physical, and social institution within
which worship is constitutive of its public life.

• • Fifth, such action connects to and takes seriously the ordinary patterns of family, work, and
civic life as occasions for neighbor love and part of the penumbra of worship.

• • Sixth, such action is not simply humanitarian or pastoral in scope, but seeks to address
broader structural issues.

• • Seventh, such action embodies a generative contradiction rather than either saying “no” or
“yes” to the status quo.

• • Finally, such action does not look, in the first instance, to the state or the market to address
issues of common concern within particular places but to modes of self-organization and mutual
support.
IX. What kind of a Filipino Nation Should we
be? (PCP II Vision)
• This is our vision:
That all may have life (mabigyan ng buhay)
We shall have to create a free nation:
where human dignity and solidarity are respected and promoted:
where moral principles prevail in socio-economic life and structures;
where justice, love and solidarity are the driving force of development.
We shall have to create a sovereign nation;
where every tribe and faith are respected;
where diverse tongues and traditions work together for the good of all; where membership is a call to participation and involvement and leadership a
summon to generous service.
Ours will have to be a people
in harmony with one another
through unity and diversity;
in harmony with creation;
and in harmony with God.
Ours shall be a cevilization of life and life.