By Fr. Ranhilio Callangan Aquino

I should have been moved by the millions who milled around the statue of the Black Nazarene on Jan. 9. For many, it was enough to touch the rope that was apparently tied to the base of the statue, but when a million or two million others want the same thing, one has a recipe for mayhem. The usually gentle Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales repeatedly asked the congregation at the Luneta Mass to allow him and the other priests present to proceed with the celebration of the Mass. I was disturbed at what to me was fanaticism and idolatry.

I still maintain that the iconoclasts were wrong about the Church?s position towards statues and images. We are helped by tangible representation and the logic of the incarnation is precisely that the unseen manifests itself in the seen! Some Protestant churches that are vehement in their rejection of statues and images allow for representations of the cross! But much of what I witnessed on television was sheer fanaticism. A stampede could have so easily broken out especially because despite the prudent decision not to take the revered image through the narrow esquinitas of the Quiapo area, those in immediate control of the image stubbornly took it through the usual route?as if there were some kind of necessity for the procession to take its usual course.

How does one distinguish between fanaticism and edifying religious fervor? Of course, it can always be said that a fanatic is fervent in his creedal allegiance, but I will reserve the term fervor for that enthusiasm one has about belief and worship and all that these demand that allows for the scrutiny of reason. A fanatic is unreasonable; a fundamentalist is unreasonable?to the extent that a fundamentalist denies a text all context and insists on an interpretation of texts outside all contexts; a militant is unreasonable who does not allow others with different beliefs to co-exist peaceably with him in the same society.

Faith is a cognitive posture. It is not and cannot be the abandonment of reason and whichever religion it is that calls on its followers to deny reason to count as believers demands of them a negation of what it is to be human in order to be sons and daughters of God. Reason has its limits, and of that we have been amply reminded by philosophers of the contemporary period, but admitting that is quite a different thing from banishing reason altogether from sacred precincts.

There is a story in Genesis that has edified millions down the ages but that I would prefer re-written. After having waited for what might have seemed ages, Abraham had a son in his old age, when Sarah, his wife, was well past beyond child-bearing years. But one day, the very same God who had promised Abraham progeny as countless as the sand on the shores of the sea asked him to go to Mount Moriah and there to sacrifice the child of the promise?Isaac. Abraham dutifully took his son, making him carry the very wood that would be used for the burnt offering of which he would be the victim! That is not reasonable and Abraham would have been perfectly justified in retorting: ?That could not have been the voice of God!?

I will continue keeping statues and showing these images, in private as well as in public, signs of my veneration. One never tears or tramples upon pictures of those one loves, and it is certainly a common experience for persons in their loneliness to kiss, hold tightly and even talk to pictures of loved ones. That is the reasonability of statues and icons. But when one attributes to a wooden image the power to heal, the power to pardon sin? as when one hopes that by attending the Jan. 9 procession, all the snatching, thieving, drug-peddling, probably even molesting of the whole year is wiped clean?this is just not reasonable. It is true of course that in the sociology of religion, one of the attributes of the sacred object is mana?mystical power to make whole and make well. But if that is one?s posture towards the Black Nazarene (the statue), then certainly one is not a Catholic, because that has never been the Catholic position in regard to images. And when one believes that joining the sweating sea of humanity surging around the statue entitles one to joust with the law and with the norms of human decency the rest of the year, this is simply stupid.

I am not by any means suggesting that the articles and precepts of faith must be constructs of reason. All religion claims non-human inspiration, and while this aspect can neither be verified nor falsified by reason, any religion that maintains dogmas and commands that dehumanize, that make the existence of community possible and that wage a war to the death against any and all who do not share one?s religious beliefs is not a religion worthy of the human person. Religion is a proposed vision of the meaning and the worth of human existence. It cannot therefore be antithetical to human existence ?and human reasonability.

I have no sympathies then for movements, even those that associate themselves with the Catholic Church, that foist all sort of unreasonable beliefs: that one can catch grace from heaven by upturned umbrellas, or that one can get rich by jumping at the command of the minister. These are not acts of faith; these are challenges to sanity! In contrast to this is the strength of a public theology?a theology that dares go public and attempts to justify itself in the public sphere. Certainly, challenging ministers of other religions to a so-called debate that is hardly anything more than an exchange of excerpts and passages from disparate parts of the Scripture is no debate at all, and going public in that manner does not make of one?s theology public. If anything at all, it only fuels the cynicism of those who are not too kindly disposed towards religion. The Bible is a collection of the wisdom of two thousand years and will be as biased and culturally conditioned as the times that produce the books that constitute it. What makes the Bible coherent is the life of a community of faith that make sense out of it, in accordance with the dictates of reason.

One can be attached to pictures and images without being a fanatic. I am particularly fond of a picture of my grandparents that I carry with me wherever my parish or administrative assignments take me. But from the picture my thoughts go back to all the love and care I have received from my grandparents. And my sentimental attachment to that picture is born of the love I have received from them, as well as the love I bear them. If the millions who transformed what could have been a reasonable distance from Quirino Grandstand to Quiapo church into a 12-hour ordeal had only looked at the statue of the Black Nazarene and then remembered that our God is the God who identifies himself with the down-trodden and the suffering, if they had looked at the statue and been reminded of the demand of Jesus that the disciple must take up his cross each day and follow him, if they had only recognized in the representation of Jesus? wounds the woundedness of the world, of our society and of our hearts, that would have made all the difference.

rannie_aquino@rannieaquino.com