by ANTONIO C. ABAYA

This article first appeared in the April 12, 2007 issue of the Manila Standard Today. I am running it again in view of the triple whammy that hit this battered country in the past 35 days or so: Ondoy, Pepeng and Santi. More than a month after Ondoy, many lakeshore towns—including nearby Taguig, Pasig, Sta. Cruz—are still under water.

The title is admittedly whimsical. God uses no doormat, and God does not “choose.” But if anything, it undercuts the self-congratulatory parochial claim that Filipinos are God’s Chosen People. Chosen to suffer most, perhaps.

Easter Sunday is not the season for light comedy, but the Philippine Daily Inquirer chose to make it so by giving front page publicity last April 8 to a mawkish and parochial essay by Alex Lacson, who claims to see “12 Signs that convinced me that we (Filipinos) are the Chosen People of God. He chose us to be His messengers, to be His ambassadors, to spread His message in other parts of the world….”

What arrant nonsense!

Among those 12 signs that Lacson sees, at least four are connected with the fact that the inhabitants of these islands were converted by the Spaniards to Christianity, specifically to Roman Catholicism.

These four signs are a.) Magellan died in Mactan in 1521. “If our history stopped there, it means we would never have become a Christian nation.” b) “Filipinos were claimed in the name of God” in a second Spanish expedition led by Legaspi and Fray Urdaneta in 1565; c) “As an offshoot of the spread of Christianity in the islands, the Philippines became the first Christian nation in Asia.”; and d) “The Philippines is the first nation in Asia to have Bibles” for which Lacson credits American (Protestant) missionaries in the 1900s.

The ready reply to all four is “So what?” Or “Big deal!” But a little historical background, which I hope Ambeth Ocampo will one day come up with, should cure Lacson of his parochialism.

The inhabitants of these islands were not “the first people to be claimed in the name of God” by the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors. That was the formulaic legal incantation uttered by the Iberian conquistadors when they grabbed the lands of the Aztecs in what became Mexico, the Incas in what became Peru, the Mayans in what became Guatemala, the Caribs in what became Cuba and Central America, the Guaranis in what became Paraguay, the native American tribes in what are now Florida, New Mexico, Texas, etc. and the hundreds of Amazon tribes in what is now Brazil… decades before Legaspi and Urdaneta.

Unlike the other European and American colonial powers whose imperial forays were propelled by lust for raw materials, mineral resources, land, slaves, preferential trade, strategic locations, etc., the Iberians were additionally motivated by the self-appointed evangelical mission to “save souls” for the Holy Mother Church. So all the indio tribes whom they conquered were “claimed in the name of God.”

Two hundred years before the arrival of Legaspi, the Sulu Sultanate was already in existence and even enjoyed the suzerain patronage of the Chinese Emperor. There was also an established Muslim civilization in western and southern Mindanao. Lacson obviously does not include Muslims among the members of God’s Chosen People.

The Jesuit missionary Francisco de Jesus y Azpilcueta of Navarre (in what became Spain)—who was later canonized as St. Francis Xavier—evangelized southern India, Malacca and the Moluccas in 1542, and Kagoshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1549. The Catholic Christian community that he established in Nagasaki survived for several hundred years despite persecution  by the Tokugawa Shoguns.

Another Jesuit missionary, the Italian Matteo Ricci, was a valued and trusted advisor in the Chinese imperial court in Peking in 1582, where he introduced Western science, mathematics and astronomy, and converted some Confucian scholars to Christianity. Some even chose to become Jesuits.

It is unthinkable that this very significant presence of Catholic Christianity in Japan and China in the 16th century did not result in the Bible, or parts thereof, being translated into Nippongo and/or Mandarin, centuries before the Americans came to the Philippines with their English-language Bibles in the 1900s.

Besides, how many indios in the 1900s could read anything in any language, much less the Bible in English? I spent nine years under the Jesuits in the Ateneo de Manila from 1947 to 1956, and I do not recall ever being made to read the entire Bible, only selected parts thereof, as the Japanese and Chinese Christians must have in the 16th century.

One of the signs that Lacson sees is that the Philippines is in the middle of the world. “A small group of tiny islands, but it’s right there in the middle. Is it an accident in history [you mean geography; countries do not move around. ACA] that our Philippines is right there in the middle? Accessible to the north, the south, the east and the west.?”

Jesus Christ! Doesn’t Lacson know that Planet Earth is a sphere, and that therefore every point on it is in the middle of it, “accessible to the north, the south, the east and the west?”

Every country’s geography textbook (including tiny Liechtenstein’s) has it in the center of the planet. That is just common sense, since every country’s students study and learn the geography of their own country before they study and learn the geography of other countries. It has nothing to do with being God’s Chosen People.

Lacson revels in the knowledge that the Philippines is one of the richest countries in the world, that the presence of Filipino overseas workers all over the world is an indication that they “are ambassadors and messengers of God”  and that “they breathe life to the churches of the world.”

True, we are one of the richest countries in the world, but if we were truly the Chosen People of God, we would have turned this natural wealth into social wealth for the majority of our people, as the Israelis—the original Chosen People—have done of their barren and desolate land. By that measure, the presence of millions of Filipino workers overseas is actually proof that we have failed to transform that natural wealth into social wealth and thus do not deserve to be called the Chosen People of God.

Besides, the Philippines is not the only country with millions of its people living and working overseas. Mexico and Egypt have more overseas contract workers than the Philippines, and not far behind are India, Pakistan and, soon, China. So, more than half the people on the planet are God’s Chosen People, according to Lacson’s standards, a distinction that loses all meaning because of its inflationary embrace.

Lacson’s parochialism knows no bounds and overflows into simple-minded word play. The word Pilipino, he writes, is derived from piling-pili (meaning, meticulously chosen) and pinong-pino (meaning, most refined).

Jesus Christ! And the editors of the Inquirer considered this childish twaddle front-page material!

At the risk of being stripped of my citizenship, I suggest that far from being God’s Chosen People, Filipinos inhabit what could be God’s Chosen Doormat.

We have, for example, more than our fair share of natural calamities. We are visited by more typhoons than any other country in this part of the world: an average of 19.1 every year, some of which are killer typhoons that kill dozens, even hundreds, of people and destroy billions of pesos worth of property and crops. A situation compounded by a weather bureau that could not tell 140 kph from 140 mph, as when Milenyo scored a direct hit on Metro Manila last year.

Killer typhoons often result in killer floods and killer mudslides in which uncounted thousands disappear in a few seconds of biblical catastrophe. Has the Philippine government or anyone else ever come up with a definitive casualty count in Ormoc or in Real and Infanta, or in St.Bernard Guinsaugon?

As if killer typhoons, killer floods and killer mudslides were not punishment enough, we are also on the seismic belt known as the Pacific Rim of Fire and experience killer earthquakes.

Vietnam has typhoons but virtually no earthquakes. Indonesia has earthquakes, but virtually no typhoons. Only the Philippines, Taiwan, China and Japan are regularly visited by the Four Horsemen of the East Asian Apocalypse, and we, being by far the poorest of the four, experience the worst suffering. If we are indeed God’s Chosen People, we have been chosen to suffer the most.

But it is the man-made disasters that, unique in this part of the world, have devastated this country physically, socially, economically, politically and morally.

And these include a run-away population growth rate; a judicial system that takes years, even decades, to render judgment; an American-style liberalism that allows the Communist movement to simultaneously wage both an armed revolution and a “legal” struggle against the government; consistently poor choices in economic strategies for the past 40 years; rampant lawlessness despite—or because of—the presence of 40,000 lawyers; institutionalized fraud in its electoral process; the most corrupt government in East  Asia; and a political and media culture that breeds Idiot Candidates and Idiot Voters, and now, Idiot Prophets as well.

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