Here is a reflection I just gave at my parish entitled "Counseling the Ignorant," which is relevant to the topic at hand:
Instructing the ignorant and counseling the doubtful are two of the seven spiritual (as opposed to corporal) works of mercy. They are important pillars upholding the sanctity of life, especially in the face of the culture of death that has allowed lifestyles in direct contradiction to the norms of the gospel to become the de facto standard of morality. Sadly, contemporary Catholic religious education is an insufficient bulwark against moral relativism, the philosophy that there are no absolutes, that your truth is different from my truth. As a result, faith and spirituality based on God’s revelation are now largely confined to the individual sphere, separate from public life.
The 26 Martyrs of Nagasaki were the first group of Christians to be crucified–and
lanced—in a grim parody of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice at Calvary
The clash between Christian faith and relativism is illustrated by Martin Scorsese’s newly released film, Silence, about the brutal persecutions of Catholics in Japan during the seventeenth century. In this film, Fr. Rodrigues, one of two Portuguese Jesuits sent to find their mentor who was rumored to have apostatized, is forced to deny the Faith in order to save others from crucifixion and other severe tortures. The Japanese persecutors in the film essentially represent the worldview of today’s relativists who ridicule the uncompromising certainty of believers willing to sacrifice everything for the truth. Despite its disappointing ending, I was deeply moved by Scorsese’s film. My gut reactions were aided by a remote personal connection; my Filipino maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Ruiz. Among the martyrs at Nagasaki in 1637 was the first Filipino canonized saint, Lorenzo Ruiz, who had been part of a missionary expedition led by Dominican friars. When asked to deny his faith so that his life would be spared, Lorenzo Ruiz replied, “I will never do it. I am a Catholic and happy to die for God. If I have a thousand lives to offer, I will offer them to God.” He was then hung by his feet over a pit with his temple slit open. After two days of agony, he died of bleeding and suffocation.
St. Lorenzo Ruiz died giving witness to a faith that the Japanese of the Tokugawa Period regarded as a threat to the integrity of their national culture. In the movie, Silence, there is a scene in which the Japanese inquisitor says to the captured priest, Fr. Rodrigues, “Your religion may be true in Spain and Portugal, but it is not true here in Japan.” Fr. Rodrigues answered, “If our religion is not also true in Japan, then it cannot be true at all, since the truth is the same everywhere!” Therein lies the rub. Almost 400 years after the martyrs of Japan gave their lives in fidelity to the gospel, we have abandoned the catholicity of our Faith and its universal claims in favor of so-called “diversity” and “inclusion.”
Even sex itself has been relativized. The disorder that began in the Garden of Eden, symbolized by Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (which in Hebrew double entendre served as a sexual metaphor), has metastasized in our day not only to the murder of the child in the womb, but even to the debasement of human gender and the very concept of the family. We have thus been beguiled by the devil to become our own gods, and to “call evil good and good evil,” as stated in Isaiah 5:20. This is the substance of anti-Christianity, which is no less than the rebellion of setting up a rival good apart from God in imitation of Lucifer, whom Saul Alinsky described in his book, Rules for Radicals, as “the first radical known to man.” Justice Anthony Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court notoriously wrote in defense of abortion, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
It is not that Catholicism cannot co-exist with diversity; far from it! While all Catholics must acknowledge the same essential truths of the Faith, their experiences and expressions of the Faith may differ, because Truth is ultimately not a mere abstraction, but the Infinite Person of God Who begets an inexhaustible treasure of mysteries in His Word, the depths of which we will never plumb. The devotion to the Holy Infant, or the Santo Niño as He is known in the Philippines and Hispanic countries, is a case in point.
The Filipino devotion to the Santo Niño revolves around a statue of the Holy Infant that was originally designed by Flemish artisans based on a vision by the 16th century Spanish mystic, St. Teresa of Avila. It was brought to the Philippine island of Cebu in 1521 by the explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, and is the oldest surviving Catholic relic in the Philippines. On April 14, 1521, Magellan presented Rajah Humabon, the ruler of Cebu, with the image of the Santo Niño and two other objects of religious devotion as a baptismal gift. Magellan died on April 27, 1521 in the Battle of Mactan. The next Spanish expedition arrived on April 27, 1565 led by Miguel López de Legazpi. His attempts at peaceful colonization were rejected, and so he opened fire on the coastal town that also bears the name Cebu. The town of Cebu was thus burnt down, and in its ruins was found the image of the Santo Niño in a pine box. The statue’s survival was seen as a miracle, and ever since it has been believed to have miraculous powers. A church to house the Santo Niño was built on the spot where the image was found. It was later reconstructed, and Pope Paul VI elevated it to the status of Minor Basilica on its 400th anniversary in April 28, 1965, during which he issued a papal bull for the Canonical Coronation of the statue.
I mention the Santo Niño because of how the Holy Infant reflects the Filipino character in a special way, as well as Jesus’ own saying: “Unless you turn and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven (Mt 18:3).” We Filipinos are generally a very concrete people, not usually given to theological abstraction. Widespread poverty has kept life at a very basic level for the vast majority of my compatriots. Our simple, childlike approach to faith has, despite its lack of sophistication, preserved the Catholic religion in the Philippines for almost five centuries in the face of a very difficult history filled with suffering.
One of those difficult periods of Filipino history was the Marcos dictatorship from 1972 to 1986, during which martial law was declared and many political prisoners were detained and even tortured. Among these political prisoners was my own father, who was eventually released a few months before the People Power Revolution at the request of Cardinal Jaime Sin, the Archbishop of Manila. There was a strange history behind this release, which began around 1983, when a certain image of the Santo Niño in a Manila suburb began to miraculously drip water. A visionary who chanced upon the image one day saw Mother Mary and Jesus, the latter allegedly a young boy with a Prince Valiant haircut and flip-flops typically worn by the poor who could not afford shoes. The boy Jesus spoke in Taglish, the pidgin English used by most Filipinos. Among other things, he prophesied that my father would eventually be released from prison, despite the fact that the Marcos regime regarded him as one of the top threats to the government.
Let us fast forward to today’s dilemmas. The Philippines, like many third world countries, aspires to rapid economic development in order to alleviate massive poverty. But there is a steep price to be paid for such development due to the globalization of the culture of death. In exchange for a piece of the pie, so to speak, the Philippines has had to jettison its public adherence to Catholic morality in favor of birth control and other ills accompanying moral relativism. The Catholic Church in the Philippines has risked unpopularity by sticking to its guns in defense of the Faith, reminding everyone that it was Jesus who said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them (Mt 19:14).” Devotion to the Santo Niño is one of the powerful means that the Church has in teaching the intrinsic worth of children, at a time when populations of developed countries are actually imploding, which may eventually lead to systematic euthanasia of the elderly due to the lack of workers to support them.
In the end, the Santo Niño teaches us that Jesus, the Word Made Flesh, may be gloriously reflected in a unique manner in every race and in every culture. Yet the Incarnation, the doctrine that God became a man, remains a universal truth that men and women everywhere must believe, if explicitly presented with the opportunity. It is not mercy to withhold this truth out of respect for an indigenous culture. Rather it is mercy to teach the ignorant the truths of the gospel in order that they may be saved and their very culture renewed and sanctified. It is likewise mercy to counsel the doubtful to hold on to the Faith for dear life, that they might not sell their souls for the mere trifle of living a few years longer. “For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it (Mt 16:25).” It was out of love for God and neighbor that the martyrs of Japan risked their lives to evangelize the Japanese people. And it was the greatest love that they demonstrated in laying down their lives in imitation of Jesus Himself, who said: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13).”