FIRST SAY:
The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.
—Christopher Hitchens
The latest from Cotabato City in Maguindanao del Norte is that three unidentified men were so pissed hearing and seeing city residents singing praises for their god that they threw a hand grenade into a Catholic chapel in Barangay Rosary Heights 3 at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday while a Bible service was ongoing.
The blast left two churchgoers injured, a village official said. They were identified as Maribel Abis, 46, and Aniceta Tobil, 65.
According to the account of the incident furnished by a barangay tanod who saw the grenade attack, two men on a motorcycle passed by the Santo Niño Chapel, tossed the grenade and sped away. Another man in another motorcycle parked nearby acted as a lookout, and left a couple of minutes after the attack.
Chairman Kagi Omar Pasawilan of Barangay Rosary Heights 3 informed the Cotabato City Police Office of the incident later.
Cotabato City Mayor Bruce Matabalao condemned the attack.
He said the city government would provide reward money to anyone who could give the police any information that would lead to the arrest of the perpetrators.
Col. Querubin Manalang Jr., the Cotabato city police director, said the two victims sustained minor injuries and are now recuperating in the hospital.
“Let’s all fight violence and terrorism. It is an outright disrespect to the Roman Catholic Church and its believers,” Mayor Matabalao said.
The grenade throwing incident at MSU occurred during Sunday mass, but the one
in Cotabato City happened while a lay minister was presiding over a Bible service. This was confirmed by the religious running the Cotabato Immaculate Conception Cathedral.
It is sad that decades of effort, negotiations, study and work by the Philippine government have produced very little by way of peace in Mindanao, all because of belief or faith in something that lacks evidence of existence.
As my favorite writer Christopher Hitchens said, the suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious. The female genital mutilation community, he also said, has religion as reason. And so many other communities that have deleterious effects on mankind.
Meanwhile, while more intelligent public intellectuals like Ka Mentong Laurel and Ado Paglinawan are busy making sense of why Rear Admiral Carlos was eased out of the Western Command, and why Jay Tarriela is issuing statements that seemed contrary to the position taken by his boss, President Ferdinand Marcos, two other public figures are locked in a feud over some Vatican decree dated May 28, 1951 purportedly saying that some apparition of the Virgin Mary somewhere in Batangas was a hoax.
The handwritten decree in Latin dated May 28, 1951, said: “By order of the Most Holy Father’s will: The apostolic delegate is to authorize the apostolic administrator to issue a document from the Curia in which it is declared that the events of Lipa, after serious examination, turns out not to have a supernatural origin and character.”
It was drafted “in [an] audience with His Holiness,” then-Pope Pius XII, on March 29, 1951. Manuel Victor Cardinal Fernandez, prefect of the DDF, the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog, certified the copy of the decree as authentic.
But Harriet Demetriou, Marian devotee, said that master exorcist Fr. Winston Cabading who sees the devil in his dreams and eats demons for breakfast was not “not yet vindicated” even with the decree’s release.
She said the document’s veracity should be vetted first.
“Where was this decree all along? Why was he (Cabading) not able to present it before? For more than 70 years, this decree has not appeared, and suddenly it was released to the public,” she noted.
In a statement, Demetriou raised several questions “after a thorough examination” of the document, including the fact that it was handwritten, with erasures.
She said she would wait for answers before making a final judgment. Her 2022 perjury complaint against Cabading was based on her claim that the Vatican decree was nonexistent.
The perjury complaint was dismissed in January 2023 by the Makati City prosecutor’s office for insufficiency of evidence but Demetriou vowed to go all the way to the Supreme Court. Another case against the exorcist was dismissed by the QC regional trial court on the same subject.
My take is that the High Tribunal should prioritize the petition of the jeepney drivers, operators and commuters because after all, the Supreme Court has mountains of cases to process.
Comentários