CEBU CITY (MindaNews / 25 Sept)—In this Godforsaken country (only one of two supposedly Catholic countries in Asia—along with East Timor—with the majority of its citizens claiming membership with the Roman Catholic Church), there have recently been a lot of God-talk.
Blame this on the “fugitive son-of-God,” whose escapade created a lot of noise both in mass and social media. Now comes the claim of Brig. Gen. Nicolas Torre III, Police Regional Office-11 (PRO-11) director (who has been promoted to head the Criminal Investigation Detection Group starting Sept. 25) that “God used them to beat the self-proclaimed ‘appointed son of God.’” (This was the headline of a recent MindaNews report.)
Torre’s exact words: “Yung pagkatanggap ko ng Senate hearing na notice grabe pasalamat ko sa Diyos. Diyos ko, salamat po. Binigay talaga ng Diyos yun. Divine Providence yun (When I received the notice about the Senate hearing, I was really thankful. It was given by God. It was Divine Providence).” (The notice in the Senate hearing came from the Senate investigation called by Senator Bato dela Rosa which according to Gen. Torre enabled the PNP to present to the public what they had accomplished in the manhunt for Quiboloy).
“Kaya ako sa buong episode na to kahit masama akong tao, feeling ko talaga ginamit tayo ng Diyos para paluin si Quiboloy. Kung masama tayong tao, mas masama si Quiboloy. Pinalo na talaga sya ng Diyos (That’s why even if in this whole episode I’m the bad person, I really feel that God used us to beat Quiboloy. If we are bad people, Quiboloy is even worse. God really beat him).”
Is God in heaven pleased with all these shenanigans as a self-proclaimed “son of God,” and his captors take turns “using God’s name in vain”? Is God out there in God’s throne delighted with all these maneuverings where the key players inaccurately reflect God’s character through their speech and actions and in the process take God’s name in vain? Theologians posit that misrepresenting God’s name is misrepresenting God Himself.
Or could it be that God is laughing at all these antics among a cast of characters whose credibility to critically-minded Filipinos has reached rock bottom? For any dramatist would consider all these happenings constitutive of a farce!
Or has God been angered by false claims of a would-be modern-day Messiah (except that Quiboloy’s first name is not Emmanuel but rather it is Apollo, the name of the Olympian deity in classical Greek and Roman mythology who was known as a god of archery) asserting that he is God’s son? Is this why God was labelled by Gen. Torre as “God who punishes” (“ginamit tayo ng Diyos para paluin si Quiboloy”). The image of an avenging God—a remnant of the vengeful, angry and violent God of the Old Testament—is now resurrected by Gen. Torre.
Some would claim that all these “stupidities” or “false claims” reported extensively by media have created a lot of confusion among believers who are not quite sure anymore who to believe in terms of the God who they will worship.
There have been a lot of the permutations of who God is, thus creating confusions for many Catholics in this country. First is Digong Duterte’s view as to who God is. In 2018 at the National Information and Technology Summit in Davao City, Duterte asked: “Who is this stupid God?” and faced the ire of those who understood him as saying that God was stupid. His spin doctors immediately had to clarify that Duterte’s “God has a lot of common sense,” but the God of his detractors, especially priests and religious who critiqued him, was a “stupid God.”
He then attacked the Pope and all the church workers who opposed his abuses, especially surrounding his infamous drug war that led to thousands of extra judicial killings. Despite his critics’ claims that he “blasphemed,” (i.e., he spoke sacrilegiously about God), Duterte’s popularity rating in this Catholic country remained high throughout his presidency. Had a “cult” around Duterte arose especially among his loyalists in Davao and some parts of Mindanao?
Another “cult” that arose in Davao City that attracted a number of followers was that founded by Pastor Quiboloy (PQ), now wearing clothes colored orange (rather than his immaculate white suit) languishing in the new Quezon City jail along with his four subordinates.
Founded on September 1, 1985 when his first followers gathered in a prayer house in Agdao in Davao City, today the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, the Name Above Every Name (KOJC)— known as a Philippines-based Oneness Restorationist sect—claims that it has four million tithed followers in the Philippines, and two million followers outside the country. Rapidly increasing in just two decades, this estimate of its total numbers is truly remarkable if the reports are true.
And pray tell, if PQ is the son-of-God who is his God the Father and how does he relate the other “Son-of-God,” who Christians call Jesus Christ?
PQ’s doctrine is that the Christ in the Jewish setting was unable to “complete the work of salvation,” as “His message was misunderstood and rejected by the Jews.” This paved the way for God to raise Quiboloy as the Chosen One, “the Christ in the Gentile setting.” Quiboloy asserts that all the claims of the biblical Christ can be applied to himself.
And now comes the claim of Gen. Torre, that God punishes those who are sinners. While claiming he, too, is a sinner, he considers PQ as a worst sinner and deserves to be punished. And what was the reason why he and his men succeeded in finally finding PQ, arrest him and drag him to prison? Because Divine Providence was on the side of the police force!
So was Torre claiming that God was on their side rather than that of PQ and the KJOC’s? So did PQ’s God abandon him? (Like Jesus dying on the Cross: did PQ echo the same lamentation—“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”). Is Torre claiming that he is now God’s favorite? Does this mean that God blesses the efforts of the military and police against those whose “kingdom” was raided in search of the fugitive?
But then the Archbishop of Davao, Romulo Valles, on August 27, at the height of the police operations to search for PQ, issued a statement that seemed to critique what the police forces did when they raided PQ’s kingdom. He wrote: “Careful discernment, and prudence, and the regard for the basic civil liberties guaranteed by our Constitution must be observed in compliance with the directives of the Courts… The prolonged search being conducted, coupled with the overwhelming presence of law enforcers in a place dedicated for religious worship, and for the education of the youth, is alarming and troubling, as it touches some sensitive issues on religious freedom.”
In fact, who among the three “wise men” (Duterte, PQ and Torre) have a correct interpretation of who God is? Duterte’s “stupid God,” PQ’s Father anointing him his Gentile son or Torre’s vengeful God? Or are all three of them “using God’s name in vain?”
But what about the God of Exodus, of the prophets of the Old Testament, of Jesus Christ and his followers? How about the God of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of the Popes issuing the Catholic social teachings, of Pope John XXIII and Pope Francis, of the Latin American liberation theologians (led by Gustavo Gutierrez), Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day and other modern Christian prophets? Of Filipinos whose faith compelled them to oppose—and for some to offer their lives—all the dictators of this country from Marcos to Duterte?
So who among the God as defined by Duterte, PQ and Torre can we Filipino Catholics trust? We are constantly reminded that “In God we trust,” a mantra that goes all the way to the Old Testament (Psalm 91:2—“I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust”) and echoed in a few New Testament verses. In the United States, this phrase even appears in their coins and currencies which was a political motto that arose during the American Civil War, where Union supporters needed to emphasize their attachment to God to boost morale.
One can only hope that the blind followers of the various cults among the Catholics in this country can be enlightened as to the “dangerous memory” of Jesus Christ, the Christian faith that arose with the efforts of the first disciplines “to preach the Good News,” the Church of Vatican II that demands the believers to “read the signs of the times,” and the Church of the Poor envisioned by PCP II. Only then can the Catholic faith help liberate the majority of our people from the false God being masqueraded by would-be prophets who Jesus himself would declare as hypocrites.
Tired of the corrupt ways of the Pharisees of his time, and frustrated at how they used faith to deepen the people’s enslavement, he angrily exhorted: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces.” (Matthew 23:13).
Could Jesus’ words still reverberate across the land these days?
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Redemptorist Brother Karl Gaspar is Mindanao’s most prolific book author. Gaspar is also a Datu Bago 2018 awardee, the highest honor the Davao City government bestows on its constituents. He is presently based in Cebu City.)