THE STREETS taught a better homily than most pulpits last weekend. Students, teachers, farmers, nurses, drivers, parents, and the faithful pressed together at the Trillion-Peso March, a slow tide of people saying the simplest of lessons: stop stealing public money.
Many faith communities in Iloilo showed up with placards and prayers. Yet a number of high-ranking religious leaders in other areas in the country, the shepherds who normally guide the flock, seemed missing, or stayed oddly quiet. No one expects them to trade cassocks for megaphones every time a placard rises. The question is more basic: when a nation raises a moral alarm, why does the silence of some shepherds feel louder than the cry of the sheep?
In classrooms, Social Studies and Values Education teachers scrambled to explain that attending Mass and standing against theft are not competing duties. Both honor God, country, and neighbor. This is how the lesson sounded in many faculty rooms: “If our leaders believe what they teach, they will walk with us when it matters.”
There is a history to this moral muscle. Filipino churches once spoke clearly in public crises — issuing pastoral letters, opening parish halls to teach citizenship, and offering quiet courage when fear was fashionable. Many still do, especially on life issues, poverty, and peacebuilding. Some bishops, ministers, priests, pastors, nuns, imams, and congregation heads blessed the marchers from the sidewalk or joined the crowd discreetly.
But a visible few chose to stand aside. Their defenders say that neutrality keeps the church from being dragged into partisan fights. Fair point. Yet neutrality and passivity are not the same thing. When the house smolders, a neighbor who “refuses to take sides” while holding a fire hose is not neutral; he is absent. The question is not about their personal schedules but about moral presence. In matters that wound the poor, presence is policy.
Why do some shepherds choose quiet?
Part of it is caution. They fear that a crowd can be hijacked by political actors, that prayer risks being reduced to photo-ops, or that security threats will endanger parishioners. Some also worry about legal permits, or about the church’s non-partisan status under the law. These risks are real. They demand prudence and planning.
Yet prudence should not become paralysis. Teachers understand this tension well. You weigh options, think through consequences, choose the better right for this moment. In citizen language, that means march when a rare window opens, then return to the grind of documents, audits, and reforms on Monday. Silence may protect institutions from noise, but it rarely protects the poor from hunger.
There is another reason the silence stings. In ordinary weeks, some of our robed leaders appear in ribbon cuttings, birthday greetings, wedding receptions, and faith parades. They publicly praise officials who favor their causes, and privately scold subordinates who ask about budget leaks in flood-control projects. Parish halls fill up for charity concerts, yet empty fast when volunteers ask to host a Freedom of Information clinic.
This is not everyone, but the pattern is visible. The lesson it sends to young Filipinos is confusing. As “Education For A Faith That Does Justice” author Rhoderick John Abellanosa somehow alludes it in his latest post: we can be bold and partisan from the pulpit against divorce, death penalty, explicit content, or taxing religious properties, but careful to a fault when the theft involves people’s money via substandard and ghost projects.
The inconsistency frays trust. A Social Weather Stations series across three decades shows weekly Mass or service attendance sliding from the high levels of the 1990s to lower rates around 2021, while confidence in institutions also shifts over time (SWS, 1991–2021). People still believe. They are just tired of double talk.
Trust is a fragile currency. Transparency International’s corruption index has kept the Philippines in the lower third of country rankings in recent years, which mirrors what families feel when they pass half-done flood-control canals and stalled flyovers. The World Bank has long warned that corruption works like a tax on the poor, cutting funds for classrooms, clinics, and transport.
The research is not abstract to teachers who share chalk, pay for bond paper, and crowd forty students into a room built for 25. When a teenager in uniform asks, “Sir, if stealing is wrong, why are powerful people not in jail?” the safe answer no longer satisfies.
Even the one who said that “Corruption is paid by the poor” Pope Francis, during a general audience in 2021, called religious hypocrisy “particularly detestable,” because it turns faith into theater and makes the young walk away. One need not be Catholic to understand the point. If the sermon and the schedule do not match, the schedule wins.
As a former educator in an Ignatian basic education school now teaching in college, I keep showing up to that discernment — imperfectly. Sometimes I forget, then I return to it. (To be continued)/PN
