To whom shall priests run?

is more shocking than the killing of priests is the absence of a massive public indignation regarding this, considering that there are approximately 80 million Catholics.

There was a time when active support for the Church and respect for priests were hallmarks of Catholic identity. Last year, several Catholic priests in China banded together to stop government workers from destroying a church building. Parishioners and other lay Catholics, when they learned about this, came out to support the priests. They sat in front of the government workers and their heavy equipment. Some of them were beaten and sustained injuries. But they stood their ground until the workers and security officials left the venue.

In Mexico, when the government publicly shamed and criminalized priests in order to muffle public outcry whenever a priest was murdered, many lay Catholics immediately came out to fight this strategy. For instance, when the government announced that a priest was a pedophile because CCTV footages showed him holding the hand of a minor, a woman came out immediately and showed proof that the man was not a priest but her husband, and the minor was her son.

In our country, few Catholics openly come out to support priests when the latter become victims of false accusations, intrigues, or hate crimes. In fact, there is an increasing antipathy towards priests, probably due to the media’s tendency to print or broadcast the moral indiscretions of a few members of the clergy, and the constant barrage of obscenity hurled at priests by the President himself.

It takes more than ordinary strength and courage to serve as a priest today. Many priests go about their work burdened by the hardly bearable circumstances that have befallen their vocation today. So, if 80 million Catholics will not stand up for their priests (whose number is diminishing every year), from whom shall priests seek solace and support when faced with life-threatening or difficult situations?

Many priests easily become target of hate crimes because they champion advocacies that threaten the status quo and the vested interests of the rich and powerful.

But many priests are forced to do this mainly because very few lay Catholics (especially those in

hardly raise a collective dissent against the ills of our nation. They forget, or simply ignore, that their main mission as lay Catholics is to permeate the secular sphere with the spirit of the Gospels.

Such apathy and indifference are manifest when self-proclaimed enemies of the Catholic Church unfairly criticize, curse, and savagely attempt to destroy her. Worst, many of them — big shot politicians and their compliant mercenaries and unthinking trolls — are themselves Catholics. This reminds me of William Butler Yeats’ poem:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

We celebrate today the birthday of John the Baptist, the “voice crying in the wilderness.” Let us pray for the good Catholics who make their voices heard and are not afraid to be called “fools for Christ” firmly believing that what is popular is shallow and transitory, while what is beyond the understanding of the well-educated but morally dumb, is nothing less than God’s word searching for a human voice.