Dogmatism

and the only way to neutralize these isms is through an armed struggle in the countryside that eventually strangles the cities.

Yet after all these years the NPA is far from being in control of the countryside let alone strangling the cities. This tragedy (for them it should be) comes from a place where ideology is dogma so absolute as to make party bosses willing to kill their own “heretical” party members. Like in the 1980s Jose Ma. Sison ordered the killing of “at least a hundred” party members who were suspected, due to their ideological “heresies,” of being government agents.

Much as I would like the peace talks to continue, my mind puzzles over how, as the CPP-NPA remains dogmatic about the violent means to strike the isms down. The unilateral ceasefire of the NPA left a door ajar to non-violent new approaches to social change. But that has since been slammed shut as the NPA returned to the ideological dogma of an armed struggle being the only way to change Philippine society.

Another dogmatic group is the institutional Catholic Church. It is, however, surviving its dogmatism because it has since stopped killing infidels (the Crusades from 1095 to 1291), heretics (the Inquisitions of 1232 and 1542) and critics (Jose Rizal, Gomez,

Burgos, Zamora, 1890s). The institutional Church of the hierarchy has been socially irrelevant for sticking generally, with few exceptions, to the defense of dogma and the imposition of rules from their comfortable world away from the sweat and grime of ordinary people’s lives. But Christ’s message will survive the institution’s dogmatism in the community of the faithful many of whom struggle to live that message in the fringes of civil and religious societies.

If bishops and priests, as Pope Francis enjoins, must live with the poor to become truly a Church of the poor, maybe CPP-NPA’s Jose Ma. Sison and company should return to live in the Philippines so they can re-read Filipino social reality, stop ideology-dictated killing of Filipinos and become truly a party of the poor. -