Now that the time for filing is over for all those seeking to be elected to public office in May 2025, I would like to share with all the aspirants some words of advice from Pope Francis. These ideas come from the social encyclical that he wrote during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is entitled “Let Us Dream” and can be sourced online for free. It should be a required reading for both actual and potential political leaders at all levels. Let this article serve just as an “appetizer” for the rich intellectual meal that Pope Francis always serves in all his writings. There is no substitute to the actual reading of the whole document.
The Pope was prompted to write this encyclical by the tragic deaths and sufferings he witnessed during the pandemic. Although, thank God, the Philippines—together with the rest of the world—has survived the worst phase of the disease, the country is still suffering from another pandemic: that of the dehumanizing poverty that inflicts some 16 percent of our population, in absolute numbers some 19 million human beings. That is why in his last State of the Nation Address (SONA), President BBM rightly did not gloat over the fact that the Philippines is being touted worldwide as one of the fastest growing economies in the Indo-Pacific region, together with Vietnam. A high GDP growth rate loses much of its value if 19 million Filipinos are being left behind. As the Pope wrote in “Let Us Dream,” the first step is to allow yourself to be struck by what you see. Thanks to the President, we are struck by what we see: the sufferings of millions of our fellow citizens mired in poverty. What must be done by our present and future leaders to help all of us “heal and repair”? Obviously, we must act. The Pope, however, points out that action is only the third step. There is an essential intermediate stage: to discern and to choose. He rightly observes that “a time of trial is always a time of distinguishing paths of the good that lead to the future from other paths that lead nowhere or backward. With clarity, we can better choose the first.”
For the intermediate or second step, the Pope enumerates the following required dispositions:
-Openness to reality
-A robust set of criteria to guide us
-Knowledge that we are loved by God, called to be a people in service and solidarity
- Healthy capacity for reflection, places of refuge from the tyranny of the urgent
-Prayer to hear the prompts of the Spirit and cultivate dialogue in a community that can
hold and allow us to dream.
In this second step, it is providential that the Catholic Church has developed a series of principles for reflection, together with criteria for judgment that also offer directives for action. These are found in what are known as the Social Doctrine of the Church that can be extracted from social encyclicals written by the Popes over more than 100 years, starting with Pope Leo XIII’s famous “Rerum Novarum,” the first social encyclical written in 1890 in order to correct the practical errors of the extreme forms of capitalism that was ushered in by the First Industrial Revolution in England during 1770 to 1840. In fact, there is an entire publication called “The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church,” also available for free in the internet. Although the teachings found in the social encyclicals are drawn from reflections on the Gospel, their principles are accessible to all with the use of reason. They have always been addressed by their respective authors to “all men and women of good will.”
Since the highest virtue in Christian teachings is charity or love, all the criteria found in the Social Teachings are truly expressions of love, that is, they seek to set in motion dynamics that allow people to feel loved, especially the poor, who are able to experience their true value. Considering that the most serious challenge to Philippine society is the very high rate of poverty, the highest priority must be given to the principle of the preferential option for the poor. This means that we need always to keep in mind how any decision we make might impact on the poor. It also means that we need to put the poor at the center of our thinking. By means of that preferential option, God gives us a new perspective on values with which to judge events. A concrete example of this is considering the impact on the poor of an overly aggressive approach to cleaning the environment that leads to a significant rise in energy costs which victimize the poorest of the poor. At this stage of our development, in which we contribute less than one percent to the carbon footprint of the world, it would prejudicial to the poor if we give the highest priority to the E in ESG, ignoring the socio-economic (S) impact on the 16 percent poorest of the poor in the country.
Pope Francis explains in the clearest term why those who drafted the Philippine Constitution of 1987 removed the concept of the greatest good for the greatest number found in former versions of our Constitution and introduced in its stead the concept of the “common good,” a very important principle in the Social Doctrine of the Church. Quoting from Let US Dream: …when the Church speaks of the common good, it asks us to have regard for the good of society as a whole. It is not enough to adjudicate between different parties and interests, or to think in terms of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, as if the interests of the majority trump all the other interests. The common good is the good we all share in, the good of the people as a whole, as well as the goods we hold in common that should be for all. When we invest in the common good, we amplify what is good for all.
Here, let me elaborate on what some of us in the Philippine Constitutional Commission of 1986 reminded the rest of our fellow Commissioners about the definition of the common good. It is not the greatest good for the greatest number because some goods rooted in human nature cannot be subject to majority voting. It is unthinkable for a society to put to a vote the proposition that it is legal to murder a troublesome neighbor or to steal the property of your neighbor. Morality is not decided by majority vote. That is why even a majority vote on a referendum asking the public to vote on the issue of killing the baby in the womb of the mother can never justify abortion. To safeguard the sacred human rights, the common good is better defined as a juridical order which enables every human being to attain his or her total integral human, moral and spiritual development. This does not preclude the fact that when the issues involved have nothing to do with absolute truths based on the nature of things, which constitute probably 99 percent of debatable issues (in the fields of politics, economics, physical sciences, the arts, etc), decisions can be based on the rule of the majority. To be continued.