08/01/2024
(An old piece I wrote years back, which I just found in my computer files.)
Sto. Rodrigo
President Rodrigo Duterte’s suggestion, made in jest or not, for Filipinos to canonize him as saint should not be brushed aside as idle talk. The Catholic Church, we are told, doesn’t have an exact record of how many saints there are, although they are believed to be no less than 10,000.
The church seems to have lost track of the number because during the first 1,000 years of its history, saints didn’t actually have to undergo tedious canonization rituals as happens now. They were proclaimed by popular demand.
Aha, so that should be very easy to make him a saint. All that Solicitor General Jose Calida should do is ask Pope Francis, himself an activist pope, to declare current canonization rituals as invalid ab initio, therefore necessitating a return to the old practice of declaring a saint by popular demand.
With his high trust ratings, if you believe SWS surveys, he could be Sto. Rodrigo in no time.
One minor problem Calida has to hurdle is the fact that one should have crossed the Great Divide before he could be declared a saint. But the Sol-Gen and Sal Panelo, with their gifts for legal gerrymandering, could easily argue that being politically dead and physically dead are one and the same.
There is a prerequisite that a candidate for sainthood should have at least one miracle to his credit. This shouldn’t be a problem either. That the country’s inflation rate has grown to 6.7 percent, when other Asean countries have only less than 1% to about 3%, is a miracle achievement for this two-year-old administration.
Another miracle is how tons of shabu were able to get past the Customs bureau despite those imported hi-tech x-ray machines, highly trained sniffer dogs, and dozens of eagle-eyed customs men watching out for incoming contrabands.
In short, adding Sto. Rodrigo to the Catholic’s roster of saints should be a walk in the park. One hitch will be in assigning a particular feast day for him. There are only 365 days in a year. He can’t have one feast day all for himself when hundreds don’t have any.
Of course, no one can stop a bishop in Mindanao from making Sto. Rodrigo the patron saint of Davao City. Then the family can have full control of the city not just politically (with his daughter as mayor, a son as vice mayor and an in-law as congressman), but also spiritually.
Then Someone up there he had called “stupid” could now return the favor.
