By: Fr. Paul Richardson

Columban Mission

About seven years ago, I was drinking coffee in a small coffee shop in a section of the town of Hinoba-an in Negros that is known as Dancalan Beach. Formerly, the area was almost completely Catholic, but over the years many of the people there have left the church to join a Filipino church known as the Iglesia ni Kristo (Church of Christ). Members of this church are extremely conservative, very anti-communist, and during the Marcos era, they were very supportive of his government. Almost invariably, these people tend to be very critical of the Catholic Church, especially of its social action programme. While I was drinking my coffee, a young boy accompanied by his friend came and sat down at the end of the table where I was seated, and I took their photo. The boy’s name was Jerry and both of his parents were members of the Iglesia ni Kristo, at the time that I took his picture, Jerry was carrying a home-made wooden toy armalite rifle. Looking again at the photo and recalling this incident seven years later, I wandered about the young man he has become. If I were able to locate him, this is the letter I would like to send him...

Dear Jerry,

My name is Fr. Richardson and I doubt very much if you will remember me. Several years ago, I took a photo of you and one of your friends in a coffee shop in Dancalan Beach. You must have been about nine or ten years old then, so now I guess you must be nearly 16 or 17.

Being a teenager is never easy, since it is a time of great changes for the person concerned and a time when he or she has to make a lot of important decisions. It is also a time when a young boy or girl forms opinions about life and about other people, and sometimes these opinions remain with that person for the rest of his life. So, I hope that you will forgive me if I write you this letter and discuss a topic that is very important to me, and which I hope, after you have read my letter, will also be very important to you.

That topic is the matter of your toy gun. Not that the gun in itself capable of hurting anyone, but simply because of what it symbolized or what it meant to others. Guns, except when some are made to destroy the place where the people live and work if there is an enemy hiding there and, of course they are used to kill.

Well, judging from all the time and care that you put into designing and carving your toy gun, someone, perhaps one of your family, must have convinced you that there is a positive value owning and using a gun. And of course they have a point there. Some people do use guns to move up the social ladder, to rob people of their possession and, in the case of some landowners and politician, to force people to do what they want then to do or even to vote for them.

I am sure that you must realize that forcing people to do anything or taking away the things that they desperately need is not just. Nor is it something  that we would normally expect of a person who is serious  about his business of Christianity. It is here that I would like to tell  you something about what it means to be a Catholic priest.

You know, it was not so long ago that one of my parishioners, a good Catholic (at least that’s the way she looks at it) said to me: “Father, I hope that you won’t be surprised if many of us stop supporting the Church or even other churches like the Iglesia. Because, you see if you continue to work for the same programme as the NPA (New People’s Army), then you must be a Communist too, and we don’t want our priests to be Communists.”

Now, that’s a pretty heavy settlement, Jerry, and of course, it just isn’t true. Whether people are Communist or not, or even if they are just rich or poor, they need a decent place to live, clothes to wear when they are cold, food to eat and medicine and medical care when they become sick. While it is true that programs to provide all of these things are part of what the New People’s Army in the mountains of Negros believe in for a priest to support these programs doesn’t mean that he is necessarily a Communist. In fact, any priest or lay person who believes in this kind of a program may be a lot closer to the Church and the Kingdom of God than a lot of people realize.

The reason of this is that all of these things are a real part of what it means to be a Christian. The place where we differ from the Communist in all this is in how we decide to go about making these things a reality.

The Communists say that you can only bring these programs about using force and violence. We Christians say that one way or the other we must convince the people, both our enemies and our friends alike that sharing what we have whether wealth or power or our own abilities, with those in need is a fundamental part of Christianity and therefore the type of thing that can never be neglected by anyone who says he is a Christian.

So, Jerry, it is my prayer that your need to carry a gun as a young boy will not remain a real part of your life as you cross the threshold into manhood. At least, I hope not. And that is the reason I have written this that they will have to wait until I write to the next time.

Very sincerely yours,

Fr. Paul Richardson
        Columban Mission 
November 1994