Part I of One Country: Faith in God

"Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God."
- Matthew 22: 21

"Faith in God and faith in our people."
- Sen. Benigno Aquino, Jr. (November 27, 1933 - August 21, 1983)

Salutations of peace and goodwill to you, O honored Filipino nation!

May Almighty God in Jesus Christ bless us with a holy blessing that works to advance in each ourselves the common good of our one people:

O my beloved people, I have put much thought on the matter of our national identity. It is something I consider vital in the awakening of the will of our one Filipino Republic.

We may study the external actions of our many national heroes, known and unknown, that bless the pages of the history of our people but in my own mind until we can contemplate the spirit that make their noble hearts beat as one heart even that universal heart of all the heroes of humankind that live in love, immortal and divine, and give so that others may live, we will not be able to completely understand and identify with the profound spirit that animated these valiant men and women of our nation.

The history of our people is not a science, nor should it be studied in the atmosphere of science, to be dissected and examined with unfeeling, unseeing and distant, dispassionate hearts, as a physical thing to be measured, methodically and objectively proved and then synthesized into objective empirical data to be memorized by the mind without being imbibed by the heart.

No, that is a calamity, I instantly thought.

In my eyes, our history, in the wider context of the great history of human activity - salvation history, is more a love ballad of all the generations of our people united across space and time in love by our common endeavor of Country; it is a song of our people, being a distinct people from all the peoples of the one family of humanity; a sovereign nation who occupy an honored place among the nations of the one brotherhood of the nations of mankind; one strong Republic in love with God and in love with one another in God as true self in time and eternity.

Faith in God.

Faith in God is not a compulsion of the self nor is it a fading fashion of the world. Faith in God is an immortal reality in the timeless heart of all believers and is therefore neither born of human impulse nor the vanities of the world both of which are ephemeral and passing. Therefore, faith itself if it is true is a manifestation of the reality of things everlasting and unseen. True faith in the heart of the believer, without distinction to any one religion, must be an act of the Divine. Therefore, it must be held in the deepest respect both when it is made manifest in the self and also as it is made manifest in others apart from the self.

There is a kind of faith that is common to all men. From the least to the greatest, each and every man who has ever lived, is living in our world today and who shall live with the rising and the setting of all the generations of humanity until the consummation of the age of mankind have in different and varying degrees experienced the beckoning call of truths unseen. The absolute reality of God is an enduring question common in the hearts of all mankind and the many religions of the world give evidence to mankind's ultimate quest for divine answers to absolutely human questions regarding God, the littleness of the self, our suffering humanity, the mysterious universe and the ultimate meaning of both our life and our death.

It is the natural diversity of our religious response to the one reality of God which have led us to believe that there exist deep divisions in this one faith. This is a lie and it is this lie that give rise to the illusions that have led the poor peoples of our one family of mankind to do great and terrible violence one to another not out of any rational debate as regards to truth, pious belief or
religious practice but out of love and love not for the unifying and ascendant reality of God as He Himself is one but love misled to embrace the vast differences that exist between us men.

There is a faith that is common to all and a personal faith that is diverse that belong to the necessary and exclusive practice of each respective and honored religious tradition. Let us call this common faith, a universal faith – a faith that is manifest in the hearts of all men: The unseen substance of a common belief in the existence of a supernatural order. It is our first response to our common longing for God imprinted into our very souls, the first unifying principle upon which the divergent practices of personal faith is built upon.

This universal faith that is common to all men form the basis of the universal human right that protects the freedom of religion. This human right exists because of our collective and universal ability to empathize and identify with the deepest, most profound spiritual longings of the human heart.

And I put forward to you today my fellow countrymen, that in our necessary and vital pursuit of Country, it is this common, unifying and universal faith and not the other which is necessary to be fully understood and cultivated in the mind stream of our national awareness.

O my beloved people, I put forward to you today that the reality of God and the reality of our Republic are not incompatible. God and Country is not a choice between one and the other, the reality of both of these truths, as we shall soon discover not only compliments each other but it completes one another.

Not only are we a patient people, O nation, we are also a passionate people.

Our native hearts, more than the hearts of other peoples, long to love and for something to love. This deep longing is part of our national experience and have arisen in our collective awareness because of our common experience as a people, an experience which is unique and belong only to us as one Filipino nation. And who must we love but God and each other in God as true self?

To obey the words of Christ to pay Caesar his due and God His due, we must remember that, of a truth, this world of ours is also God's world and that God is never divorced from His creation. God must participate in the existence of all things to make them real. Sin distanced us from God but God never left us just as God was never divorced from the reality of His creation. We can never divorce God from the reality of things that exist lest all these things instantly turn to dust and the purpose of God's creation be for naught. But is not God infinitely wise? Therefore, God's purpose for all of creation must slowly and steadily be working itself toward fulfillment or we are not real and all this is but an illusion.

We can choose to separate religion and state but to separate God and the state is a different affair altogether. To banish from public life even the universal faith that beckon all men to the reality of the Divine, which I believe is an essential element in the pursuit of human happiness is, in my own mind, to deny from our own citizenry both the necessary means to advance towards our ultimate end as well as the vision of that ultimate end itself.

What is Country without God? Where shall the truth of Country rest without God? Where shall Country find strength and unity without God? Where does the endeavor of Country lead us without God? What shall we love without God?

More importantly, O my beloved, “Who shall love us without God?” Will the world love us? Many have called out to the dead things of the world to save them in the end and was not heard. Who shall we love without God? Many have loved the world and they have all perished. For the world they loved loved them not. Shall we love ourselves as ourselves without God? Then how far shall the morning be for us, O nation. Will darkness shine in the darkness? How shall we even know our true selves without the Light of the Lord?

No, there can never be a separation between God and our people.

The separation that exists between church and state is good. But it can only serve the people to the extend that it enables the state to act in an impartial manner in the daily execution of it’s duty toward God and Country. By church, it is meant, any formal religion. By state, it is meant, the hierarchical offices of the executive, legislative and judiciary branches and the constitutional directives that delineate and define their powers and extent according and subject to the will of the people that enable and authorize them by popular election. By God, I mean, God in His universal capacity as the Creator of all mankind. And by Country, I mean you and I as we relate to each other in God as citizens of our one nation. A state has it’s own duties before God that ensure that all of the offices of that state is bound by virtue.

Personal faith is both vital and necessary for the individual within the context of that individual's particular response to the call of the Divine as It is understood and interpreted for him or her by that individual's own religious revelations, doctrines, traditions and practices.

I am a born and bred Roman Catholic; a Christian man, both body and soul, baptized forever into the one great family of God, our Father and servant of our Lord Jesus Christ and our Holy Mother Mary. This is my story. This is my personal faith. I am very happy with it and because of it. But being like this I also know how happy must other people be who are at peace with their own expressions of faith in the God I believe to be one and the same for all men. This is an act of my universal faith and it forms the basis for the religious respect that I feel when I see people of other faiths happy with the God in themselves. There are common elements between the many great religious traditions, all of them, I believe serve to enrich and ennoble the spirit of man.

Personal faith in the public arena of the state will only serve the common interests of the nation only if it is quietly applied in the practice of human ethics, universal morals and the personal and social virtues that ennoble, guide and animate the spirit of jurisprudence, executive command, social responsibility and public service.

By always bearing in mind the nature of the common faith experience between each of us, in our meditation on the universal faith of all human beings, we will come to understand and realize that profoundly common faith which is present in the hearts and minds of all of mankind, from the least to the greatest, without prejudice or religious distinction and arouse in our spirit that empathy and concern born out of our common human longing for the reality of things true and unseen. Unseen realities which I personally believe are more real to any of us than the sun and the stars in the sky that eventually lead our hearts to the profound realization of how poor we human beings really are in the midst of the wealth of God's glorious creation.

Saint Lorenzo Ruiz de Manila, Pray for us.

Prosper the Peace. Prosper the People.

Sancta Sanctis!

Glory to God in the highest
Adoration to Jesus Christ
Peace to men of good will.