Villegas asks faithful: “Fast and pray”
IS God punishing us? Are we getting the harvest of the sins we planted?
Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas posed these questions and others, as he invites the faithful “to fast and pray for the atonement of our sins, personal and family and national, privately away from the social media, known only to God, on a date and time that is most inconvenient”.
In a circular titled “Galit na ba ang Diyos sa atin (Is God already angry at us?) and which he also delivered as his homily in a Sunday Mass, Villegas urged the people to “gain back the righteousness of our interior lives, which have been much compromised and forgotten by the culture of social media”.
He asked: Who am I to interpret the meaning of these series of calamities? Earthquakes and erupting volcanoes, floods and long days of rain, unrelenting pandemic and mutant viruses, unprecedented death counts, what more? How come they are happening almost at the same time?
He said only God, and only Him, can answer the question “Are we being punished for our sins, personal sins and national sins?”
He said that “having done our fasting and prayers in the hiddenness of our souls”, he invited the people to declare a community fast and prayer on the feast of Saint Maximilian Kolbe on the 14th of August.
Taking a swipe at the political situation, he said “Conscience must prevail over survey popularity” and “Nationalism must prevail over regionalism and ethnicities…that the common good must prevail over family dynasty interests, that democracy cannot survive in a nation whose citizens ignore the voice of conscience…that the culture of corruption continues to bleed the poorest of the poor. (Eva Visperas)
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