“The Catholic Church is failing its people, the poor. The Church is not there with them,” said Mary Racelis of the Institute of Philippine Culture (IPC).
“Despite all the evidence from various sources, the Christianity exposed by the CBCP [Catholics Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines], many of us found that it’s not helping with reality,” Racelis, 80, added.
She spoke during a forum on defining the Filipino poor by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).
Citing social-cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, Racelis defined the poor as “those who experience material deprivation, lack of security, dignity and the desperation of chronic and powerless victims; high risks and costs in their lives but few comforts; inequality materialized.”
Statistically, National Economic and Development Authority’s (Neda) Myrna Asuncion said the poverty incidence increased to 26.5 percent in 2009, translated to a total of 23.14 million individuals regarded as poor. The increase is 0.1 percentage points higher than in 2006, when the government recorded 22.17 million poor individuals.
“Data shows that while poverty incidence declined between 1991 and 2009, the rate of decline has been exceedingly slow. There were even periods when the poverty incidence increased despite the above-average economic growth,” Asuncion said in the same forum.
Asuncion, Neda assistant director, added that “for every percentage-point increase in income growth in the Philippines, poverty incidence falls by about 1.5 percentage points.”
However, “this is weak compared to the 2.9 to 3.5 percentage points for high-performing economies and the 2.5 average for a set of 47 developing countries.”
“In terms of magnitude, total number of poor families increased by about 185,000 from 3.67 million in 2006 to 3.86 million in 2009.”
And while poverty incidence of families improved during the three-year period, from 21.1 percent in 2006 to 20.9 percent in 2009, Asuncion considered this just “a slight reduction of 0.2 percentage point.”
Racelis, who has been studying poverty since the 1960s, said poor Filipinos are not being reached by the Catholic Church because its “structure doesn’t allow them to.” Nonetheless, she added, “spirituality is crucial.”
“It enables people to find solution. It gives them hope. This is something the Catholic Church must pay attention to.”
Federico José T. Lagdameo of Ateneo de Naga University noted that the intangibles missing in the country’s anti-poverty reduction program bear this out. Lagdameo said during the same forum that like other Conditional Cash-Transfer Programs, the government’s Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) “operates on the framework of human capital accumulation or development.”
“But while its subscription to this framework has yielded, as the studies mentioned earlier, positive results, the 4Ps falls prey to the charge of being a program that treats people as a means toward development and economic growth and not as the end itself of development. It can be criticized as construing the poor as means towards economic growth by aiming primarily at their productivity and not their well-being or human flourishing.”
Lagdameo proposes that the 4Ps adopt the dictum that “people ought to be treated as ends and not as means” to lift Filipinos out of poverty.