CBCP head calls for new breed of leaders to solve country’s problems

Saying that widespread poverty and corruption are like contagious cancer that devours the whole of society, a high-ranking Church official has called for new breed of leaders to cure the country’s social ills.

In a Lenten message released to the media yesterday, CBCP President and Jaro Archbishop Angel Lagdameo said next year’s national elections should generate new kind of leaders who would crush the social cancer permeating every fabric of society.

“The forthcoming national elections must not simply be a changing of hats for the same persons, or change of faces but with unchanged hearts. We must be able to gather a critical mass of citizens-leaders with a genuine passion and obsession for good governance and prophetic leadership,” the message read.

The CBCP head said this “critical mass” should become the training ground of like-minded citizens who will lead the country imbued “with the values of honesty and justice, truth and integrity, credibility and accountability, transparency and stewardship.”

“These are the moral values that citizens must use to criticize and measure the present brand of leaders and raise up a new breed of leaders,” said Lagdameo.

He lamented that it is the poor, “oftentimes treated like commodities”, who suffer the most by the breakdown of moral values in government.

“Graft and corruption breed widespread poverty. Widespread poverty in turn breeds graft and corruption,” Lagdameo said.

Reflecting on the current crises the country is facing, he said a paradigm shift is necessary to solve the nation’s present problems.

“We will not solve our problems—religious, social, economic, political—by insisting on doing the same things that have produced the problems,” he said.

The prelate said the season of Lent calls for a profound moral renewal from every Christian, a total change of mind and behavior.

“Lent is an opportune occasion for profound re-examination of life, for confronting ourselves with the truth of the Gospel, which demands radical moral renewal,” said Lagdameo.

A renewal in moral values can only be possible if there is “a critical mass of citizens-leaders who are willing to ‘break out of the box,’ to jump on to the beginning of a new wave, to move into a new cycle of development, to operate with a new social consciousness and conscience, not for their individual or group security, but for the good of the greatest number,” he said.

Quoting the National Pastoral Consultation on Church Renewal (NPCCR), Lagdameo said, “failures in renewal have come from a deeper source: our hardness of heart and resistance to conversion… We as Church, have to confess responsibility for many of the continuing ills of Philippine society.”

The same assessment also came out in a 2006 Pastoral statement “Renewing Our Political Life”. The same pastoral letter pointed out that “at the bottom of our political chaos is a crisis of moral values, a crisis of truth and justice, of unity and solidarity for the sake of common good and genuine peace.”