FIRST and foremost, truth-facing. Before we can begin to take back our land from the grip of evil, we must open our eyes to the advance of sin and godlessness in unprecedented ways across our archipelago and in corners and sectors we thought were spared from the diabolical.

Most disturbing is the Philippines’ first school shooting, demonstrating that wanton killing has now invaded even our youth previously spared from it unless instructed by lawless adults. Now we know that those deemed too young to be made criminally liable can very well commit murder.

Alarmingly, cases of children in conflict with the law (CICL), the term used in the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Law for offenders aged 15 and younger, and spared from imprisonment, leapt in the first half of last year to 5,698 — 30 percent more than the total for all of 2024. About one-fifth of CICL cases involve violence.

Now, we have the first recorded case of willful killings by a teenage suspect.

Malevolent machinations

Needless to say, there are even more appalling signs of evil rising in our land. The mind-boggling flood control scam — with tens of billions of pesos in government funds scammed by bureaucrats, businesses and budgetary proponents to the deprivation and endangerment of thousands of poor families — has brought the malevolence of corruption to unheard-of depths.

Consider these first-ever enormities. In 2024, budgetary proponents made “insertions” that realigned billions of pesos from education, health, economic and other outlays designed to benefit the indigent to boost infrastructure and dole out allocations meant for electioneering. In effect, taking money from the poor to give lawmakers funds that will help get votes, mostly from poor voters deprived of the slashed appropriations.

That’s one sin marked for divine retribution in the Bible.

The flood control scam spawned faulty or fake flood protection infrastructure — denying hazard-facing communities the facilities they need to avoid deathly inundation. Scammers willfully committed this fatal fraud knowing that it would cause disastrous floods that would drown people, destroy crops needed for sustenance, and devastate and plunge families even deeper into destitution.

This killer graft is satanic.

The political and business machinations perpetrating and protecting the unprecedented scam demonstrates how widely the evil has infected our public and private sectors. Congress, our highest lawmaking body, did the budgetary insertions diverting funds to electioneering from projects the poor desperately need.

The president signed the corruption-laden national budget into law. And if alleged bagmen of the accused mastermind of budgetary graft are truthful, monies in the tens of billions went to our very highest officials.

As for business, corrupt construction companies conspired with legislators and public works bureaucrats, and banking executives encashed government checks in the tens or hundreds of millions, which were then laundered through casinos that got winnings in exchange.

And it’s not over, from the look of things. The insertions reportedly used to give P150 million each to Congress members voting to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte last year have been replaced with “delayed release” outlays for those who did the same this year. And anti-graft probers are apparently being used to intimidate senators and get votes not only to elect pro-administration Senate leaders, but to eventually convict Vice President Duterte and keep her out of Malacañang, as her opponents, including those favoring American military escalation here, wish.

Which brings us to a third evil: the scheme by the United States and its allies to use our land for possible military conflict with China over Taiwan. This brings grave danger to our people, especially communities near military bases and other facilities opened to foreign forces as well as planned secret sites for US intermediate-range missiles able to threaten nearby seas as well as most of China.

The immense danger Filipinos face is hidden by our leaders, our military and our media, even if US journalists, generals and think tanks have long acknowledged that facilities used by American forces in Asia would be prime targets in a US-China war. This peril is now undeniable with the devastation suffered by Arab states hosting American bases and forces in the US-Israel war on Iran (“The US is weaponizing our country against China,” https://tinyurl.com/mprua7t3).

Back to God

We will cover more extensively the evil of devastating war next week. For now, we focus on domestic devils, especially those infecting our families and youth as well as our institutions and communities.

Having opened our eyes to evil in our land, what do we do? Well, for starters, effectively promoting goodness and virtue. That is a paramount mission of religious authorities and institutions, and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines can do much to firm up initiatives for spreading and upholding principled life and actions among the Catholic faithful making up four-fifths of the nation.

At the same time, our nation should not depend primarily on our religious leaders to build up righteousness and combat evil. Rather, upright Filipinos must join hands and hearts to strengthen and spread the tenets of our faith among our people, especially our youth led astray by the misgovernance and self-indulgence of their elders.

That’s the goal of the Kamalayang Pinoy Movement, Kapatirang Espirituwal ng Pilipinas and Katipunan ng Kamalayang Kayumanggi, which held their fourth national convention a week ago. Lead convenor and former chief justice Reynato Puno underscored the imperative starting point of national renewal against evil’s assault on our nation — return to the Almighty:

​”Guided by Your eternal light, we seek the elusive solution to the hydra-headed problem of corruption [and] the hardened, unrepentant hearts of our leaders... the stranglehold of power of political dynasties and the monied elite.... We seek solution to the new attempts of powerful nations to redesign a global order that will be run based on their self-interest and will be perpetuated by the force of arms, not the rule of law.”

So, how exactly can Filipinos advance righteousness against the demonic? Let’s put our heads together on July 5.