UPD Catholic students hold ACLE on Reviving Pakikipagkapwa
Kaye Baccay
The Catholic Students’ Community (CSC) and the Campus Ministry Office (CMO) organized an Alternative Classroom Learning Experience (ACLE) at the School of Economics on Oct. 12.
With the theme “TAO PO!: Reviving Pakikipagkapwa amid Looming Indifference,” CSC and CMO aim to talk about the perspective of the Church on extrajudicial killings with reference to the Filipino concept of pakikipagkapwa.
“When we planned about this, we still thought of grounding it in the…continuous spate of killings in the country. Maybe some might find it already a passe, [so] we tried to put… a fresh angle into it,” CMO coordinator Rogelio Nato Jr. said.
“So we thought that…maybe one facet of why these things are happening around us especially in the country is because of the lack of feeling for the other or the lack of compassion,” Nato added.
In connection to this, CSC and CMO invited Miguel Karlo Abadines and Fr. Patrick Dominador Falguera, SJ, both from Simbahang Lingkod ng Bayan to provide the perspective of the Church on the current issues the country is facing.
In his talk, Miguel Karlo Abadines, quoting Pope Francis, clarified that the Church can be involved in politics.
“Basically, the call was that the Church cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice and to fight for justice demands that we engage in politics,” Abadines said.
“The Church is not quiet. The Church has been speaking up even before elections… Even when the war on drugs started…the Church was one of the first groups that actually mobilized… It is the one mobilizing the most amount of money, the most amount of resources, the most amount of time, catering to people who are involved in drugs,” he emphatically added.
Meanwhile, in his talk, Fr. Falguera introduced the concept of engaged citizenship by telling the students that there are many institutions and organizations like theirs where they can extend their help.
He ended by encouraging the students to have “the audacity of the impossible” and to carry with them “stubborn hope.”
This semester’s ACLE entry is CSC and CMO’s fourth since it joined the university-wide activity in 2015.
