Bishop Paul's tenure likely to be activist

The sentient among Malaysia’s 850,000 Catholics, out of a Christian population of 2.3 million - about 9 percent of the country’s 27.5 million people - would have been disturbed by reports that crucifixes had to be removed before Prime Minister Najib Razak graced the Christian Federation of Malaysia’s open house on Dec 25.

It is precisely this category of Catholic that will welcome the turn of Dr Paul Tan Chee Ing, bishop of the Malacca-Johor diocese, as head of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei.

The two-year presidency commences today and ought to wholly be concerned with ecclesiastical matters - render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s being a scriptural guideline for the faithful, especially its clergy.

But by training and temperament, Paul Tan, 70, is a prelate who would want to push the parameters of that dichotomy more than did his predecessor, Archbishop Murphy Pakiam, the host of the crucifix-less CFM open house, held at his residence in Bukit Nanas on Christmas Day.

Discerning Catholics would be distressed to discover that a Church that would resort to the courts to invoke a right to call God ‘Allah’ seemingly cannot tell the wood from the trees when supinely conceding to a crucifix-less hosting of a Christmas open house.

The crucifix is the universal symbol of Christianity, the doctrinal core of the faith.

Agreeing to the removal of crucifixes on the birth commemoration of Jesus would be akin to a Muslim’s submission to Quranic revelation sans acknowledgment of Prophet Mohammad’s unique role in its transmission.

In 2001, Catholic social activists, called upon to help out in the government-sponsored Christmas open house that year, mulled a boycott because government officials wanted no mention of Jesus to be made on the occasion.

The officials required that no carols be sung mentioning the name of the person generic to the faith.  

Fortunately, boycott-mulling activists managed to convince government officials of the stricture’s absurdity.

The 2001 open house proceeded without a hitch. Needless to say, there was no apparent diminution of the faith of non-Christians who attended and must have heard the name of the one who became very nearly unmentionable.

Umno notoriously finicky

Umno is notoriously finicky on the issue of Christianity, tending to comport itself like its Islamic rectitude would be embellished if seen to be zealous in its effacement of one leg of the Abrahamic triad of religions.

As far as can be seen, no such effacement has been called for by Pakatan Rakyat leaders whose putative chief Anwar Ibrahim and wife Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail were guests of CFM at its 2007 Christmas open house. (Crucifixes were not hidden then.)   
                   
Fellow Pakatan stalwart Mohd Nizar Jamaluddin of PAS, endeared himself to the Christian community by hosting, as the then Perak menteri besar, an open house in Ipoh in the 2008 Christmas season, on which occasion he hailed as his brothers in the Abrahamic fold.

Malaysians Christians are partial to Nizar and his fellow PAS MP, Khalid Samad, the latter for reason of a visit to a church in his constituency shortly after winning the Shah Alam parliamentary seat.

However, they view with wariness the conservative wing of the two politicians’ party, for its insistence on syariah law for Muslims in Malaysia should Pakatan take power at the federal level, even though that policy is not on the agenda of the coalition’s Common Policy Framework.

It is apposite, in these times, that it is the turn of Paul Tan - who has degrees in philosophy, theology and Chinese history from universities in Ireland, Hong Kong and France - at the rudder of Catholic Bishops’ Conference: he is heir to a a strain of Catholic natural law thinking that goes back to Thomas Aquinas.

Through his reception, in the 13th century, to the Greek-Arabic body of scientific knowledge, which Muslim thinkers Ibn Rus and Ibn Sina were mainly responsible for preserving, Thomas Aquinas laid the foundations of the philosophy that held there is an objective moral order in the universe, knowable to human reason.

From Aquinas on successive Christian thinkers have developed this stream of moral philosophy such that its principles are reckoned to belong not just to the Christian faith alone; they rest on a foundation of universal reason.

Grounded on these principles, Christian intellectual have made the case for freedom of religion as a human right, and against such things as abortion, same-sex marriage, and embryo-destructive research.    

Under Paul Tan’s leadership, the bishops’ conclave is likely to make its presence felt on the signal issues of the day.

As for removing crucifixes from Christian celebratory occasions to placate the craven instincts of an invited grandee, that would be the instance where Caesar will not be rendered his due.