Youth's mission: ‘Clever as serpents’

When Cardinal Virgilio David, president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), stood before the crowd at the EDSA People Power Monument last Sept. 21, 2025, he invoked an urgent reminder from Scripture: “Behold, I am sending you out like sheep among wolves; therefore be as shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16).

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His call was addressed in a special way to the Filipino youth upon whose shoulders now rest the onus of the unfinished mission of People Power. Their awesome task is to serve as the backbone of the resistance movement against corruption and plunder.

This exhortation did not come in isolation. Just days earlier, the CBCP issued its pastoral letter, Beyond Survival, a sobering document that calls attention to the urgency of undertaking three concrete lines of action: (1) reject patronage politics, (2) support an independent probe into the ghost flood control projects, and (3) demand justice, not impunity.

Taken together, these are not mere institutional reforms; they are moral imperatives. They are a summons to discipleship in the public square.

The biblical peg could not have been more apt. In Luke 19:5, Jesus calls Zaccheus, the tax collector, to come down from his perch. Long complicit in corrupt systems, he repents by pledging restitution. His story is proof that no one is beyond conversion, but also that authentic repentance must involve concrete acts of justice.

In Matthew’s gospel, we discern the call for balance. The followers of Christ must combine shrewdness with innocence—astute in recognizing the tactics of the corrupt, yet steadfast in moral integrity (Matthew 10:16). In a political landscape riddled with patronage and deception, this dual posture is precisely what the youth must cultivate. They cannot afford to be naive, but neither must they fall into the cynicism and compromise that have corrupted generations before them.