Seeking God’s help in battling corruption

Before people marched to denounce corruption at last Sunday’s “Trillion Peso March” and the “Baha sa Luneta 2.0,” many first faced a reckoning inside Manila’s churches.

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The Holy Mass had a prayer so piercing, so honest, forcing us to confront what we have allowed our nation to become.

People who attended Mass, or heard it online, surely did not miss this powerful invocation. It was not timid, but a bold indictment of our national conscience.

The Oratio Imperata for Integrity, Truth, and Justice — now mandated in all shrines, parishes, and chapels of the Archdiocese of Manila since Oct. 2 — teaches that before people march on the streets to express outrage against the evils of corruption, they must confront the corruption within themselves.

The prayer is a “resounding call to contrition and conversion,” according to Manila Archbishop Jose Cardinal Advincula who said the Oratio Imperata now “replaces the Prayer of the Faithful during the celebration of the Holy Mass — a rare practice reserved only for the gravest of circumstances — as a clear expression of the urgency and seriousness of the situation.”

“We confess that we ourselves have often walked in darkness,” the prayer declares. It holds up a mirror to us — ordinary Filipinos, voters, taxpayers, silent witnesses to wrongdoing. The next line strikes harder: “In our silence, in our compromises, and in our indifference, we have allowed corruption to grow and falsehood to spread.”