Putting on a Show for the Pope

Manila Standard Today
January 5, 2015

http://manilastandardtoday.com/2015/01/05/putting-on-a-show-for-the-pope/

PASAY City says it plans to hide away unsightly street children during the visit of Pope Francis this month, highlighting the hypocrisy, myopia and the wrong headedness that characterize our urban policies.

The ostensive reason for the campaign, says Pasay Social Welfare Department head Rosalinda Orobia, is to prevent syndicates that employ these children as beggars and street vendors, from taking advantage of the Pope’s compassion for the poor.

The notion insults our intelligence and suggests that the Pope is somehow too naive to understand how criminal syndicates in major cities around the world shamelessly use destitute children to turn an illegal and immoral profit.

We all understand the natural tendency to put one’s best foot forward when guests come calling, but hiding away poor street children completely misses the point of the Pope’s apostolic exhortation to “hear the cry of the poor.”

“Seeing their poverty, hearing their cries and knowing their sufferings,” the Pope said, “we are scandalized because we know that there is enough food for everyone and that hunger is the result of a poor distribution of goods and income.”

Against the backdrop of this exhortation, we should all be scandalized by the government’s artificial campaign to keep the streets free of poor children only for the duration of the papal visit, with no cogent plan to keep them in schools or their homes, where they belong, and to instill discipline among their parents, who should know better.

By various estimates, there are between 20,000 to 30,000 street children in Metro Manila, and as many as 250,000 plying the streets of major urban centers across the nation. Studies show that most are boys aged 7 to 16, and about 75 percent of them return home to families after working or begging on the streets.

Each child on the street represents a serious violation of children’s rights, exposing the young to hunger, sickness, injury, maltreatment, sexual abuse, exploitation and other dangers.

There is no question that children should be kept off the streets, but a campaign to do so just for the duration of a dignitary’s visit helps nobody except the officials who want to put on a show and pretend that all is well in our cities.

Every day, as motorists and commuters, we are disturbed at the sight of children begging, selling and playing on the streets. Why do the officials of the Department of Social Welfare and Development, city governments, the police and the Metro Manila Development Authority, believe it is all right for them to do so--except when the Pope visits?