Did the Pope see the truly poor and hungry?

(UNSEEN HAND: Mystified fans continued to wonder if there indeed was a manipulative super-rich force behind the perplexing game results in the current PBA Philippine Cup Finals. They asked how powerhouse San Miguel Beer played below par again on Sunday, like in the times when the team was hugely favored to win. Either certain team stars played to lose, or did not give enough to ensure a win? Is it true—like what Jefring Liit in the Mandaluyong City wet market area had been secretly tipped—that a notorious gambling lord, with rich link and hold on select players, continue to perpetuate the abominable gangster’s grip on basketball here?

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THANK God, it’s over, sighed Franklyn Manlangit, a young father from Bacolod who drives a passenger jeepney in Mandaluyong for a living. He was to realize late that Monday was also part of the holiday stretch when workers and students, his daily clients, did not come out to ride the jeepney to school and work place.

He again failed to earn enough for their meal, barely completing the P500 to remit to his operator for the day’s use of the rented passenger vehicle.

“Wala tayong magagawa, sakripisyo na rin (We can’t do anything),” he said, at the same time wondering how he could directly benefit from the Pope’s visit.

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He took everything in stride, like his fellow jeepney drivers.

This, of course, could not be the case with the army of assorted beggars and street kids, including sooty somnanbulistic mud and solvent souls, who all had to be swept out of city streets in time for the Pope’s pilgrimage to the Philippines.

This unholy sanitation effort by the government had in fact led to suspicion that not a few cold and hungry street kids had to be rounded up and caged in order to make Manila appear truly nice and neat.

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Anyway, on Sunday after the papal visit to the University of Santo Tomas, there rose random questions from poor street people about what the Pope really wanted when he said “We must learn to beg,” all the while unknowing it was a call for all of us to learn how to ask for strength and forgiveness, in order to make it through assorted calamities and unbearable challenges.

Why still learn to beg, wondered the poor and hungry, at the same time asking if the Pope was aware of the poverty, the obscene existence of those who had to wrestle it out against evening garbage collectors for food leftovers, while wallowing in numberless stinking corners, turning these dark, wet, filthy spots into their private Payatas and Smokey Mountain.

Would the Pope’s visit at least lead to reforms in a rotten government system, main source of injustice and inequality in our troubled midst?

Those concerned, from President Aquino down to his secretary of social welfare, need not be told that, more than love and faith, the groundswell of adulation for Pope Francis was mainly a prayer for care and material help, a miraculous salvation from sickness and hunger of the hopelessly poor.