27/09/2026
NEWNESS IN CIVIC EDUCATION
CEAP National Convention
Waterfront Hotel, Cebu
Thank you, our dear panelists: Bishop Gerry Alminaza, Fr. Flavie Villanueva, and Hon. Ronald Llamas for the heart-moving stories, for your dedication to educate and form the public arena. Dear fellow delegates, our panelists this afternoon are not model of a fashion magazine called Aralin Panglipunan textbook. They are three living prophets who keep teaching us that citizenship is not a subject we pass in school, but a vocation we practice in the street, the sanctuary, and the state.
Bishop Gerry Alminaza of San Carlos, now president of Caritas Philippines, stands where charity must grow a conscience. He refuses the old civic lesson that the Church merely feeds the poor while the powerful decide how wealth is hoarded. For him the poor are not objects of aid but “subjects of transformation, the very presence of Christ.” He places empty chairs at gatherings to remind us of those excluded from policy: the poor, the earth, the unborn generations. He names overpriced flood-control projects “monuments to greed,” insists that corruption kills more than budgets. For it kills trust, justice, and lives, and calls every diocese to make integral ecology not an extra ministry, like an extra-curriculum, but a dimension of the Church’s whole mission. His newness in civic education is this: we cannot teach good citizenship while remaining silent about how money is generated, how nature is treated, and how the Church itself spends and invests. He calls us to divest from corrupt institutions. A society that is dishonest in governance will never be honest in protecting creation.
Fr. Flavie Villanueva, SVD, a former addict who now plates unlimited rice for the homeless and walks with widows of the drug war, teaches another civic lesson: dignity is not an idea; it is a shower, a meal, a name on a shrine, an exhumed body given back to a family. At the Arnold Janssen Kalinga Center he feeds and bathes hundreds who have been written off. Through Program Paghilom he accompanies those “widowed, orphaned, and traumatized,” insisting that “healing without truth is incomplete.” He has taken lists of the dead to Congress, cooperated with investigators, and called for a truth commission that will keep asking: Who killed? Who signed? Who looked away? His challenge is the oldest and the newest: the state can erase a person twice—once by the bullet, again by the unmarked grave and the official lie. His hope is stubbornly incarnational. Compassion, he says, “had to grow teeth.” Civic education that never touches the body of the victim remains a lecture. His prophecy is that the least of these are still citizens, and that a republic that cannot bury its dead with honor cannot teach its children how to live.
Secretary Ronald Llamas, student activist under martial law, founding president of Akbayan, and former presidential political adviser, has spent a lifetime arguing that democracy dies when memory is not taught. He watched liberal institutions fail to educate a generation born after the dictatorship; he watched social media weaponize forgetting. His newness is not another party platform. It is the insistence that civic education must be done through immersion to form a democratic ethos, hope against recycled cynicism, participation against dynasty and spectacle, everyday monitoring of public works instead of waiting for the next EDSA. The challenge he names is cultural as much as political: when history is revised, when the poor are courted only at election time, citizenship becomes a brand, not a habit. His hope is patient and unromantic: two years to go before the next National Elections. Then another six, to organize a message of hope that can outlast an old, recycled despair.
Taken together, these three prophets redraw civic education.
First, the poor are not a chapter. They are the curriculum. Listen before you lecture. Accompany before you analyze.
Second, truth and mercy are not opposites. Fr Flavie will not let healing float free of names and dates. Bishop Gerry will not let charity float free of justice and creation. Secretary Llamas will not let hope float free of memory.
Third, the public square is already theological. Greed is a choice. Corruption is stolen dignity. Ecology is care for the neighbor we have not yet met. Red-tagging, death threats, and disinformation are the price prophets still pay when they refuse to treat citizenship as a spectator sport.
Our takeaway is simple enough to teach in five minutes but hard enough to live for a lifetime. Civic education is new when it forms people who can see the empty chair, name the dead, trace how wealth is made, and stay when the applause dies. Bishop Gerry, Fr. Flavie, and Secretary Ronald Llamas are not asking us to admire them. They are asking us to become the kind of citizens their lives have already begun to describe: listeners, healers, stewards, and stubborn keepers of the truth, so that faith, at last, may transform the public square.
