by Raffy Gutierrez
As promised, here’s the link to my first book, “Veneration Without Thinking.” Feel free to download and share to everyone whom you feel might benefit from it OR even challenge it.
https://archive.org/details/veneration-without-thinking-by-raffy-gutierrez
Last week I told you why I wrote this book. This week I want to tell you what it actually says, and how you’re going to read it.
Veneration Without Thinking is not a book about losing your faith. It is a book about an institution that drew a map five hundred years ago — rules about marriage, sin, and obedience — and convinced an entire nation that the map was the actual ground they were standing on. Nobody ever asked to see how that map was made. This book does.
Here is the simplest version of the argument. The Catholic Church teaches that marriage is an unbreakable sacrament, instituted by Christ, eternal and beyond revision. Most Filipinos believe this the way they believe the sun rises — not because they checked, but because no one ever told them they were allowed to ask. What the historical record actually shows is a doctrine built by named men, on a known timeline, finished at a political council convened to answer Martin Luther. That is not eternal truth. That is institutional history wearing eternity as a costume.
The book traces that history. Then it asks the only question that matters: if the foundation was built by men, in time, for reasons — why does it still govern the civil lives of one hundred and ten million Filipinos? Most have never been given the chance to question it at all. Millions more never agreed to it in the first place, because they were never Catholic to begin with.
This is the project. Not an attack on Catholic belief. An audit of Catholic power.
The book moves in four parts.
Part One names the fog itself — how a belief becomes a prison without anyone ever locking the door. It gives you the tools to ask three questions the culture trained you not to ask: What do I actually know? What do I merely believe? What have I only been told to assume?
Part Two is the history — five hundred years of it. Pre-colonial Filipino spirituality, replaced by Spanish doctrine. Rizal’s diagnosis of a manufactured passivity, turned into a holiday so we’d stop reading what he actually wrote. A Constitution that promises separation of Church and State, sitting beside a body of law that still enforces one religion’s theology on everyone.
Part Three is the cost — and this is where the book stops being theory. The woman who cannot afford an annulment. The senator who crosses himself before voting against the bill that would free her. The doctrine of redemptive suffering — pasensya, tiisin mo, offer it up — that turns a woman’s beating into her spiritual credential and a child’s trauma into a witness to sanctification. I did not invent these costs. I documented them.
Part Four is the way out — not away from God, but toward clarity. A model for thinking, rooted in Filipino language and Filipino tradition, for any Filipino — believer or not — who wants to tell the difference between what they know, what they believe, and what they’ve simply never questioned.
I also did something in this book I think matters more than anything else in it. I wrote a full chapter giving the Church’s strongest five arguments against divorce — stated as forcefully as I could state them — and then I answered every one, using the Church’s own doctrine against itself where I could. I did this because an argument that won’t face its best opponent isn’t an argument. It’s a sermon. I didn’t write a sermon.
Now, how you’re going to read it.
Starting next week, I will be releasing the entire book here, in this column, one piece at a time — free, in full, no paywall, no installment held back for a later purchase. This is not a teaser campaign for a book you’ll eventually have to buy. The whole thing is going up here, in The City Post, chapter by chapter, until it’s done.
Here’s the shape of it: each week, a new piece — sometimes a full chapter, sometimes a chapter split across two posts when the argument needs the room. I’ll always tell you exactly where we are in the book, so if you join in week six, you’ll know what you missed and where to find it. I will pin the very first post to this page for the whole run, so nobody gets lost.
We start with the Prologue next week — A Letter to the Filipino Catholic. It is exactly what it sounds like. Read it whether you agree with me or not. Especially if you don’t.
Five hundred years is long enough to wait for a conversation we should have started generations ago. I’m not asking you to leave your faith at the door. I’m asking you to bring your mind back in.
See you next week.
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Raffy Gutierrez writes a weekly column on politics, religion, and civil society. The views expressed are solely his own.
