"Still, an Australian nun with a Filipino heart"
(Notes after Sister Patricia Fox, the deportation order, and her recent return to Australia)
At first, this post express its heartfelt gratitude to Sis. Patricia Fox for her selfless dedication, love, and service to the Filipino nation- especially its most impoverished sectors namely: the peasantry, workers, urban poor, and the indigenous masses.
With her actions which may include steadfast support of its struggles, of disaster relief operations, organic agriculture, and factfinding missions, this lawyer-turned-nun is more Filipino than the apathetic Filipinos of today; and to think that with her actions be imbued with sense of humility, charity, and selflessness, hers is much true than what the system tries but not motivated by serving the people but of political means.
But despite her efforts, the system chose to malign madly knowing that serving the oppressed exposing and opposing the system and its actions be it union busting, displacement of communities, and extrajudicial acts eapecially those of killings against the innocent, unjustly accused, or stood on their beliefs. The system, no wonder why they chose her to be another example by "just" deporting her, by using "legal means" and worse, by making false reports enough to justify her deportation if not a demise like her comrades in faith, Favali or Tentorio.
However, despite the efforts by the system, those who truly concerned for the country stood by her side; with lawyers defending her right to stay, of colleagues supported her advocacy, even those from the congress expressed sympathy as her call for human rights is also a part of her vocation as a religious, if not practising her legal skill being a former lawyer turned missionary; all knowing that from there no wonder why the system turned their eyes on her as any other oppositionist or a concerned citizen willing to speak in regards to what's being sought in ones own surrounding- what more of being a foreigner who, for decades been part of Filipino life, and becoming as Filipino as the others.
Remember, prior to her there were foreigners who expressed concern if not sympathy in the country under struggle regardless of their citizenry: from Sun Yat Sen and Mark Twain of the Spanish and American period, Jane Fonda and Steve Psinakis of the Marcos regime, even Leila Khaled and the young Thomas Van Beerzum whose participation in a rally provoked an order madly.
Perhaps her deportation doesn't end her selfless service to the people. In fact, the Filipino community in Australia did sympathise with her and her life's work as a nun-advocator. And to think that the system stubbornly justifies their act as necessary and legal, or as what Panelo says as "foreigners have limits" and how he injected the Latin "Dura Lex Sed Lex", it is true enough that more concerned folks, be it native or foreign, sought this, like any other matter pointing against the commoner, as plain simple political harassment;
Or to cut the note short: that faith if taken into practise, particularly in response to the surroundings of this inconvenient world, is itself becoming political. To paraphrase Panelo's, if the the law of cause and effect will operate against her as it did in this particular instance- then so is the order whom initiated her deportation out of obviously political reason.