Jovito R. Salonga: A portrait
The first time I saw Jovito R. Salonga in person was in 1970, in a gathering of UP students wanting to know a Christianity that works in politics. He was in full vigor, a bright young star within earshot of the presidency. Against the turmoil of the brewing First Quarter Storm, he struck me then as perhaps just another polished politician of some novelty, shaped as he was by what the sociologist Max Weber called the “Protestant work ethic.”
The next time I saw him was in 1983, in Encino, California. Like other dissidents against the Marcos regime, he was reluctantly in exile. Blind in one eye and hard of hearing, he looked like a botched experiment in resurrecting a corpse by a frazzled Frankenstein. Victim of the Plaza Miranda bombing in 1971, he bore the wounds and scars of that dark period. He rolled up his sleeves and showed me his disfigured limbs and hands. It was as if, in detailing his injuries, he was trying to make sense of what had happened to him.
There was, however, a new note in this telling. Suffering had ripened his faith into a deep and quiet undercurrent of grit and grace—a calm, gentle, yet uncompromising loyalty to principle that was to characterize the spirit with which he waged his sturdy struggle to uphold the rule of law against all the forces that have undermined it.
With insight and prescience, Salonga told me of his fears for Ninoy Aquino who had just seen him, en route to his ill-fated return to the country. He said Ninoy could not be stopped: “Hindi na maawat.” He foresaw that upon landing, Ninoy would be either gunned down or clapped in jail. But at the same time, he understood the necessity of returning and putting up a fight. “Someone has to sacrifice,” he said, “and Ninoy is bent on being it.”
Years later, through the tumult of the country’s upheavals and his long career, I would have many occasions to watch this last of our great statesmen. The person, I found, was much more impressive than the politician.
I rued his unsuccessful run for the presidency and expressed this to him. “That is politics,” he said. “It is the hand dealt to me by the sovereign God.” He accepted without rancor the crank realities of the country’s electoral politics, even as he determined, with great tenacity, to push inch by inch the causes he believed in. He wrote scholarly narratives on such historic events as the Senate finally ending the stay of the US bases. He put up memorials for those who had fallen during martial law, and waged his crusade for good governance, justice and law-keeping through the NGOs he established. Even when mental confusion had set in, he worried about these organizations’ funding and how they could keep going.
Salonga lived simply and did not have immense resources, yet each year he would throw a grand birthday party and invite his many friends and associates to celebrate. Unlike the stiff and often boring parties of the great, these occasions were often inspiringly luminous. He loved music, a legacy from his older brother Ben’s days at Silliman University, when he would come home on vacation and the family would gather around and play music together. His family was poor yet had genteel influences, and in one generation rose to middle-class comfort and a sophisticated education.
Missiologists call this a “redemptive lift,” the social consequence of a faith lived with authenticity in the workaday world. Salonga’s father, a Presbyterian pastor, was an early convert when the first wave of American Protestant missions came in the early 1900s. They were “harbingers of modernizing tendencies,” as former senator Leticia Ramos-Shahani puts it, speaking of similar influence on early Protestant families such as hers.
Salonga belonged to that generation whose historical memory was marked by the prewar halcyon days of the American Commonwealth, then the cruel lacerations of the years under Japanese occupation (“nung panahon ng Hapon,” their tales would begin). Etched in their minds was the return of the Americans as “liberation,” never mind that thousands died from friendly fire and Manila was bombed to ashes. His social history spanned these years, then on to the two decades that were to shape the memories of another generation who grew up under the shadow of authoritarianism. Throughout, he stood out like a tattered flag, an old-fashioned patriot who stands in that long line of witnesses to the great spirit that yet animates our people, unfortunately surfacing only now and again in popular movements —from Hermano Pule’s Cofradia to the people’s uprising at Edsa in 1986.
Unlike today’s free-floating “global citizens,” Salonga stayed rooted to where he was. He had a handful of aged high school friends who showed up each year at his birthday parties, a fact that spoke of his lifelong attachments and loyalties. He had opted to be buried alongside his beloved wife and others of his clan in the Pasig public cemetery. Asked why not at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, his son Steve shrugged and smiled. “He did not want to end up being buried alongside Marcos. Sa kanila na lang ’yon.”
Salonga used to joke that for him, life began at 80. He was to cheerfully repeat this line when he turned 90. It seemed then that this was merely the usual repetitiveness of older people. But Steve confided that even then he was showing signs of incipient decline. That a good, long life should end this way fills us with anguish and anger, as Yevtushenko once railed: “It’s not people who die but the worlds in them;/ And again and again, I make my lament against destruction…”
Dr. Melba Padilla Maggay is a social anthropologist and president of the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture.
