Church in transition

Because they’re under unrepentantly secular, liberal and perhaps, unhistorical, the news media have largely missed out on two key developments in the Catholic Church over the past several months: the resignation of Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales as archbishop of Manila and his replacement by Imus Bishop Luis Tagle. The announcement of Bishop Tagle’s appointment was made by Pope Benedict XVI toward the end of last week.

The importance of having a new bishop of Manila is important for the Philippines whose history and culture, after all, have been inextricably linked with Christianity. It is also important for Asia since Manila has historically been the stepping stone of evangelical missions to several capitals of the continent: this could be easily gleaned from the fact that most of the Christian protomartyrs have stayed at one time or another in Manila: San Vicente Liem de la Paz of Vietnam and San Francisco Capillas of China would come to mind. Even San Lorenzo Ruiz de Manila was martyred in Japan. Christianity continues to flourish despite communist repression in China and Vietnam, and it is building up quite a sizeable number in Korea, Indonesia and India, a development partly owed to the work of missionaries coming from the Philippines.

Manila is the parent diocese of three other ancient churches—of Cebu, Nueva Segovia (Vigan) and Nueva Caceres (Naga), which were suffragan dioceses of Manila during the Spanish period. If one considers that it was only late last year when the Holy See announced the appointment of Jose Palma to replace Ricardo Cardinal Vidal as Cebu archbishop, then what we’ve been seeing is a changing of the guard in the Philippine Church, the end of an era and the turning of a new page in the Church’s rich history in Asia. The transition continues as the Holy See is expected to announce soon the replacement of Naga Archbishop Leonardo Legaspi, OP, who has also offered to resign as he reaches 75, the canonical age of retirement for hierarchs.

Vidal, Rosales and Legaspi share between them a history of strong leadership of the Church. Vidal presided over Cebu, where Christianity is older than Manila, at a most challenging time—between the last days of the Marcos dictatorship and the Edsa democratic restoration. He maintained Cebu’s implacable Catholic character. He participated in the election of Joseph Ratzinger as pope in 2005; and as a sign of how the Holy See held him in high regard, he was allowed to stay on as archbishop even beyond 75 until Palma’s appointment last year.

Legaspi would have been allowed as much if he had not begged off for health reasons. But like Vidal, his main achievement is to have made Naga as much an uncompromising Catholic bastion as Cebu. He enjoys overwhelming respect and recognition among civil and political leaders in Bicol; perhaps even Jesse Robredo, who had crossed swords with him when the local government secretary was mayor of Naga, would grudgingly admit that. As president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines for several terms, Legaspi also quietly but effectively cast his stamp on the Philippine Church. Harvard-trained and the first Filipino rector of the University of Santo Tomas, Legaspi is a dyed-in-the-wool Dominican who combines orthodoxy, scholarship, perhaps a rather severe intellectualism, and a sensible management style with a pastoral bent.

Like Legaspi, Rosales was an auxiliary bishop to Jaime Cardinal Sin. When he assumed the post of his former boss in 2003, he filled quite big shoes but has proved equal to the task. A quiet worker and a prayerful man, Rosales has re-infused a sense of quiet spirituality in the See of Manila. He has, as Saint Paul said, run the good race.

Looming now on the horizon are two potential Filipino cardinals—Palma and Tagle. Both are—in the politics of the Church—linked to Rome in more ways than one. Palma studied at UST and the Angelicum, the Dominican academy in Rome, where Blessed John Paul II took up his doctorate; both are pontifical institutions. Perhaps because he took up his doctorate at the Catholic University of America, Tagle has been seen as theologically suspect. But he’s a member of the International Theological Commission, an advisory body to the Pope.

A progressive theological adviser to the Second Vatican Council but who later on put the breaks on the liberal, modernist excesses of the council’s reforms when he became bishop and cardinal, Benedict XVI seems to have made two key appointments in the Philippine Church that would mirror his own striking ambivalence and his nearly indecipherable enigma. Over all, these are interesting times for the Church.