‘A future not our own’

That full-page paid ad, on Page A14 in the Inquirer issue of Oct. 26, startled many. It bore the title: “Fr. Fausto ‘Pops’ Tentorio: Beloved Servant of the Masses” – referring to the 59-year-old Italian priest, gunned down in North Cotabato mid-October.

The advertiser claimed itself to be the “Southern Mindanao Regional Party Committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines.” Siegfred M. Red, “secretary” signed the ad. This is the first time ever the CPP deployed paid ads.

The CPP, for instance, confirmed the death of spokesman, “Ka Roger” in a statement e-mailed to the Inquirer Oct. 10. CPP’s website carried a black-and-white portrait of the 64-year-old Batangueño, who used laptops to wage the “people’s war”: A one-line caption read: “Gregorio ‘Ka Roger’ Rosal, 1947-2011.” That was all.

This full-page ad shatters the pattern of the past 50 years. Is this an exception? Will this continue? What’s going on here?

Look at “Father Pops” and his 33 years of service. “For many years, (Father Tentorio) served the people of the Philippines in a courageous and indefatigable way,” wrote Pope Benedict XVI. He was “a good priest, a fervent believer.”

Tentorio shepherded his flock with the sacraments and cobbled programs – from child immunization to adult literacy. Thousands of those he had cared for trudged alongside his coffin to Balindong cemetery.

“Your dream is my dream,” Tentorio wrote in his last will and testament, made public by his PIME confreres. Scribbled in the Visayan dialect he was fluent in, Father Pops added: “Your struggle is my struggle. Therefore, you and I are one: companions in building the Kingdom of God.”

As pastor, he “sought justice for lumad or indigenous people, dispossessed of their land, harassed by armed men, when government seemed to abandon them,” Kidapawan Bishop Romulo de la Cruz recalled at the funeral. Siding with the oppressed, “can earn you enemies who go after even the kindest of men.”

AFP’s Eastern Mindanao Command denies it had any hand in Tentorio’s rubout. But it did tag the priest as “friendly” to the NPA, admits Lt. Col. Leopoldo Galon, EastMincom spokesperson. “He welcomed sinners and tax collectors.” Wasn’t that also the tag slapped on Father Pops’ Master?

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines and PIME (Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions) are pressing government to nail the killer and mastermind. “What makes us so indignant is the injustice, the impunity of the perpetrators,” Italian Ambassador Luca Fornari fumed.

Justice Undersecretary Francisco Baraan has started what seems a hard-nosed professional inquiry. Baraan is hamstrung by the mistrust toward the military among potential witnesses.  Like it or not, government’s probers find themselves in a race. The Reds dumped this “blood debt” right at the door of the 6th Infantry Division. “Revolutionary forces vow to bring revolutionary justice for Father Pops,” the ad pledges.

“CPP-NPA is the longest-running Maoist insurgency in the world,” Diana Rodriguez and Soliman M. Santos Jr. write in the new book “Primed and Purposeful.” Armed clashes, across four troubled decades have left 4,745 killed and injured 1,534, incomplete tallies claim. Most of the victims were civilians. And 1.2 million Filipinos became refugees.

Military victory has eluded both the security forces and rebels. “Nor is it likely in the future.” Communists are bogged down in strategic defense of its “protracted people’s war.” They’ve never achieved a “great leap forward” of mass adherents, Rodriguez and Santos add.

Indeed, from its peak in the 1980s, the CPP “withered and splintered,” Australian National University’s Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet writes in the Philippine Human Development Report. Weakened by internal pogroms, a CPP evaluation confirms their “ideological superficiality.”

“Mindanao’s communist party-building was notably weak… Communist ideology is part of the leaders’ vocabulary. (The paid ad, for example, is studded with jargon: “bureaucrat capitalism” “commandism” “our-time-imperialism,” etc.)

“But for most ordinary members, that is not the case.” It is abuse and injustice. In Abra, Kalinga and Mountain Province, the movement has morphed “into a struggle for Cordillera identity.” Some NPAs evolved a “kind of business enterprise that sells protection in exchange for money and other compensation.”

Father Tentorio was selfless, not because of his priestly vocation but “because he learned from the masses,” the ad claims. “The masses alone are the creators of history.” This is, of course, Mao Zedong 101. “Party members should take their cue from the masses, and reinterpret policy with respect to the benefit of the masses,” the Great Helmsman wrote.

Sundays, Tatay Pops would give “brief but sound homilies that affected people’s lives,” the paid ad says. “In his sermons, he guided peasants and the masses… to embrace the national democratic struggle.” That’s the communist shorthand for conflict.

The military, meanwhile, insists it did not tag Father Tentorio as a “communist” –and thereby made him a target for hitmen. “The ad… is a deceptive attempt to insinuate that the military is behind his murder,” Colonel Galon protested.

Remember Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador? He became the strongest voice against government lawlessness after the murder of Jesuit Fr. Rutilio Grande, who defended the poor. Romero was shot while saying Mass in March 1980. A UN Commission later established that death squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson ordered the killing.

Romero wrote what Tentorio lived for: “The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision…We merely plant seeds that will one day grow….We are ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future, not our own.”

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