Church-military dialogue then and now

CBCP to be represented in the NTF-Elcac,” so headlined an Inquirer.net news report by Jean Mangaluz on Aug. 31. NTF-Elcac is the government’s National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict which human rights groups accuse of Red-tagging, asset-freezing, branding persons of interest as terrorists, putting lives in danger, and creating a culture of impunity. This is the context of today’s flashbacks.

Flashback Friday: At a 1982 forum where Catholic bishops were present, Salvador P. Lopez, former university president, diplomat, writer, and statesman, asked Bacolod diocese’s Bishop Antonio Fortich: “Aren’t the Church and the military just using each other in the Church-Military Liaison Committee (CMLC)? And how long could this go on?” The subtext: You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

You would find the repartee in the long article “In this Catholic country, is it being subversive to live out Christ’s gospel?” by Lorna K. Tirol (Philippine Panorama, 11/21/82) which would later result in a libel threat and military interrogation of the author that several of us women writers also endured during the Marcos dictatorship. That article is included in a book I edited.

Earlier, I had written “How fares the Church in a bewildering decade” (Panorama, 9/4/83) and, fast forward 14 years later, “At first there were only priests, nuns” (Inquirer, 9/21-22/97), for the 25th anniversary of the imposition of martial rule under the Marcos dictatorship. But so much more you can find in the book “Church-state relations” by Mario Bolasco and Rolando Yu published in 1981 by St. Scholastica’s College where both were in the faculty.

If I may digress, books that packed a wallop had innocuous-sounding titles at that time, like “Vision of a New Society” (a dig at the dictator’s much-ballyhooed “new society”) written by one Felix Casalmo who, I would later find out, was Jesuit sociologist Fr. John Doherty.

Members of the clergy and religious congregations of this present era should find in “Church-state relations” a wealth of information on the workings of the church during the dark first few years of martial rule, how it all began (“critical collaboration,” naninimbang, or doing a balancing act, as a young priest decries the present state of affairs) and how the churches eventually found their voices and broke open the floodgates.

But as I had written, “at first there were only priests, nuns” while many mitered shepherds would only follow their flock later, so to speak. So you see, the institutional churches (the hierarchy and those working at ground level) have always been worth watching and writing about, sometimes at the risk of one’s own safety, especially if the subject matter was about truth, justice, and defense of human rights. Ask me. May I add parenthetically that the churches now are big on justice, peace, and integrity of creation, but not so on truth and falsehood.

Oh, I remember the Association of Major Religious Superiors’ own “mosquito press” during the dictatorship. First, there was the safe-sounding “Various Reports,” then “Signs of the Times,” and lastly, “Ichthys” named after the fish sign of the early Christians in the underground. (Note: I have saved a pile of copies for archiving.) They kept the mimeograph machines humming and the nuns and their allies busy with circulating the “contraband.” I do not see much of that now, social media and ease of information dissemination notwithstanding.

One should not be too quick to liken the present-day NTF-Elcac with the CMLC of yore. The NTF-Elcac had been there since the Duterte presidency without the church being represented. Then, suddenly? CMLC was established in November 1973, specifically, at first, to address the human rights violations (arrest, detention, abduction, torture, raids) committed against clergy and religious. One of the most severely tortured priests at that time was Fr. Primo Hagad who, I was told, was never the same again after his ordeal. And then there were the raids of religious houses, the Jesuit Sacred Heart Novitiate in Novaliches among them. This raid became some kind of turning point.

On the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines’ link-up with NTF-Elcac, CBCP president Bishop Pablo Virgilio “Ambo” David later clarified that only its commission on public affairs would engage with NTF-Elcac and that the commission intends to provide “moral-ethical approaches” in addressing insurgency. Note that among the vocal supporters of NTF-Elcac, through his media network, is self-styled “appointed son of God” Pastor Apollo Quiboloy who is wanted in the United States for alleged sex trafficking and whose social media accounts have been shut down.

The NTF-Elcac-CBCP link-up will be discussed in the CBCP’s permanent council. Let us hope for positive results and not a co-optation as some have feared. In the meantime, the case of the two female activists abducted in Bataan by armed men should be a concern. Jhed Tamano, 22, works with a program of the Ecumenical Bishops’ Forum-Central Luzon, while Jonila Castro, 21, is a volunteer environmentalist allied with sectors opposing reclamation projects in Manila Bay.

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