Christian Engagement & the coming Elections

The 2022 Philippine presidential and vice presidential elections are scheduled to be held on Monday, May 9, 2022, as part of the 2022 general election. At least 65.7 million registered voters are expected to go out and vote on May 9 for the 2022 Philippine elections (aside from the 1.8 million overseas voters). The position of president and vice president are elected separately; the two winning candidates could thus come from different political parties.

Recent surveys, agree on the fact that the election has effectively become a two-horse race, in which the rest of the fractured field of candidates lags far behind. With just less than a month to go until the Philippines’ presidential election, Vice President Leni Robredo is slowly gaining ground on presidential front-runner Ferdinand (Bongbong) Marcos Jr., the son of the country’s late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos. The surveys also show that Marcos’s running mate, Sara-Duterte Carpio, the mayor of Davao City in the southern Philippines and the daughter of incumbent President Rodrigo Duterte, remains the top choice for vice president. However, the Marcos-Duterte tandem, keeps the dominant position as the election campaign enters its final stage. (ep)

General Election in The Philippines

Jesus did not say that his Kingdom was not in this world

Martin Luther King was among the most outstanding religious activists of the past century. To this day that reputation remains intact, especially for black Americans, and other people of color (and that includes us, Filipinos). When questioned why he was involved in political activism, King pointed out that during that powerful episode with Pontius Pilate, “Jesus said: ‘My Kingdom is not of this world.’ He did not say that His Kingdom was not in this world.”

Hopefully, that settles the issue of Christian engagement in politics. In other words, the question we are addressing is not whether or not religious should get involved in politics, but how religious should engage in political activity? No Church can avoid the political dimension of its pastoral activities. Synonymous with God’s universal love is his/her justice for all. More precisely phrased, the question is: What is the Christian political responsibility?

The Religious Discernment Group experience

To attempt answering that question, I would like to draw upon the experience of the Religious Discernment Group, commonly referred to as “RDG”.

On 26 February 2008, the CBCP (Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines) published a pastoral letter entitled: “Seeking the Truth, Restoring Integrity” and called for the establishment of “circles of discernment” as a way of responding to the urgent pastoral challenges in the context of the conflictive political situation created by the Arroyo administration. From that CBCP statement, let me quote a couple of lines:

«For the long term we reiterate our call for “circles of discernment”. … It is through … prayerful discernment and action that the roots of corruption are discovered and destroyed. We believe that such communal action will perpetuate at the grassroots level the spirit of People Power so brilliantly demonstrated to the world at EDSA I». (the underscoring is mine.)

Picking up the gauntlet, twenty-seven members of the Clergy (including a bishop, Msgr. Angel Lagdameo) gathered at the Tagaste Retreat House in Tagaytay on 15 & 16 September 2008 and reflected on their own pastoral experiences. Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle, then bishop of Imus, welcomed the participants. The reflection was done in light of their prophetic mission and stewardship role, in order to come up with a possible course of action. That initiative would eventually lead to the establishment of three circles of discernment groups. Spearheaded by the late Fr. José Dizon, the National Clergy Discernment Group (NCDG) was organized in October 2009, the Religious Discernment Group (RDG) in December 2009, and the Lay Discernment Group (LDG), in February 2010.

Recently, our bishops have revived their re-iteration of the call to establish circles of discernment. That is to say, 14 years later. That would then be the third time the bishops are exhorting Church people to create these circles of discernment.

At this juncture, allow me to narrate, briefly, how we, the RDG have been trying since 2009 to respond to the bishops’ call, and see how our efforts could possibly intersect with the reality of the coming elections in May.

The RDG began with a bang. More than a hundred and fifty religious men and women from all over Luzon gathered at the De La Salle University to inaugurate its foundation with a Eucharistic Celebration presided by Bishop Sofronio Bancud, himself a religious. Already at the inaugural gathering the chosen optic of response was the prophetic dimension of the call to follow Jesus. This is reflected in the RDG’s motto: “PROPHETS are GOD’s HARBINGERS of HOPE in the HEART of the WORLD.”

See-judge-act

We have consistently availed of the see-judge-act methodology. It was developed by the Belgian priest, later Joseph Cardinal Cardijn, when he started organizing young blue-collar Christian workers in the Brussels area during the years following the 1^st World War in order to evangelize their colleagues. The group was named Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne, or the Young Christian Workers (YCW). The methodology was recommended by Pope John XXIII in his 1961 encyclical Mater et Magistra (see # 263); and more recently, it was employed by Pope Francis as the foundational pastoral method of his encyclical Laudato Si’.

The overall outcome of RDG’s efforts were the regular convenors’ meetings, the bi-annual gatherings during Advent and Lent and its quarterly bulletin, Fire and Water. There were also occasional convocations of fora on relevant current issues.

Perhaps because of the highly politicized atmosphere we are experiencing these days, occasioned by the ongoing election campaign, the need for a better functioning, or operative interpretation of discernment has become urgent and perhaps, necessary.

Discernment is commonly approached and considered in contradistinction with action. Thus, the Cardijn methodology is oftentimes employed in two phases: first, you see-and-judge, and then afterwards, as a separate move, you act. That is, as if action was optional and not constitutive of a single seamless process with see-and-judge. Were the late cardinal, basing himself on the way of Jesus for whom there is no separation between word and deed, such an application of his methodology becomes questionable, if not unacceptable.

The faithful tends to expect a unified stand to come from the CBCP regarding politics. Some are even critical of the “silence of the shepherds” regarding political issues. In this connection, a caveat might be in order. As an institution, the Church Hierarchy would tend to operate within the cautious dynamics of an established order, just as most institutions and other organized bodies would. To avoid unnecessary frustrations or disappointments, it might be good to temper our expectations in as far as what we think the institutional Church should do or, what it would be willing to say and do. It’s better to have more realistic expectations since we are not dealing with politics neither in its original meaning^[1] nor its ideal sense, but with realpolitik^[2] in all its gray areas and inclination for compromise. Even just advocating that Catholics practice principled politics, as Bishop Pablo David is now doing, is a relative novelty in the Philippine electoral scene.

A friend bishop once lectured me: “You know, Freddie, we bishops, frankly speaking, can only be prophetic from the perspective of an institution. Don’t forget that the Hierarchy is a well-entrenched institution”. As above indicated, I have accepted the reality of the ingrained prudence of the institutional Church. To this day, however, I have not figured out exactly what the good bishop meant. Of course, I appreciated that he was frank. Just the same I felt, more than I thought, that his pronouncement was a contradiction in terms: prophecy from the perspective of an institution?

Is not the prophetic dimension of Christianity non-negotiable, an essential and constitutive component of the Christian religion required of all Christians, including the members of the Church hierarchy?

I believe that foremost in the church’s prophetic role is to serve as the guardian of mystery and morality, of what is supernatural and beyond the ordinary. She must, therefore, consistently bear witness to the fact that politics, by itself, cannot adequately address the deeper issues of humanity and solve the problems that beset it. Obviously, a reconciling Church calling for unity and preaching solidarity, may not be identified with a narrowly based political party. It is in this sense that it may not practice partisan politics. However, this does not mean that the Clergy and the religious may abandon the political arena. They cannot and may not. For it does not mean that the religious have no business with the problems of justice and peace, with refugees and displaced populations, with those in the peripheries (ang mga nasa laylayan ng lipunan), with the hungry and the oppressed, with the 1,000 million living in poverty, or the 15,000 dying of starvation daily. Such a stance would be in direct contradiction with what we find in the pages of the Bible (cf especially Matthew 25).

Our modern prophet, Martin Luther King put it bluntly: “Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men (and women) and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them, is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial”.

Harbingers of hope in the heart of the world

But we may not lose heart. There are good signs and positive developments. Recently the bishop of Caloocan, who happens to be the new CBCP president, blessed the initiative of his lay leaders to endorse explicitly the presidential candidacy of Leonor Gerona Robredo. This was unthinkable a year ago when the archbishop of Davao was the president. Bishop Pablo David has also pronounced that: “Our issue now is morality and truth, and it would be a great sin against God that in matters of good and evil, truth and falsehood, you are neutral . . . it is not right to be neutral when truth and the country’s future are at stake.”

More and more God-fearing people are framing their analysis of the current situation in moral terms. In the eyes of many Filipinos, the struggle is cannot be just political but moral and spiritual. In so doing they are asking what the presidential candidates actually represent and on which side they stand – truth or falsehood, good or evil? Morality is both exact and exacting. Its demands are always concrete, not abstract or theoretical, because lives are at stake. There are victims and victimizers. May a Christian vote for a known thief and convicted tax evader? The issue was highlighted by the charges of moral turpitude leveled against Marcos junior in his run for the presidency.

Is the contrast between the integrity and competence that Leni Robredo has been consistently manifesting and the disconcerting toxicity of the Marcos-Duterte tandem not yet stark enough? Isn’t it yet obvious that for Christians and other God-fearing people, it must be Leni?

A call to action – what can be done, what can we do?

The least we could do is to vote responsibly. That would mean voting according to our conscience. However, we must see to it that our consciences are both well-formed and well-informed, not deformed and open to the highest bidder. But need our participation in the electoral process be limited to voting right on election day? We are going through a critical period of our history as a nation demanding that we be not only critical but alert and imaginative.

Have we noticed that Leni Robredo is touching base? She is reaching the masses in a manner unprecedented?^[3] It’s significant that she has won over the young voters. With them Robredo has galvanized volunteerism into a movement. Brought together the crowds that have gathered to see and listen to her^[4], would probably be bigger than those that filled a large part of EDSA in 1986.

What else, what more can we do? That’s were imagination and gumption would come into play:

• Join the many counter campaigns against the well-funded revisionist “golden age narrative” of the BBM camp.
• Oppose and resist the rebranding of the Marcos dynasty, and expose their legacy of violence and corruption by supporting and convincing survivors of the Marcos Martial law era to take courage and rise up to reveal its shocking brutality and sordidness. Help disseminate their witness, their testimonies and those of relatives and eyewitnesses of torture and indignities.
• Re-open and revive the Fr. Rudy Romano case and other cases of desaparecidos
• Encourage and solicit more statements of support from religious and civic society groups, NGO’s and LGU’s.
• Refresh cases human rights violations cases.
• Publish more komiks-style flyers on the abuses of the Marcos regime, in particular of the Martial Law era.
• Expose the opulent and profligate lifestyle of the Marcoses, their brazenness, their lies and fabricated stories of heroism and service.
• Highlight the incredible thievery of the Marcoses and the debt that nation is still paying.
• Educate Church people on the true sense and meaning the of the theory of the separation of Church and State.
• Help more Catholics not to be confused and enable them to get a handle on the issue of partisan politics.
• Demand accountability from the Comelec and safeguard the integrity of COA by questioning and challenging the “midnight appointments” by Rodrigo Duterte.
• Create circles of discernment and/or discussion groups in your own religious communities, to serve as instruments of ongoing formation for religious and members of the
• Organize fora, seminars and symphosia to foster clear and open discussions on what we can learn from the Gospels regarding Christian political responsibility.
• Please expand the list of possibilities . . .

Fr. Wilfredo Dulay, mdj

March 5, 2022

^[1] Politics (from Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, 'affairs of the cities') is the method of rulership over a national government, state government and local government in groups, or other forms of ruling power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status.

^[2] A system of politics or principles based on practical rather than moral or ideological considerations. For example: "Commercial realpolitik, the tyranny of profit, had won the day."

^[3] Something the so-called “heroes of EDSA” – Ramos, Enrile and Cardinal Sin – were not able to do. And could not have done. Fidel Ramos and Juan Ponce Enrile made sure the crowds were already there when they showed up. Sin’s exhortation surely brought a lot of people to the streets. But EDSA was largely a happening in the NCR. It was not nationwide. Undeniably EDSA was an extraordinary phenomenon. More than a revolt, a popular uprising perhaps, but it was not a revolution. There were no revolutionary leaders. Corazon Aquino was instrumental in restoring a “Filipino style democracy” that was certainly more benevolent that the Marcos dictatorship. Loosely described as revolutionary, the Aquino government was anything but. There was a change of hands, from the iron grip of Ferdinand Marcos to the maternal touch of Cory Aquino, but the well-entrenched and interlocking political dynasties continued to rule and exploit the land and the people.

^[4] It is important to note that Kiko Pangilinan seems not to have a following of his own. He is riding on Robredo’s popularity. To have Sara Duterte as vice president in case of a Robredo victory could be quite an obstacle to her plans for an efficient and transparent governance.