Catholic Church Seeks Middle Moral Ground in Turbulent Philippines

“Forgive the informality,” Bishop Celso Guevara said. “We have just had a meeting.”

Dressed in slacks and a T-shirt, the man sometimes called “Bishop Che” sat down to discuss the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines.

The priests of this overwhelmingly Catholic country have “gone out of the sacristy . . . to work for the poor, to seek a fair share for everybody,” Guevara said. But the church opposes violence, he insisted, noting with a smile that he is “not as radical” as his namesake, the late Cuban revolutionary Ernesto (Che) Guevara.

There are Filipino priests who have taken up arms with the Communist-led insurgency here, or who have ministered to the guerrillas. But in a country increasingly polarized in its politics, the church as a whole has tried to stake out a moral middle ground.

Cardinal Jaime Sin of Manila, the head of the Philippine church, is a sharp critic of government and military abuses. At a recent memorial service for a priest killed by paramilitary forces on the restive island of Mindanao, the cardinal warned that “the mounting frequency of these assaults on human life where Filipinos kill Filipinos is fast becoming our own version of Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ and Nazi Germany’s Holocaust.”

No Government Role

But the cardinal has rejected a more active political role in the government of President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

“The moment the church advocates a system of government,” he said, “the church can become a widow in the next generation.”

Catholicism was ingrained here under 400 years of Spanish colonialism, and the Philippines is the only Catholic nation in Asia.

The church is the grand cathedrals of Manila and Bishop Guevara’s large but faded St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Bataan province, as well as the humble pastel-painted churches of the rural barrios. It is the faith of 85% of the Filipinos, whose devotion is worn on their sleeves, a central part of their lives from birth to death.

There are other religions here: American evangelists make popular television fare, Islam is the historic faith of the southern islands, charismatic sects abound and the Iglesia Ni Kristo, an authoritarian Christian church, has grown rapidly since World War II. But Catholicism is the institution that binds the more than 7,000 islands of the archipelago. And it has many faces.

Novena Church

In the Baclaran district of Manila, the Church of our Mother of Perpetual Help, run by the Redemptorist order, reflects the deep belief of the Filipinos. It is called a novena church, a place where Catholics can ask help from the Virgin Mary and seek fulfillment by praying at a novena Mass for nine straight weeks.

The Masses are scheduled throughout the day on Wednesdays, and the huge pillared building is filled with 3,000 to 4,000 people, all fanning themselves in the heat and repeating their prayers.

“This church is miraculous,” Antonio Alejandrino, a 56-year-old insurance underwriter, said as he left a Mass. “I had a wound that wouldn’t heal. I asked for help and, after the second Wednesday, the bleeding subsided. It was a miracle.”

For many, the Baclaran services are a part of everyday life.

“They come to reassure themselves that she is still on our side,” said Father Francis J. Pidgeon, a Redemptorist priest.

At Guevara’s church, in Bataan, the accent is more temporal. He heads a diocese of 320,000 with only 22 priests. One is Father Antonio Dumaual, a leader of the protest movement against the activation of the Philippines’ first nuclear power plant, which is situated on the Bataan peninsula.

People Concerned

“We found that the people of our parish were concerned,” Dumaual said, explaining his involvement in what has become a political issue for the Philippine opposition.

Some nuns in Guevara’s diocese were active in a workers’ movement, advising farm and factory hands of their legal rights under Philippine law. Many Filipinos consider such activity leftist, for it leads to labor organizing. This is a country with just 3,000 union contracts, according to Perfecto Fernandez, a professor of law at the University of the Philippines, “and half of those are company unions with sweetheart contracts.”

Guevara says he believes that in its relationship with the authoritarian Marcos government, the church should follow the policy set out by Cardinal Sin--one of “critical cooperation.”

“If we work hard, many reforms are possible within the system,” the bishop said. “But unless we have a fair election of credible leaders, we will fail.”

He says he believes that Christianity and communism are incompatible but also says, as many Filipinos do, that any government must seek social justice. And he finds no fault with priests who perform sacraments for the guerrillas of the New Peoples’ Army, the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines.

Monitors Rights

Closer to the issues of political opposition and the insurgency is Task Force Detainees, a church-related human rights monitoring organization. Established by the Assn. of Major Religious Superiors after Marcos declared martial law in 1972, the group attempts to document political arrests and military and police abuses, including reported instances of torture and what Filipinos call “salvaging,” assassinations at the hands of military or paramilitary forces. It also helps political detainees and their families.

Lyn de Luna, a lay worker at the group’s Manila headquarters, says there are now 51 Task Force units throughout the country. The work of the group, in which several nuns are deeply involved, has the support of the majority of bishops, De Luna said.

There are 110 bishops in the Philippine church. If they could be categorized politically, 10 might be considered leftists, 10 rightists and the rest centrists, according to Felix Bautista, editor of Veritas, a church-related weekly.

Bautista, often a spokesman for Cardinal Sin, says the cardinal is a target of both political poles. Marcos has accused the country’s leading prelate of making statements that tend to foment revolution. However, Bautista said, radical churchmen would rank Sin right behind the president on any list of “evil men.”

Politics Avoided

Seated in his Veritas office, just off the press room of a major printing firm in Manila, Bautista suggested that Sin and the church “have sufficient influence to swing an election one way or another.” But he said that influence will not be used politically.

He said the cardinal is a “hopeless optimist” who believes that “long after Marcos is gone the church will still be here.”

“His appointment book is filled with the names of politicians,” Bautista said. “They are not asking for support. They just want to be seen with him.”

The church works at three levels: Sin and the bishops; the laity, the most influential part of which is the upper- and middle-class business community, and the parish priests.

The cardinal is at the apex, a man who is often identified with the wealthy parishes of Manila, although Bautista insists that for every Mass the cardinal says in a society church he says 20 more in the barrios.

The pastoral letters of Sin and the bishops carry great weight. Bautista says one has been written for the next elections, urging that Catholics not only vote but keep watch at the polls to make sure their votes are fairly counted.

Polls Watched

The Catholic laity was influential in a poll-watching organization called NAMFREL in the 1984 assembly elections, which are generally considered the fairest here in recent years. The NAMFREL president is Jose Concepcion, a wealthy businessman and lay leader.

But it is the parish priest, particularly in the countryside, who is the day-to-day voice of the church. The priests in rural barrios and slum parishes, often areas of discontent infiltrated by radical organizers and Communist agitators, draw much of the criticism from the Marcos government and its supporters--that which is not aimed directly at Sin.

These priests often serve in areas beyond the reach of civil and military authorities. Where there is no mayor or police, the people come to their local priest for answers. In areas like Mindanao, the question increasingly is whether to cooperate with the insurgents.

Some priests, working in parishes where violence is rampant, are apparently making the hard decision: telling their parishioners to go along to get along. And others, caught in the middle, opposing equally the ideology of the insurgents and the corruption and brutality of local officials, have been killed.

Some have gone over to the insurgency, including Father Conrado Balweg, a guerrilla leader in northern Luzon who, according to Bautista, cradles an M-16 rifle in his arms and says: “This is my way of saying Mass.”

Most Filipinos say the core of the clergy is moving to the left. From Sin down, the church is abandoning the traditional ways of life and calling for political and economic reform. The voice of the parish priest will help determine how far it moves.