President Threatens to Retaliate : Activist Priests Openly Fight Marcos Reelection

Father Nico Bautista stood not at the altar but on the stage of a campaign rally last week when he exhorted his faithful on how God would have them vote in Friday’s special presidential election.

“Can a priest be partisan?” the young priest shouted at the 50,000 cheering fans of opposition candidate Corazon Aquino. “We are and we must be. . . . It is for the moral good of the people.”

And for the next several minutes, Bautista gave, as the word of God, a sermon endorsing the religiously devout widow of slain opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr.

So it has been throughout this predominantly Roman Catholic nation during an election campaign that has increasingly pitted the powerful forces of the Philippine Catholic Church against the vast political machine of President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

For some priests and bishops, the role has been an indirect one--endorsing only the principle of honest and fair elections and working overtime organizing citizen poll-watcher teams to check for fraud and harassment on election day.

For others, like Bautista in Manila’s influential business district of Makati, the election has become something of a crusade. They have adopted an election theology that has grown out of a Philippine-style “liberation theology.”

But for Marcos, himself a converted Catholic who is keenly aware of the power of a church to which nearly 90% of the nation’s 24.8 million voters belong, the politicized priests, nuns and bishops have become a very real election threat.

Over the weekend, the president struck back.

During a press conference Saturday, Marcos issued a dark threat of his own to clergymen who have come out openly in favor of Aquino, who almost never appears at a campaign rally without a priest by her side to bless the event.

“Most of them are Communists, all Communist-inclined,” the president said angrily, adding that he is keeping files on the priests’ activities. Asked whether he intends to take action against the priests after the election, Marcos added, “If they are Communists, they will be wiped out.”

It was not, Marcos said, that he believed the Catholic Church was against him in the upcoming election. In fact, at one recent campaign rally in Mindanao, the president told the crowd: “God is with us. God knows that to protect the Filipinos, we must make Marcos . . . win.”

But, in the pragmatic arena of Philippine politics, many clergymen and independent analysts here say, Marcos is acutely aware of the importance of the support of the church.

On Sunday, Marcos’ handpicked National Election Commission passed a resolution ordering jail terms of up to six years for any priests, bishops, nuns or Catholic lay workers caught engaging in “partisan political activities.”

Declaring that “the separation of the church and the state shall be inviolable,” commission chairman Victorino Savellano released the four-page resolution, which states: “It is indeed of judicial notice that some priests and heads of religious organizations use the pulpit to exhort the parishioners attending Mass not to vote for particular candidates by repeating and even magnifying the propaganda lines of the opposition candidates.”

‘Police-Power Measure’

Savellano added that the commission’s new order is “a police-power measure designed to prevent religious controversies, avoid the evil of ecclesiastics engaging in partisan activities and promote community welfare and peace.”

For men such as Felix Bautista, editor of the church-backed weekly magazine Veritas, which has issued some of the most scathing attacks on the president in recent weeks, the resolution represents his deepest fears fulfilled.

Two days before it was passed, editor Bautista, who is also one of the closest aides and advisers of Manila Cardinal Jaime Sin, was asked what he will do if Marcos is reelected.

“I will find asylum in Cardinal Sin’s palace,” he said. “If they break down the walls of the palace, then I’m a goner.”

But Bautista, 63, said that he is continuing to use the church magazine--apparently with the cardinal’s tacit blessing--as a forum to attack every aspect of Marcos and his administration.

Last week, for example, he reprinted all 10,000 words of an article by historian Alfred W. McCoy challenging Marcos’ record as a war hero. And Bautista himself conceded that his magazine “has dropped all pretense of objectivity” during the campaign.

“To me, this whole election is a case of good against evil,” Bautista said, echoing the justification that many activist priests are using for their political involvement. “And if it is that, then the church has a moral obligation to side with the good.”

The creation of Veritas soon after the Aug. 21, 1983, assassination of Aquino’s husband, Bautista said, was in part Cardinal Sin’s idea--a reaction to the mainstream national media organizations that are almost entirely owned or controlled by close friends and supporters of Marcos.

Sin, whom many longtime analysts here believe may actually be potentially more powerful than the president, has been careful throughout the campaign to avoid openly endorsing either candidate.

“If you ask him as a citizen, he’ll tell you he will vote for Cory, but he’ll never mount the pulpit and say ‘Vote Cory,’ ” Bautista said, referring to Aquino by her universally used nickname. “And the cardinal often says to me: ‘Felix, how can you doubt a Cory victory? God is on her side.’ ”

Nonetheless, Sin has walked a rhetorical tightrope in the two pastoral letters he has issued during the campaign. In the second and stronger of the two, the cardinal referred to “a sinister plot . . . to frustrate the honest and orderly expression of the people’s genuine will.”

Propaganda Campaigns

He wrote of massive bribes being distributed, of black propaganda campaigns and of plans to cheat on election day, and he warned of a national disaster if the poll is not seen as clean and free.

Never did the cardinal name the party behind that plot, but his implication was clear to most of the Filipino faithful, and, when asked last week which party was handing out the bribes, Sin said: “I think it’s obvious. Cory doesn’t have any money.”

It was not clear, though, whether the cardinal’s subtlety would save even him from possible prosecution under the new election code.

The resolution issued Sunday says, in an obvious reference to Sin: “Other (clergymen) write pastoral letters which are read during homilies in religious services. . . . While they are silent as to the names of their candidates, their innuendoes are such that they leave no room for doubt as to the candidates they ask their parishioners to elect in office.”

Beyond the rhetoric, there is an even more direct role the church is playing in the upcoming election.

The church is the prime organizational force behind the National Movement for Free Elections, a citizens’ watchdog group that has enlisted about 500,000 volunteers and is using donated computers, radio sets and even helicopters and airlanes to check for election fraud and intimidation and make its own independent vote tally nationwide.

In nearly all 73 Philippine provinces, it has been the bishops and local parish priests who have established the movement’s teams in their area.

Bishops’ Letter

In an effort to justify the church’s role, all 73 bishops issued a pastoral letter Jan. 25 in which they declared, “These elections can become one great offense to God and a national scandal, or they can be an event of conversion and national renewal.”

The bishops urged citizens to refuse bribes for their votes, to maintain a personal vigil against cheating, intimidation and violence on election day and to “vote into office the persons you believe God wants you to put in office . . . because the power to choose our leaders comes from God.”

But many independent political analysts here believe that, by using the church as its foundation, the free elections movement is by its nature pro-opposition.

In her own defense to charges of Marcos and his aides that she is exploiting the church by using priests and prayers at her rallies, Aquino denied to reporters Saturday that priests were openly endorsing her. But she added: “I can’t help it if free and fair elections are equated with a Cory Aquino victory. So be it.”

In the rural provinces where a tradition of corruption and abuses by government and military officers helped spawn the burgeoning Communist insurgency, the priests have long sided with the political opposition--and occasionally, Marcos claims, the Communist rebels themselves. Marcos has personally ordered the indefinite jailing of at least a dozen priests as suspected Communist sympathizers during the last decade. Among them was Father Teodoro Romegio, the parish priest in the town adjacent to Marcos’ birthplace.

Local leaders there say that Marcos showed his concern about potential opposition from the church in the coming election last December when, during a visit to his home province of Ilocos del Norte, he ordered that Romegio be freed immediately.

Even Marcos loyalist Msgr. Manuel Aspiras, whose parish lies in the heart of the province where Marcos is clearly the favorite son, said last week: “I may be the only priest in Ilocos del Norte who speaks well of the president. Most of the priests are against Marcos.”

But Aspiras, too, added that his role in campaigning for Marcos is justified.

“I am not campaigning as a priest,” he said, “I am campaigning as a Filipino.”

The fundamental question remains: Just how much will the church’s role actually affect the outcome of the election?

“Not that much,” said Veritas editor Bautista. “There is really no such thing as a Catholic vote in the Philippines. In any given congregation, you will find opposition and KBL (Marcos’ New Society Movement). There is an offsetting nature to that.”

But Bautista quickly added, “The church in this country does enjoy a position of pre-eminence. It is looked up to by its parishioners.”

Several close Marcos aides privately have said that they, too, do not believe there is a “Catholic vote.” But at the same time, they interpreted the president’s weekend verbal threats to the church as a sign of growing concern that this election may be different from any before it by virtue of the sheer energy the church is putting into it.

Regardless of the outcome, even editor Bautista said that he doubts Marcos will “declare war on the church” if he is reelected.

“You have to look at our country’s history,” he said. “When the Spaniards first landed on our shores 400 years ago, the Conquistadors and the Catholic missionaries arrived side-by-side.

“The Conquistadors carried swords and built military garrisons. The missionaries carried the Cross, and they built churches and schools.

“Today, the garrisons are gone, but the churches and the schools remain. And I don’t believe an election will change that.”