Philippine Bishops Assail Fraud, Urge Nonviolent Protest : Prelates Charge That Presidential Election Was ‘Criminal Use of Power’

In a thinly veiled attack on President Ferdinand E. Marcos and his ruling party, the powerful Philippine Roman Catholic Church charged Friday that last week’s presidential election was “a criminal use of power,” rife with intimidation, terrorism, murder and massive vote fraud.

The majority of the church’s bishops issued an unprecedented call for “nonviolent struggle” against any government proclaimed as a result of polls the prelates called “unparalleled in the fraudulence of their conduct.”

“A government that assumes or retains power through fraudulent means has no moral basis, for such an access to power is tantamount to a forcible seizure and cannot command the allegiance of the citizenry,” the bishops declared in a statement with far-reaching implications for this nation of more than 40 million Catholics as it anxiously awaited the official result of the election.

‘Our Moral Obligation’

“If such a government does not, of itself, freely correct the evil it has inflicted on the people, then it is our serious moral obligation as a people to make it do so.”

The statement, which church officials said represents the sentiments of all 110 Philippine bishops, came after a grueling and sometimes bitter two-day session called by Cardinal Jaime Sin to frame a public response to an election that many say ranks among the most corrupt in the history of Philippine politics.

The church stopped short of declaring victory for challenger Corazon Aquino, 53, a religiously devout but politically naive housewife whose campaign relied heavily on behind-the-scenes church support. Hours after the polls closed Feb. 7, Aquino said she had won the contest.

But Marcos held an almost insurmountable lead in the National Assembly, whose canvass of vote results is the only binding count. The assembly, which Marcos’ party controls, said today that with 97% of the votes tabulated, Marcos had 10,184,710, or 53.8% to Aquino’s 8,731,999, or 46.2%.

Marcos, who so far has not responded to the church’s charges, was at least as concerned with the bishops’ message as he was about the final tallies, according to church sources and aides to the president.

First Lady Visits Bishops

Marcos’ wife, Imelda, who persuaded Marcos to convert to Catholicism from his native Aglipayan religion before they were married 30 years ago, made a special trip at 2:30 a.m. Friday to the Manila compound where the bishops were sequestered. Several bishops said Imelda Marcos beseeched them not to release any public statements on the elections, let alone one as critical as the declaration they made later Friday.

In his own recent public appearances, Marcos has made it a point to take the offensive against the increasingly activist Catholic Church, which wields enormous influence in a nation where more than 85% of the population professes the Catholic faith. The president accused nuns and priests of being subversive Communist sympathizers during his campaign, and he has chided them for what he called illegal, partisan acts he said they committed while guarding the polls against fraud on election day.

Marcos repeated these allegations in an interview Friday night with CBS News anchorman Dan Rather.

Asked about the bishops’ charge of election fraud, Marcos replied: “My reaction to this is now they’ve finally bared their real position, and that was that they were for the opposition all the time, that they were campaigning. They used the priests and nuns not only to help the opposition but to destroy the electoral process.”

Pope Sent Message

So great was the pressure this week on the bishops, one said, that Pope John Paul II sent them “an expression of solidarity” as they began their session Thursday. The message said only, “I am with you.”

During their two-day conference, a closely guarded session marked by frequent arguments and shouting between the activists and the conservatives in the bishops’ ranks, the most controversial debate centered on what several called the strongest political statement ever issued by the Philippine church.

Although only 62 of the country’s 110 bishops were present for the two-day session, officials said that all 110 had met earlier and agreed that the statement from the meeting would speak for all of them.

The statement, included in Friday’s declaration, said: “Yet despite these evil acts (election fraud and abuse), we are morally certain the people’s real will for change has been truly manifested.”

That statement virtually echoed the language of Aquino and her supporters, who have continually referred to “the people’s will” in justifying their claim of victory.

But the statement contained neither the name of Aquino nor of Marcos. Several bishops interviewed Friday said that the Philippine clergy was split over making such an endorsement--on the face of it, an apparent violation of the constitutional separation of church and state.

To Be Read in Churches

Yet when he was asked whether the church’s charges of widespread cheating, violence and vote-buying were directed against Marcos, Bishop Jesus Varela said, “We did not name Marcos, but it is obvious.”

Compounding Marcos’ dilemma over the church’s increasingly political role is the fact that the bishops’ statement will be read from the pulpit in tens of thousands of churches throughout the Philippines on Sunday, a day on which several Marcos aides have hinted the National Assembly may proclaim him president for another six years.

In their statement Friday, the bishops preached against apathy: “If we did nothing, we would be party to our own destruction as a people. We would be jointly guilty with the perpetrators of the wrong we want righted.”

But the church stressed that violence is not the answer to an election it said was so marred by brutality and terrorism that such tactics “made naked fear the decisive factor in people not participating in the polls.”

‘Nonviolent Struggle’

“Neither do we advocate a bloody, violent means of righting this wrong,” the statement said. “If we did, we would be sanctioning the enormous sin of fratricidal strife. . . . The way indicated to us now is the way of nonviolent struggle for justice.”

Msgr. Teodoro Bucani, auxiliary bishop of Manila, told reporters after the bishops’ press conference Friday that the church is advocating a movement akin to the civil-rights campaigns of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States and the civil disobedience of Mohandas K. Gandhi in pre-independence India.

In the context of the church, he added, it is “to exercise a Christian ostracism of those persons” who are behind electoral abuse.

Asked whether such electoral offenders would be allowed to take Communion, Bucani said, “obviously not.”

The bishop was asked if Marcos would be excommunicated, and he replied, “That will be between President Marcos, his conscience and the priest who celebrates the Mass with him.”

Behind the rhetoric of the church’s declaration Friday, even the bishops conceded, the church was still casting about for specifics to implement its nonviolent battle against the outcome of the tainted election.

“We are expressing here the bishops’ judgment of this election,” Bucani said. “And now we are asking the people to reflect on it and think of what can be done.”

When asked why the church has not thrown its full force behind Aquino’s claim of victory, Bucani said, “You don’t just declare a president by a moral estimate.”

Meanwhile, Ramon V. Del Rosario, the Philippine ambassador to West Germany, has resigned to protest the handling of the election, the third prominent diplomat to quit in a month, officials said in Manila. In a letter to Marcos dated Wednesday, Del Rosario said he believes the people’s will was “wantonly subverted” by “massive vote buying and terrorism.”