U.S. Embrace of Bishops Is Unsettling, Dangerous

In two widely separated trouble spots, Haiti and the Philippines, U.S. foreign policy has found critical assistance from the activity of the local Roman Catholic bishops.

For a long time both Jean Claude Duvalier and Ferdinand E. Marcos had come under strong episcopal criticism for their assaults on human rights, but only in the past few weeks has there been recognition in the United States of the effect that such church involvement has had on both dictators’ slippage from power.

Because American sympathies and U.S. government policy distanced themselves from Marcos and Duvalier, the stance of the Catholic bishops in those countries is now being applauded in our press and welcomed by our government. In both countries the official Catholic leadership has clearly denounced social injustice and economic oppression. This is particularly true in recent months in the Philippines, where Cardinal Jaime Sin, archbishop of Manila, has taken an influential and courageous stand. In speaking out, these leaders have exemplifiedthe prophetic stance long advocated on the American scene by such figures asthe late Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

One cannot avoid being just a bit cynical about the way in which powerful interest groups in the United States now praise the role of the Haitian and Filipino bishops, whereas at home in the United States these same groups criticize any attempt by the Catholic bishops to speak out on public issues of economic justice or disarmament. Apparently what is enlightened criticism in Manila or Port-au-Prince becomes naive interference when spoken in Washington.

But there is something more unsettling in the United States’ present embrace of the Philippine Catholic bishops, and it came through most clearly in the congressional move to funnel U.S. government humanitarian aid through the Filipino hierarchy. Such a move would have made the bishops agents of U.S. foreign policy, and would have established a church-state link running counter to our cherished view of the separation of church and state.

Americans have always believed, and rightly so, that the relationship between church and state established by the U.S. Constitution is a matter of fundamental principle, not just a pragmatic arrangement that seems to work well in our own country. If that is the case, we should honor the principle abroad as well as at home.

One can certainly sympathize with the desire to continue humanitarian aid to the Philippine people regardless of any decision about military aid. And one can see a certain logic in wanting to distribute such aid through the church. It already has structures in place that could be used to distribute the aid, and it is untainted by charges of corruption.

But, given the open alliance of the Philippine bishops with Corazon Aquino’s candidacy and the post-election resistance, any aid sent through the bishops would have been seen as subtle assistance to one side of the political struggle.

What is objectionable and potentially dangerous is to forge a semi-official link between the U.S. government and groups of church officials who, at least for the time being, favor a course of action in their country that is in agreement with American foreign policy. This is essentially the same approach that the Reagan Administration is taking in Nicaragua by enlisting Managua’s Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo as a political ally, and it, too, is fraught with dangers for both the church and long-range U.S. interests.

The hierarchies in Haiti and in the Philippines have been an effective prophetic voice precisely because they could be seen as politically unambitious, free of encumbering political links, with no hidden political debts to pay. To tie their voice to any government program, even one as genuinely humanitarian as aid from the U.S. Congress, would endanger the prophetic freedom that is the source of their influence.

The most desirable and ultimately most productive course of action that the United States could take would be to listen to the concerns for justice and to the on-the-spot judgments of the Philippine bishops, to make its own geopolitical judgments, and then to use appropriate economic or political agencies to implement those judgments. If that means that the Philippine episcopacy can support our foreign policy, so much the better, but it should not be an instrument of that policy.