Catholic Church a Battleground Between Philippine Right, Left

For the first time in recent history, the Philippine military has charged a Roman Catholic priest with murder.

According to military accounts, Father Diosdado Ladera took up an M-16 assault rifle on the island of Mindanao, more than 100 miles south of here, and joined a guerrilla unit of armed Communist rebels in staging an ambush that left five soldiers and three civilians dead.

Ladera, the parish priest of a small mountain village near Cagayan de Oro, is out on bail. He said he was miles away from the scene of attack and called the charges “preposterous.”

Here in Davao City, the walls of a Carmelite convent--the order most closely associated with the nation’s devoutly Catholic president, Corazon Aquino--are splattered with the words, “Agents of Satan.” The local military commander alleges that the nuns are storing arms for Communist rebels in the convent’s basement.

Protestant Minister’s Message

On the island of Negros, hundreds of miles to the north, a right-wing Protestant minister regularly tours the streets of the provincial capital in a Jeep, shouting through a rooftop loudspeaker, “Your parish priest is a Communist.”

And in the Philippines’ second-most populous island of Cebu, more than 500 government soldiers in full uniform marched from their military camp last month to a nearby Catholic Redemptorist Church and knelt in a “prayer of protest” for “the redemption” of the religious order, which they have renamed the “Red-terrorists.”

For many local church leaders, these incidents are modern-day parables that reflect increasing tension between the military and the church. But together they go far beyond the differences between the country’s two most powerful institutions--the church to which 85% of Filipinos belong and the 200,000-member, largely right-wing, military. They also disclose a rift within the church.

Cardinal Jaime Sin, the nation’s senior churchman and a staunch supporter of the Aquino government, flatly denied that there are serious differences among his 5,000 priests and 72 bishops.

“The church right now is more united than before,” the cardinal told reporters over breakfast recently. “We have our problems, obviously . . . but this is an effect of the past regime.”

The cardinal’s confidence, however, belies what many priests and even several influential bishops have said is one of the most critical periods in church history, an era in which already existing rifts between conservatives and radicals within the church are being exploited by top military commanders who believe that they need the backing of the church leadership to defeat the violent insurgency.

Support for Coup

A little more than a year ago, the military enlisted the open support of the cardinal and the church hierarchy in the coup that drove Ferdinand E. Marcos into exile. Now, military strategists are trying to harness that same pastoral power to defeat the Communist insurgents.

But the strategy so far has only served to polarize the church even more than it was under Marcos, a 20-year period in which many priests became social activists, then leftists and, in some cases, ultimately Communist guerrillas.

For the rebels, who have used the nation’s rural villages as the base for what they call a “protracted people’s war,” the priests’ support was critical. Every Philippine town has a strong Catholic parish, whose reach into the jungle and mountain villages is far more extensive than that of either the government or the military.

Col. Raul Urjillo, chief of intelligence for the Philippine army, said in a recent briefing that the rebels have used the church network in their rapid expansion, and he proposed that the government and military should take advantage of the fact that “the Catholic Church is now the principal supporter of the new government.”

Other senior military commanders, noting the ideological splits in the ranks of the clergy, admitted that they are trying to use those divisions to shift the church’s grass-roots support to the side of the military.

Sin’s breakfast was testimony to the church hierarchy’s concern over the politicization of its ranks. In a strongly worded document, Sin issued a directive that morning banning all priests from direct participation in partisan politics and calling on them to withdraw all support from the Communist rebels.

The cardinal’s auxiliary bishop of Manila, Msgr. Teodoro Bacani, put it bluntly during the breakfast press conference:

“It is not possible for a priest to become a member of the Communist Party and remain in the good graces of the church.

‘Church Was in a Dilemma’

“Under the Marcos administration, because of the oppression, some (clergymen) sought tactical alliances . . . in order to topple the Marcos regime. At that time, the church was in a dilemma. It could neither attack them nor support them.”

Since the rise to power of so pious a leader as Aquino--she often quotes the Bible in her speeches, prays in convents during national crises and once declared publicly that it was Jesus Christ, and not she, who was the true leader of the Philippine nation--the dilemma is over, Bacani added.

It is now clear, he said, “those who work for class struggle . . . do not have the support of the church.”

Despite such warnings, though, hundreds of priests and thousands of nuns remain deeply sympathetic to the Communists’ avowed causes of social justice and government reform. And, in a church that embraced many tenets of Latin American-style liberation theology during the dark Marcos years, it was clear that the conservative church leadership and the military will both face considerable resistance in their crusade to purge the Philippine clergy of radicals.

Many rural priests do, in fact, meet regularly with local leaders of the armed insurgency, and some are actually considering running for national or local office in this year’s elections on the slate of a new leftist political party.

In an interview following the cardinal’s directives, a spokesman for the underground, radical leftist group, the Christians for National Liberation, said his organization has actually grown in size since Aquino took power.

Father Cresencio dela Cruz, who said he still considers himself a priest despite his leadership role in a group that endorses the Communists’ armed struggle, said his 15-year-old organization claims a membership of 4,182 bishops, priests, nuns and seminarians.

‘Enhances Our Vocation’

“By joining the movement, we do not turn against the faith and the Catholic Church--rather it enhances our vocation and service to the people,” the priest said, adding a sharp condemnation of the church’s conservative bloc, which, he said, has actually joined forces with the military “to isolate the leftist clergy.”

One highly educated seminarian, who gave up his bid for the priesthood and joined the rebels five years ago, added in an interview in January that Catholicism and the rebels’ self-styled Marxist ideology are not mutually exclusive.

“We only use Marxism as a tool for analyzing society,” said the former seminarian, who uses the nom de guerre Comrade Philip and is a regional commander on the island of Samar

“The issue here is not religion. Even though some of our comrades practice atheism, it is not being imposed on the institutions of society. Our cause is primarily one of social justice--land reform and redistribution of the wealth. And it is over these issues that the friction has so intensified within the Catholic Church.”

Perhaps the most articulate and controversial critic of the Philippine Catholic Church today is Father Edicio de la Torre, who spent 10 of the last 13 years in jail on charges of rebellion, allegedly for working with the rebels to bring down the Marcos regime.

Aquino ordered De la Torre’s release from prison along with several hundred other leftists two days after she took office a year ago. But the priest remains an outspoken critic of what he asserts is “a return to ruling-class rule,” and he continues to align himself with the radical left in criticizing the new government and the church.

For the church radicals like De la Torre, there was irony in the cardinal’s order banning priests from engaging in partisan politics. De la Torre said, and several members of Aquino’s inner circle of aides confirmed, that the cardinal ranks among Aquino’s top personal advisers. During each of the series of crises that have buffeted her government, Sin has been among the first public figures to come to her aid, they said.

Sin’s Support of Aquino

The cardinal was among those who praised Aquino when her negotiators signed a 60-day cease-fire with the Communist rebels last December, and he just as vocally supported her order to launch limited military offensives against the rebels when the truce expired Feb. 8.

“Cardinal Sin has a logic I cannot follow,” De la Torre said. “He can support Cory Aquino’s sword of war when she unsheathes it on the New Peoples Army, but, in his eyes, you cannot be a rebel who supports an armed struggle for social justice and equality.

“It is as if the cardinal and the traditional church are saying violence is legal only when it is done by the government. You must preach nonviolence equally. . . . “

De la Torre said his criticism of the traditional Philippine Catholic Church and its conservative leadership is primarily over its inability to tolerate new ideas or dissent, combined with its tradition as “an elite institution” of the wealthy landlords and politicians--a legacy that dates to the 350 years of Spanish colonization, which brought the first Catholic missionaries to the Philippines.

“The Catholic Church and its model of society are feudal,” he said. “And in a feudal structure, if there is no unity, there is nothing.”

More specifically, De la Torre and other radical clergymen allege that the church’s feudal bias is clearly illustrated by the cardinal’s support for Aquino, whose family ranks among the wealthiest landowners in the Philippines.

Defending the church, the cardinal and his top aides asserted that the church no longer is playing a key role either in the government or in national politics.

Bacani described the church’s role as one of “constructive, critical collaboration. We have to help the government rebuild this nation in many ways. . . . But we do not want to become a Cory church. We want to maintain a distance which will allow us to play a role of a prophet.”

Railroad Track Analogy

Sin used the analogy of a railroad track to illustrate what he insisted was a separation of church and state in the country:

“The two tracks cannot be too close to one another, nor can they be too distant from one another, or else there will be a derailment.”

The cardinal has conceded that he did play a key role in the past year of national change. He was instrumental in persuading Aquino, a novice politician, to challenge Marcos in the February, 1986, presidential election that ultimately triggered the successful coup. And it was Sin’s personal appeal over the radio to the nation’s Catholics to turn out into the streets of Manila, protecting the military rebels who staged the coup from troops loyal to Marcos.

Sin insisted, however, that he was forced to assume that role because “I was the only one who could talk. It seemed that anyone who would talk would be put in the stockade.

“But I think I should be in the background now, and I will do my best to avoid the limelight.”

Critics such as De la Torre, though, insist that the church will only survive as an institution if it opens itself to change and dissent.

Ultimately, De la Torre said he hopes the church will evolve into “a pluralistic institution,” a conversion that he said will take many years “first filled with confusion among the Catholic masses and eventually liberation, in which the people finally begin thinking for themselves, rather than relying solely on church doctrine for their models and morality.”