Last week, as the bodies of alleged drug dealers piled up on the streets of the Philippines, the nation’s leading churchman finally broke his silence. Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the Archbishop of Manila and a leading papabile, gave a radio interview in which he criticised the murders, alongside other forms of killing such as abortion.
No one who has followed Filipino politics is surprised that President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs has become so deadly so quickly. Duterte had promised to kill 100,000 criminals during his first six months as president, dropping their bodies in Manila Bay until “the fish will grow fat”. He is well on the way to keeping that promise – and it seems no one can stop him.
On Monday, Reuters reported that 2,400 people have been killed since July 1. Around 900 died during police operations and the remainder are classified as “deaths under investigation” – a euphemism for vigilante killings, according to human rights activists.
The first Church leader to speak out about the rising death toll was Archbishop Socrates Villegas, president of the country’s bishops’ conference. Last month he urged priests to take to the pulpit and denounce the killings. “In our dream to wipe out drug addiction, are we not becoming a killing fields nation?” Archbishop Villegas asked in his message, which was read out in churches. “From a generation of drug addicts, shall we become a generation of street murderers?”
Cardinal Tagle’s intervention was far less direct. In an interview with the Church-run Radio Veritas, he put it like this: “Many are worried of extrajudicial killings and we should be… But I hope we’re also worried about abortion. Why are only few people speaking out against abortion? That’s also murder!”
He then described unfair labour practices as “murder”, because they are “a form of murder against the dignity of labourers”. He continued: “Those wasting food, those putting food in the garbage can before others pick it up and feed it to their families – that is also a form of murder against children with nothing to eat.”
Cardinal Tagle’s intervention is significant for two reasons. First, he is something of a celebrity in the Philippines, home to roughly 80 million Catholics. What he says therefore ought to carry clout. But second, the intervention is significant because it is rather odd. It seems curious to equate state-condoned vigilante violence with throwing leftovers in the bin.
Why is Cardinal Tagle taking this unusual approach? Duterte’s guiding principle is an “eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. He regards himself as a deliverer of divine justice and is willing to pursue criminals by any means, including murder. Cardinal Tagle’s tangential condemnation of “all forms” of murder, in which he also remembered the hungry and the poor, is meant to remind Duterte that the Church has been championing the oppressed for 2,000 years and that the bishops’ condemnation of the killings is not dictated by political opportunism but by basic moral principles.
Fr Shay Cullen, an Irish missionary who founded the Preda Foundation, which helps abused Filipino children, told the Catholic Herald that Cardinal Tagle’s comments were a sign of his innate caution.
“[He] is very conservative and not one to challenge the situation or the government policy of shoot-to-kill directly, he said. “He prefers the conciliatory approach and so uses the abortion issues to try and strike a ‘balanced’ approach.
“The situation calls for a direct challenge with a call for respect, for due process, evidence, a trial of suspects – not just killing them as suspects.”
Duterte, of course, is unlikely to pay much attention to Cardinal Tagle’s softly-softly approach. This, after all, is the man who called Pope Francis a “son of a whore” and joked about raping a dead missionary.
As Archbishop Villegas recently conceded, the Catholic Church has been exiled to the “wilderness” just months into Duterte’s tenure. Even the mainstream media aren’t paying much attention to the Church leaders’ condemnations. “Anxious reminders by the Catholic Church of the commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’ make few headlines in the predominantly Catholic country,” reports Reuters, “with newspapers preferring to carry breathless accounts of the latest slayings.”
Meanwhile, Duterte is staggeringly popular. A July poll gave him a 91 per cent approval rating.
No wonder he is feeling invincible. He recently shrugged off UN criticism of his crackdown and this week he said he would take no lectures from US President Barack Obama about the killings. “I am a president of a sovereign state and we have long ceased to be a colony,” he said. “I do not have any master except the Filipino people.”
If Duterte shrugs off potential criticism from the world’s most powerful man, then he is unlikely to accept it from the youthful and relatively inexperienced Cardinal Tagle.
The Archbishop of Manila must now decide how much he is prepared to risk to end the killing spree. He can either continue to speak out elliptically or seek a confrontation that could, in the end, risk his own life.
His decision will define not merely his clerical career, but also the Filipino Church’s future for years to come.
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