SOME six months after some bishops, priests and nuns tried to mobilize public support against the winning presidential candidate Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. (BBM) in favor of his closest rival Leni Robredo, a Jesuit theologian has declared that clerical intervention in that election was doctrinally wrong and damaging to the pastoral mission of the Catholic Church.
This is the main thesis of a lecture given by Fr. Eric Marcelo O. Genilo, SJ of the Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University at the DaKaTeo Online Theological Interdisciplinary Conference last November. It is provocative enough to ignite a lively debate, but so far reactions to it in theological or ecclesiastical circles have been rather subdued. It has not even received sufficient notice in the secular press.
Titled, “Illusions of Influence: Clerical Partisan Engagement during the 2022 Elections,” Genilo’s paper is due for publication in the Loyola Papers next year. But a good friend has sent me a copy with a genial request to comment on it, if I pleased.
Quoting Church teaching from a wide range of sources, Genilo points out that although the Church is “duty-bound to offer, through the purification of reason, and through ethical formation, her own specific contribution toward understanding the requirements of justice and achieving them politically,” partisan intervention by the clergy in any election is always advised against.
It reduces the Church into a political party, creates unnecessary divisions that harm community life, tarnishes the Church’s spiritual mission with the stain of the mundane, allows the use of religion for political gain, and “makes lonesome widows of churchmen after the election for marrying partisan politics during the campaign.”
Genilo uses the colorful words of Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas in the 2013 midterm elections to chide the same archbishop for defending clerical support for presidential candidate Robredo in the last elections.
In his paper, Genilo finds it easier to justify clerics denouncing candidates rather than endorsing them. When a presidential candidate is clearly bent to destroy the Church and its mission of salvation and has all the resources to win while hiding his malevolent intentions behind political promises, he says (quoting the CBCP Catechism on Church and Politics) the Church “may authoritatively demand the faithful, even under pain of sin, to vote against this candidate.”
However, it is difficult for the clergy to justify their endorsement of a particular candidate if other qualified candidates are also running for the same office, he says. A priest’s or bishop’s endorsement of a candidate explicitly communicates to the public that this candidate has the qualities and political programs that the other candidates lack, he says. If enough clergy unite their endorsements for a candidate, it can give the impression that the Church is calling for a Catholic vote in favor of a candidate, he points out.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) disclaims any effort to promote a Catholic vote in any election. But Genilo says “the imaginary of the Philippines as a Catholic nation emboldens the CBCP to make political interventions when it perceives that proposed national laws will violate Church teachings.” The bishops “presume that legislation should always conform to Catholic teaching,” he says, but “many non-Catholics and dissenting Catholics do not share this presumption, as evidenced by the general public’s support for passing the 2012 Reproductive Health (RH) Law despite the Church’s opposition to the law.”
I do not believe it is entirely correct to say the bishops “presume that legislation should always conform to Church teaching.” At most the bishops probably expect it, especially if the legislators are all Catholic or at least predominantly so. But for obvious reasons they cannot expect “non-Catholics” and “dissenting Catholics” to be bound by any Church teaching. With respect to the RH law, it was addressed to Catholics and non-Catholics alike and therefore had to be treated as a constitutional issue rather than as a religious one.
As a Catholic I believe with the Church that contraception is “intrinsically evil,” but as a sitting senator at the time I voted against the law because I did not believe the State had any right or duty to tell its citizens how to procreate. I also believed President B.S. Aquino 3rd committed a crime when, after US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered him a grant of $454 million from the US Millennium Fund, he used the notorious congressional “pork barrel” to railroad the RH law that violated the Constitution and Church teaching on human life.
For me, the controlling issue was the Constitution. The Constitution makes it super-abundantly clear when it says, among other things, that the State “recognizes the sanctity of family life and shall protect and strength the family as the basic autonomous social institution. It shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception.” This was the overriding issue, and it was the only issue I raised against the questionable law in my petition before the Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, the court ruling completely ignored my fundamental objection, even after I restated it in my motion for reconsideration. Justice Jose Catral Mendoza, who penned the ruling, even assured the nation that the law was nothing but a “population control measure,” as though population control were a constitutional blessing.
Fr. Genilo performs a signal service to the Church in pointing out the unfortunate error committed by some bishops and priests in the last elections. What a shining example it would be if the erring clerics would make amends for their error.
A blessed Christmas to all!
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