Woodstock Report | The Philippine Church and Human Rights

Bishop Francisco F. Claver, S.J., was an International Visiting Fellow at Woodstock from 2004 to 2005. He returned in 2006 to finish the book he describes below. For more information on the International Visiting Fellows program, see the article, "Enriching Exchanges."

By Bishop Francisco Claver, S.J.

Two years ago while working on a book I was writing as a visiting fellow here at the Woodstock Theological Center, Fr. Lo Biondo and Dr. Porterfield, Vice President for Public Affairs at Georgetown University, thought it would be a good idea for me to handle a student seminar on human rights at the university.

I agreed – and before I was done with it I got the bright idea for another book. I started work on it upon my return to the Philippines, progressing at turtle-pace in bits and pieces. A retired bishop is supposed to have all the time to do as he likes. I didn’t find it so, back in Manila. So I asked Fr. Lo Biondo if I could come back to Woodstock and finish writing the book where the idea for it was first born. He kindly agreed, and so I came back to D.C. in November 2006 and the work got done, alleluia!

The seminar I taught at Georgetown had started with the showing of a film, “Collision Course.” It is a documentary, made by the British Broadcasting Corporation thirty years ago, and it looked at the human rights violations under President Marcos and the opposition of Church people to those violations, hence the title of the film. It brought back dark memories of the fourteen dreadful years of military rule in the Philippines.

I saw how, as the years of oppression went on, we had undergone some deep changes in thinking and approaches with regard to Church involvement in politics.

Those memories made me go back to material I already had in my possession – articles and talks I had authored, bishops’ statements, official and unofficial, writings that for the most part had not been widely circulated in the Philippines because of the tight control the government had over the media and its allergic reaction to any writings critical of President Marcos’ dictatorship. “Subversive,” such writings were considered by the military, so they ended up as fodder for the underground press. Reading them over, I saw how, as the years of oppression went on, we had undergone some deep changes in thinking and approaches with regard to Church involvement in politics.

I used some of those writings for seminar discussions with my students. They make up the bulk of the book, one article usually per chapter. At the end of each I appended comments and further reflections – a good part of them the fruit of our seminar discussions.

The sum of it all was the development of a distinct spirituality of social involvement.

Except for two summarizing articles written midway through martial law in 1980, one placed in the beginning, the other at the end, the rest of the writings are arranged in the chronological order in which they were written from 1972 to 1986. And they show well, I believe, the progression and development of our thinking as well as our changing focus of concern as Marcos’ military government’s violations of human rights got progressively worse.

A divided hierarchy in the beginning, working through its disunities all through those fourteen years of misrule, and finally quite united at the end; an equally divided clergy and religious, the more activist among them flirting with the Marxist ideology of violent revolution as the blueprint for getting out of our bad political situation, but most of them slowly coming to the acceptance and use, like the bishops, of active non-violence; clerics doing all the speaking out, at first, in defense of rights violated, but lay people, in “basic communities” especially, taking up in later years the challenge and becoming more and more vocal; the general citizenry, helpless in their fear in the beginning but slowly regaining courage and growing in their resistance to the deprivation of their right to participate in decisions being taken unilaterally by the government for their “benefit,” thus developing what in the end became the “people power” that toppled Marcos in the peaceful revolution of 1986 – these are some of the changes that the book records even as they were happening. The sum of it all was the development of a distinct spirituality of social involvement.

The Church has a definite role in the redeeming
and renewing of the political culture.

The last chapter is made up of excerpts from the Acts and Decrees of the Second Plenary Council of the Philippines, which took place in 1991. They re-echo what the preceding articles say about the directions we as a Church had evolved in our struggling with the bad politics of Mr. Marcos. In the stress the Council put on the “announcing of the message of liberation” – the choice of words alone is most significant – as an integral part of our way of Church renewal, it put its official imprimatur on those directions in no uncertain terms.

I feel strongly that the lessons learned then will have to be rerelearned again and again, especially now in the parlous times we still live under in the Philippines. The freedoms we lost and fought to regain under President Marcos’ martial law government are once more – and maybe always were – in jeopardy in the unredeemed and unrenewed political culture we still are depressingly saddled with despite the 1986 peaceful revolution. The Church has a definite role in the redeeming and renewing of that political culture. That role has to be continually brought to mind – and played to the full in evangelical fidelity – for the hope it brings to a seemingly hopeless situation. It is for that reason I write as I have written.