Free even in enslavement
Claver, Francisco F.
mediating and formalizing his relationship to the Big Parent. Thus a first stage of prayer, as centering, consists in the psychoanalysis of God. Although this process is especially concerned with...
...When we feel adored by God, just as we are, we come into a new relation to ourselves that aff'u'rns our power and lovability...
...The pattern was there early on...
...We never were able to come up with an organization that would take the place of unions and associations emasculated by martial law, but ironically in the very process of searching, we began to develop much faster something we had been aiming for since the early seventies -- a more participative church...
...The Communist hard core in 1973, on the government's own admission, numbered only 2,000...
...T HE FUTURE is grim...
...But let us have a look anyway...
...I do not intend to indulge in wild, hence useless, speculations, but then our reality in the Philippines is so constricted that our options likewise are constricted...
...And Marcos was acutely aware, from the very beginning too, of the potential of the church as a help or a hindrance to his dictatorial rule...
...The anger was there too, righteous but impotent...
...Banana republic" will by no means be a mere figure of speech in the case of the Philippines should constitutional democracy never be restored...
...It is not exactly as amorphous as they said...
...In the concrete, this meant that all mass media were controlled, the writ of habeas corpus was inoperative, anyone suspected of "subversion" could be thrown into jail, homes could be searched without warrant, one's person was no longer inviolate...
...For our own good, he said...
...It will be such too under a Communist state - - if we are ever forced into one...
...For when the faith is lived in all its social implications, it cannot but be subversive of any unjust political order, and its confessors, likewise, cannot but be vulnerable to the punishing hand of threatened power holders...
...D ESCRIBING OUR PRESENT situation as slavery may strike you as overdramatic...
...The one real reason for martial law was Marcos's overweening ambition for power...
...Our history since then has been even more colorful because for once we could bungle it ourselves...
...Someone with more than an acute sense of history has succinctly summarized our post-"discovery" history thus: we lived for four hundred years in a Spanish convent, forty years in Hollywood, four years in a Japanese prison...
...And this brings us to today...
...And let me try not letting the anger to which I just admitted intrude...
...The Philippines, an archipelago of some 7,400 islands, was settled thousands of years ago by seafaring folk either directly from mainland Asia or indirectly through island-Indonesia...
...and (3) the curtailment of "the emergency" to a few months, not years...
...To call government acts against the church through all the years of martial law "persecution" is not at all far-fetched then...
...And the reason he alleged: the imminent danger of subversion of the state by Communist forces...
...When we cease to serve a narcissistic God, who demands that we be for him, our own healthy narcissism gains support...
...Raids of religious houses, arrests of church personnel, closures of mass media operations run by the church, deportation of foreign missionaries, harassment and surveillance of church workers -- these were constantly happening...
...It is strange, but you never advert to how essential such freedoms as those of movement, assembly, association, speech, etc...
...For the principle of participation - - which we believe is at the heart and core of a genuine Vatican II church - - leads to such a creation...
...This is what Aquino had hoped to accomplish had he lived...
...That economy is based on a policy that favors multinationals and their interests over those of the ordinary citizenry...
...The stranglehold of multinationals...
...The fact highlights the possibility of a plurality of faith-options that can be made in any given human situation...
...Thirdly, the Communists could push through with their much touted revolution...
...Advocacy thus became the church's role in the CMLC as long as complaints had to do with areas within the competence of the military...
...T HE ACTION of the church with the people I speak of centers on the effort to build BCCs or Basic Christian Communities...
...The acceptance of this possibility is of paramount significance in the working of a participatory church that we say the BCC is...
...One was a young man, a college-educated community organizer...
...These zeroed in on what would subsequently prove to be the sorest issues under martial law, namely, the violation of human rights, the lack of due process under militarization, and the undue prolongation of Marcos's incumbency...
...are to ordinary human interaction until you are told you cannot travel, meet with others, join unions, speak your mind out, among other things, without the express say-so of someone...
...Second, communal discernment is thus of crucial importance and the BCC is the medium which makes it possible for Christians to gather together and engage in it, in the very process refining and deepening a critical faith-sense...
...The Conference of Bishops as a body was initially silent on the new political order and the wrongs it spawned, its member bishops sharply divided on the issues and on the manner of approach to them...
...We were back, at the stroke of a pen, to our centuries-long status of wards - - little children once again...
...But in time pronouncements were made in pastoral letters as the true nature of martial law became more evident, as more crimes were committed by the military...
...But still it was possible to get justice even from them if a defendant were persistent enough...
...The trouble was that, in those early days (and years) of martial rule, as in the tale of the emperor's new clothes, nobody dared to speak the naked truth...
...A good portion of the disagreements was about complaints of the general populace with the conduct of martial law...
...And it is that strength that gives us hope for the future...
...A willing or unwilling one...
...Most observers of the current scene believe this is the most likely possibility...
...It is not that I begrudge Ninoy the outpouring of grief and indignation his death unleashed...
...With the advent of martial law, however, many of these programs, those aimed at organizing farm labor especially, came to an abrupt stop...
...Fourth, both discernment and action are done from the point of view of faith, not of political ideology alone, hence the stress on "the perspectives of faith...
...but when we were finally free of all foreign landlords and tried in chaotic freedom to become masters of our own house, we fell back into thralldom because one man wanted it so...
...No one was deceived by all the talk about the Communist rebellion or the New Society...
...Those parts of the church that were silent on the oppression of government were left in peace, not those that spoke up against its excesses or encouraged the people to act to regain lost freedoms...
...There was none - - or at least none loud enough, noticeable enough to make a difference - - at the flood of blood that had been flowing in the Philippines prior to that one murder...
...Now our talents, our selves, are gifts to him...
...Both were held incommunicado for more than a week and were finally released - - but only after various church groups made waves, pressuring strongly the local military commandant into investigating their disappearance...
...For too long the Christian faith of our people has been glibly characterized as "nominal" for the sole reason that regular church-going is not a general practice among the majority of them...
...Knowing no other way, we took these attentions for love, and when we come to recognize them for what they are, we are left pained, rageful, and then alone...
...He spoke with the older man and tried to persuade him to do as he had himself resolved to do, simply to put an end to their unbearable ordeal...
...Hence the wariness of the regime with anybody who works with and for them in any substantive way...
...A case can be made for either point of view depending on what one will make of the more than three hundred instances of sporadic revolt of conquered tribes under Spanish colonial rule...
...One can quarrel with the reading of it...
...By evening of the next day, after a whole day of total ignorance (an effective gimmick, by the way, for a would-be dictator who would control, by terror, an entire nation), we learned from President Marcos himself that he had signed a decree, effective as of the night before, putting the whole country under martial law...
...And bungle it, we did...
...But there is grave doubt they can do so at this time...
...He was, in effect, telling us that we could not as a people reach the high goals of necessary progress and development unless he, Marcos, had all the power in his hands to lead and direct us at every step of the way...
...The church that evolves from the process is truly a church of the people...
...The picture I have presented of the Philippines, its present and its future, though bleak and joyless, is thus not entirely without redeeming hope nor promise...
...To keep up the caricature, I guess we could add: the first twenty-four years of our freedom we spent trying to build our own house from the remains of past structures only to have it turned forcibly, twelve years ago, into a"safe-house" - - a place of detention, that is, and torture...
...But the pain is there nonetheless at the unnoticed, unmourned killings-in-the-mass of countless other Filipinos who died - - and are still dying - - for the same reasons that Aquino was shot...
...The church in his mind was primarily the leaders of the institutional church, the bishops...
...So he has coddled the military, making them over into the new oligarchy - - the new and few rich of today...
...A year later, still dazed and battered by the ravages of war, we were granted independence...
...There are any number of points that could be made by way of comment on this little story...
...Mr.Marcos's term as president was to terminate with the end of the year 1973, and he could not be re-elected according to our Constitution...
...The history of this effort is easily told...
...The pattern was clear from the very start...
...On the contrary, it will be a change for the worse...
...It is most indicative of Marcos's outlook on the church that not once did he put a bishop under arrest although there were a few prime candidates for his stockades -- the most he did was to occasionally deny them permits to travel abroad...
...It could mean anything from thinking unkind thoughts about the First Lady's extravagant tastes or butchering a pig without a government permit to attempting to replace Marcos as Head of Stat...
...Although this process is especially concerned with the transference to God of the childhood relationship with the parents, it becomes inseparable from the analysis of the character and other defenses that develop in the context of that primal relationship...
...Last year the bishops could still refer to the regime's use of the term as one of a "conveniently amorphous definition...
...Their interrogators wanted them to admit to being Communists and to implicate other church people in their "crime" - - whatever it was...
...Such a one is assumed guilty in the first place, and proving his innocence is sheer futility since the accuser and the judge are for all practical purposes the same moral person - - the government...
...It is not this anger that I am concerned with here - - at least not explicitly...
...And this new form of church was epitomized by the BCCs...
...Let me discuss, then, those on whom these options weigh heaviest: the church and the people...
...That distinction belongs to others, notably, the NPA, the New People's Army of the Communist resistance, and the MNLF, the Mort National Liberation Front of the Muslim secessionist movement - - two armed powers...
...Two of our church workers, while going about their duties, were taken in by the military and spirited away to some unknown camp of detention...
...THE PHILIPPINES--YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW Free even enslavement FRANCISCO F. CLAVER T HERE WAS HORROR - - worldwide, universal - - at the blood spilled on the tarmac of the Manila International Airport in August when Ninoy Aquino was felled by an assassin's bullet...
...From that definition, a few salient points should be made: First, "the problems of daily living" the community prays and reflects over can be of any kind - - political, economic, social, spiritual - - problems that in one way or another have to do with the life of faith of the community...
...Let me end with this little vignette drawn from actual life in backwoods Bukidnon, and let it serve to sum up, in some way, all I have said...
...And the task as we define it, we see only too clearly, is a pressing imperative under military rule...
...2) the trial of political prisoners by civil courts and not by military tribunals...
...But this does not mean the church was never a force to contend with...
...What happens when they do so not simply as individuals but as community...
...But the hard fact is, we were wards, to put it mildly, first of Spain, then of America, and very briefly and lastly of Japan...
...In 1898, we were handed over, for a measly twenty million dollars, to American tutelage after "the Battle of Manila Bay" (it was no battle) when President McKinley decided - - after prayer on his knees, we are told - - that it was the manifest destiny of America to take the islands in hand and guide us into enlightened ways...
...For in the faith, with the faith, they can overcome, and overcoming keep intact their integrity as a people: free even in enslavement...
...If corruption was rife in public life before martial law, it is much more so now under armed venality...
...We started to cast about for other ways of uniting our people, the poor rural folk in particular, for action on their own behalf against the many social ills that had plagued their lives long before martial law and gotten worse with it...
...It took some time for the realization to sink in that we had the answer all along in that kind of church...
...I am afraid, as events unfold, all other choices are going to come down to just these two...
...Needless to say, they were not Communists...
...It is impossible to get justice from the courts of law for anyone accused of the crime of "subversion...
...The destruction of democratic processes...
...Hard scholarship needs hard cash, and we do not have that kind of money to dig out our past...
...Actions of the government directly against the church were among many of the unresolved and unresolvable problems the CMLC tried to meet...
...He could step down from office, of course, but the event is most unlikely in the light of his unshakable belief in his messianic "mission...
...Philippine democracy, whatever its flaws, was a working proposition until Marcos came along with his New Society...
...Both men, it turned out, had been tortured while in prison...
...The net result was fear, pervasive fear...
...The very first critical protest against the imposition of martial law came from a group of seventeen bishops supported by seventeen religious superiors...
...I will call it "The Story of the Young Man and the Old Man...
...Again, such an eventuality will be no change at all...
...In a letter they wrote to the president a week after the declaration of martial law, they expressed their misgivings in three requests they made of him: (1) the restoration of the freedom of the media...
...Considering the political picture as a whole, one would have to conclude it is the most difficult option to bring about - - yet not impossible...
...Marcos needs the military to rule by the gun...
...To be reborn out of this silence can be experienced as sudden revelation or, less dramatically, as a slow, episodic unfolding of new value...
...Not under conditions of violence and poverty, of struggle and unrest...
...Then, having made room for God to enter, we become open to a new reality...
...So pardon me if I express myself with not a little anger...
...He used it as his legal device to extend his term - - and in the extension, to rewrite that same Constitution in a gross attempt to shore up his legally tenuous hold on the nation's leadership...
...Courts of justice in pre-martial law days were admittedly quite corrupt...
...But that same Constitution provided for an emergency measure like martial law...
...The loss of the old God - - however nagging or infantilizing he may have been - - can be experienced as a desertion...
...The other, an older man, a farmer with at most an elementary school education who was engaged in parish family-life apostolate in his village...
...No, his death was horrendous beyond belief and deserved all the condemnation it received...
...The second point is probably even more basic...
...Inevitably...
...But most likely he will die peacefully in office since even now he is a rather sick man...
...More and more our people are seeing it as the only possibility...
...9 March 1984:141 We remained a crown colony of Spain up to the end of the last century...
...I will discuss the Philippines, what it is today, what it will be tomorrow...
...The impossibility of justice...
...It is with these armoring and distorting defenses thatwe approach God, ourselves, and others - - impenetrable to the actuality of our experience...
...No amount of demands put forth for clarification through the past twelve years could elicit from the government a clear, satisfactory definition...
...This article is based on a speech given at Georgetown University...
...This amendment does not go into effect, however, until 1987...
...The barrios constitute the most depressed areas of an already depressed country, the most neglected too as far as the church's ministrations were concerned...
...The younger man came close to the breaking point and one night he decided he could not take any more: he would "confess" the next day and say whatever his torturers wanted him to say about himself...
...If Marcos in his great wisdom has, by decree, appointed another strong man - - or strong woman - - to assume power after him, we are back to square one.* Secondly, the military, with or without such a decree, could - - unbidden - - stage a coup...
...Anybody can see that as long as Marcos hangs on to the power he has stolen and does not allow it to be legitimized democratically, the repressions will persist and the evils that flow from it will intensify...
...The Pacific War intervened and the Japanese lorded it over us from 1941 to 1945...
...No amount of arguing could -convince the military that these were not subversive activities...
...In 1521, Magellan stumbled on us and we were declared "discovered...
...Something happens to the values of people when the possession of a gun becomes the ticket to influence and money...
...We cease to be merely infantile adults - - unconsciously repeating patterns of living developed in infancy - - we become childlike indeed...
...From all this we have learned that the essential task of the church therefore - - however we define the church - - is to foster the faith of people, to work to strengthen it, to help it to grow and to permeate all areas and aspects of life, transforming individuals and societies...
...Minimal Commonweal: 142 when compared to the fifty million of the total population...
...We have come to recognize what God is not, but we have no new concept to put in its place...
...For us clergy and religious of Bukidnon, the anger crystalized later into public protest at the ~.ANCISCO F. Ct~V~, S.J., recently resigned as bishop of Malaybalay, Bukidnon, Philippines...
...The action of the church with the people can bear a closer look...
...The option for violence has been so far the more attractive of the two and exerts a strong magnetic pull even within the church...
...I will dwell on today and tomorrow...
...We became a Commonwealth in 1935 and in 1945 we were to become independent...
...For the purpose of discussion, I would define it in these terms: It is the community of Christians who meet together at set times for worship (on Sundays usually) under the guidance of a trained lay leader and who consciously Commonweal: 144 and deliberately try to respond to the problems of daily living precisely as a community of faith and from the perspectives of faith...
...What is the BCC...
...It did not take long for the church group to realize the window-dressing nature of the CMLC...
...It sounds like a harmless "statement of objectives" coming from some pious association...
...T HE BROADER and more pernicious effects of Marcos's usurping of power can be summarized under five headings: Militarization...
...He could also end up a victim of the ugly violenco that has propped up his regime...
...That kind of persistence these days is liable to lead to final "out-of-court" verdicts like the AqiJino murder...
...For in the final analysis, it is the people who are subverted or who subvert...
...So he had to trot out this other equally as incredible pretext: we Filipinos had to be re-formed into a New Society...
...It probably does - - under conditions of ordered peace and genera] contentedness...
...The Committee was originally made up of Defense Ministry officials and generals on the military side, of Catholic bishops on the church side, but it was subsequently expanded to include leaders of other religions...
...The niggling yet pivotal difficulty was with the one word "subversion...
...Faith-values have been internalized to a much greater depth by our people than we were wont to credit them with in the past...
...These four alternatives thus seem to be the only hard possibilities: Firstly, there are a number of unpublished decrees - - laws therefore under the present dispensation - - that we suspect deal with the question of succession...
...What happens when ordinary men and women, the rankand-file of church membership, begin to take their faith seriously and apply it to the problems that make up their life under a repressive government...
...But before that discovery is made, the emptiness can be devastating...
...And fourthly, there is always the possibility of returning to constitutional government through peaceful means...
...I make only two...
...Needless to say, Marcos was not at all pleased with the letter...
...Now it is estimated to be anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000...
...Now we are discovering that the faith is not merely nominal after all...
...For indeed, banana plantations are very much a part of the economy being promoted...
...But another reason was forthwith given for the extraordinary move - - I guess he perceived from the very outset that even in our benumbed condition we could see through the flimsiness of the first pretext: the Communist rebellion, such as it was, was after all limited to only two or three of the sixty-five provinces and to Manila itself...
...killing, in one of our'parishes shortly after that fateful September day, of a man suspected of "subversion" while still detained in jail...
...At the heart of the silence there was Him Who is all stillness, all peace, all poise...
...But in a situation where the insurgents are able to paint - - and often prove - - themselves to be defenders of the poor against an oppressive government, counter-violence can be turned into high virtue - - and a most challenging one too...
...Even more trenchantly, it is the community of believers who work at making faith and life into an integral whole...
...In the late sixties, the church rose to the challenge of a social action congress in 1967 to "go to the barrios," the rural sector of Philippine society...
...So let me say something here about what martial law has meant for us all these years...
...It was, from the very beginning, even when it was as a whole silent and deeply *Since Bishop Claver presented his analysis, the Matcos regime sponsored a referendum on constitutional changes that reinstated the office of vice president as successor to the president...
...The sum total of this policy is that little or no "trickling down" of development profits takes place at all - - it is practically all up and out...
...Literally overnight...
...The immediate effects of martial law (aside from the deep wound inflicted on our collective psyche, that is) was, to summarize a long horror story, the loss or curtailment of practically every civil human right...
...The first is that both men were right in the different decisions they took...
...The fact says very much to us in the Philippine context...
...They can, however, continue as they have been doing, especially in the supposition that the military seize the reins of power: gain greater support among the masses for their concept and practice of armed struggle...
...It was imposed on the country, unbeknown to us, on the night of September 21, 1972...
...But the nonviolent option, I feel, is gaining ground, particularly since Aquino's murder...
...Archeologists and anthropologists are still hard at it proposing theory after exotic theory about the beginnings of the various peoples who were the predecessors of the eighty and more language groups of today...
...We do not need a prophet to tell us what is going to happen...
...With this kind of today, dreaming about tomorrow is apt to be nightmare...
...Our story took place in late March of 1982...
...It was perfectly powerless to do anything about the larger and deeper issues that underlay the most simple of complaints and, worse, it was being used to give the semblance of church-government unity...
...Or under a constitutional democracy - - if we succeed in restoring it...
...His understanding does not coincide with the theological definition of the church -- dictators never bother, I am afraid, about theological niceties -but I will follow his lead anyway and use the term here as he understands it, at least for a starter...
...By the end of the century, we were duly Christianized and conquered (not necessarily in that order - - the reverse is truer) except for the mountain tribes of northern Luzon and the Muslim peoples of Mindanao and Sulu in the south - - enclaves of resistance to the cross and sword of the Spaniards...
...That was our yesterday...
...And after him, what...
...The space cleared for his entry may at first be experienced as a deserted silence...
...They suffer persecution...
...All current and would-be political forces in the country today, including the Communists, see only too well that their various revolutions and struggles for power cannot succeed without the support of these two largely uncatalyzed bodies...
...But then, as Georges Bernanos discovered, "Suddenly I perceived that the silence was a presence...
...At the risk of being overly simplistic - - and prejudicial - - I would reduce the four to only two: violence or nonviolence as the means of regaining our lost freedoms...
...In those dioceses where the challenge was seriously considered, church social action programs, targeted at greater economic development and more political freedom for farming folk, began to have great impact...
...We do not have to distort them to find acceptance...
...Labor is kept cheap, independent unions are proscribed, and terms of repatriation of profits are most generous...
...In any case, the bishops did in fact reflect the same kind of doubts and certainties, divisions and unities that were found in the church at large, so that much of what we say about the bishops applies to the rank-and-file too...
...Subversion," thus, is anything thought, said, or done which would diminish, or is suspected to diminish, Marcos's hold on the power of government...
...In the meantime, President Marcos would be succeeded by an executive committee that would govern until an election, which it would supervise...
...g ONTRARY TO WHAT is sometimes said, the church has not been "the only unified opposition" to the Marcos regime...
...It is an anger that has been with us ever since we woke up to an eerie silence one morning .-- September 22, 1972, to be exact -- and found to our consternation we had become a nation of slaves...
...THE EDITORS 9 March 1984:143 divided on the issue of martial law itself...
...Insurgency...
...All it means is that the spiral of violence keeps going...
...And I state it explicitly because it says much for the kind of unity as well as diversity that a faith community must have...
...The old man quietly demurred: " I can't," he said, "because I can't admit to a brazen lie - - even to a lie that hurts no one...
...9 March 1984:145...
...The longer his interruption of the process of democratic government and the more space given a military elite tO burgeon and get entrenched, the greater is the likelihood of the Philippines becoming another "banana republic," with coups and countercoups the ordinary mode of change in government...
...Its main task was to look into points of disagreement between the government and the church...
...The sticking point between the church and the government has always been the church's social apostolate, its works for justice and human rights, its projects of development and empowerment of the poor...
...Third, the discernment leads to common decisions for action - - and decisions for which the whole community takes responsibilitiy for implementing...
...So he took it - - unasked...
...he would name names, too - - but fictitious ones - - and append his signature to his "confession...
...It is those faith-values that constitute, when all is said and done, the strength of our people...
...The two men drew deeply from their faith to sustain them in their ordeal and to respond to it...
...Twelve years under the Marcos regime have given more than sufficient proof that those bishops had scored a bull's-eye with their three requests...
...The bishops' strongest pastoral letter was issued in February last year when they sternly warned against the government's iniquitous development policies and its harsh treatment of dissenters...
...It is what other political leaders of the moderate center profess to be trying to do now...
...But I would like to preface what I have to say with a little of yesterday, for the past explains something of the present, and both together do the same for the future...
...He called a meeting with some of the signers of the letter, the first of several that led to the formation of the CMLC or Church-Military Liaison Committee...
...As they are ever more deeply analyzed, and we become more open to the truth of our lives as children, we become increasingly vulnerable...
...The opposition boycotted the referendum changing the constitution, and the turnout, due to the boycott or apathy or both, was low...
Vol. 111 • March 1984 • No. 5
