Photo: Priests at St. Augustine parish in Pinamalayan, Oriental Mindoro pray over Vice President Leni Robredo during her visit on March 3, 2021
A sizeable proportion of immigrants in this country are Filipinos. If you meet one, he she is quite likely to be a nurse or caregiver. There are elections on May 9 in the Philippines, a predominantly Catholic nation and a former Spanish colony, in South-East Asia of over a hundred million people. The complexities of politics in the Philippines are too much for this article. However, it is fair to say that news reports on the two main candidates for Presidency (a real Presidency different from the Irish role) provide plenty of colour and excitement, not to speak of friction and tension, fed in no small part by decades-old historical rivalries.
Leni Robredo is the kind of candidate (of the Liberal Party) that we rarely see in the West. Ferdinand Junior (known as Bong Bong) Marcos is her principal antagonist and the candidate of the Federal Party. While the incumbent President Rodrigo Duterte proclaims himself as non-partisan in this election, the running mate of Marcos is the daughter of Duterte. Irish people will recall the late, great Fr Niall O’Brien, an Irish Columban priest who was jailed by the Government of then President Ferdinand (Senior) Marcos. Fr Niall was seen many times on RTE news thanks to the interviews relayed from a rather strange jail setting by Charlie Bird. You may also remember the notoriety of the President’s wife, Imelda Marcos, who possessed three thousand pairs of shoes. Imelda’s peculiar form of indulgence gave rise to a new adjective, ‘imeldific,’ meaning ostentatiously extravagant, sometimes to the point of vulgarity.
Now all of this might well seem to be of interest merely to political anoraks or those with connections to the Filipinos who have enhanced our Irish health system for decades as nurses and caregivers. However, a phenomenon worth remarking on, one that far more common in the Philippines than the secular West, is the discussion around the extent to which the Church can get involved in politics. ‘Pampanga Archbishop Emeritus Paciano B. Aniceto, Pampanga priests, the formators, and seminarians of the Mother of Good Counsel Seminary of the Archdiocese of San Fernando, have thrown their support to the presidential bid of Vice President Leni Robredo.’(iOrbitNews Online, February 3, 2022).
The Philippines hierarchical Church officially has tried to refrain from individual endorsement of candidates or parties while noticeably directing the attention of their flock to the policies of certain candidates and parties. Take Bishop Roberto Gaa of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Novaliches: ‘“I am treading a very thin line,” he said, without directly mentioning Robredo, Pangilinan or anyone from their senatorial slate. “I have said before that what’s important here is having discernment. We should be the lead in the process of discerning who to choose among the candidates.”’
Individuals have often been more forthright: ‘Almost 600 Filipino priests, nuns, religious brothers, and deacons expressed their support for presidential candidate Vice President Leni Robredo and vice-presidential contender Senator Francis Pangilinan, saying they “best fit the job” to be the country’s next leaders.”’
‘Over 100 members of the religious order Society of Jesus have endorsed the tandem of Vice President Leni Robredo and Sen. Francis Pangilinan in the upcoming elections.“We believe that VP Leni and Senator Kiko display the least self-interest and are the most capable and morally credible to promote truth and social justice, protect our democratic principles and freedoms and pursue our vision for our nation,” the Jesuits said in a statement.’
On the other side, Marcos Junior has shown a ‘sour grapes’ attitude to endorsement from Church people. ‘After enjoying the endorsements of religious groups El Shaddai and Kingdom of Jesus Christ, the camp of presidential aspirant Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. on Friday, March 4 hit the Catholic clergy for allegedly “meddling” with Philippine politics.’
Now replace some of those names, clerical, religious or political with Irish ones and ask whether such a scenario is imaginable in Ireland. Step outside the Philippines context and we can see further examples of this paradigm, both historical and contemporary. Archbishop Oscar Romero, one of the the least ‘political’ Church figures you could find at the start of his episcopacy, became so ‘political’ that he ended up being shot dead in 1980 while saying Mass because his speaking out on behalf of the poor was deemed a political threat to some. The Liberation Theology movement of the 1960-70s in South America period illustrates the blurring of lines between political struggle and the preaching of the Gospel, a controversial movement that posed challenges for Church people.
Moving to recent times, Pope Francis himself had to walk a tightrope in 2017 when he visited Myanmar (Burma). One of the most talked about injustices of the military-controlled Government was the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya population. Francis had the wait until he had crossed into Bangladesh on the next stage of his trip before he could freely say the word Rohingya, watched as he was by the military leadership that effectively controlled the Myanmar parliament while in Myanmar. But say it he did and has since repeatedly called for justice for the people of Myanmar, a mainly Buddhist country. Last year, after the military coup in Myanmar, we became familiar with a now famous internet image of a brave religious, Sister Ann Roza Nu Tawng, kneeling in supplication in front of the pointed guns of the authorities in Myanmar. She dared to beg for the lives of her fellow citizens, over 1,500 of whom have been killed in protests alone since the February 2021 military coup. The adulation shown towards Aung san Suu Kyi (now imprisoned on trumped up charges) is every bit as evident among Myanmar Catholic religious I have spoken to as it is among the general population.
Now back to Ireland. Is the Catholic Church not political enough, too political, or political at all? Choose your topic and, almost invariably, the answer to that question that I have seen on online platforms seems to be: not or hardly at all. One can understand how an up-front approach could quite possibly backfire on an institutional Church (still wounded by the sexual abuse scandals of decades) on the great moral issues, although we can see in the 2018 referendum a result that could hardly have been more catastrophic for people of faith. What if Church leaders, particularly bishops or superiors of religious orders had spoken out more forcefully or more in unison on the inevitable consequences of the removal of the right to life of the preborn from the Irish Constitution? Could things have been any worse than they are now for the thousands of babies who have since had their lives ended by abortion here?
One of the most startling developments of the pandemic in Ireland was the seeming suppression of public worship because of Covid measures or guidelines. Much as the Government tried to deny the accusation, it was increasingly difficult not to apply that word, suppression, to the reality of life for active faith-practitioners. Would-be Mass-goers could be questioned, stopped or possibly arrested on their way to church, a Catholic priest was fined €500 for saying Mass and a last-minute cloak-and-dagger legislative manoeuvre by Stephen Donnelly seemed designed to defeat the court action taken by a lay Catholic businessman, Declan Ganley. Where were many of the bishops in all of this? Many accused them, deservedly or not, of passivity or fear. Face was somewhat saved when the new Archbishop of Dublin went against a Government guideline that seemingly arose out of an off-the cuff remark by Tánaiste Leo Varadkar at a press conference. The guideline ruled out Confirmation and Holy Communion ceremonies in summer 2021 due to the pandemic. Some might say the official Church had found a backbone at the tail end of the pandemic.
All this might legitimately raise the question: have we witnessed the gradual, but now almost complete, dissolution of the orthodoxy of thought, attitude and behaviour that was for so long integral to Irish society thanks to a Church that was close to politicians from De Valera onwards? We know from mainstream and social media that this is being cheered on very publicly by a culture in Ireland that seeks to imitate the most woke, secular and socially liberal societies anywhere on the globe.
There is a certain irony to be found when we look at the one Irish party in the Dáil that uniquely represents what is most universally admired in the Christian world view (particularly human rights that are increasingly being undermined by secularism such as religious freedom and the right to life from conception to natural death). I speak of Aontú.
Its leader, Peadar Tóibín, said when he founded the party in 2019: ‘We seek the unity of Irish people north and south and to build an Ireland for everyone – Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter in the tradition of the United Irishmen of 1798.’
Put it another way: the most open and tolerant political party right now (with both local and national representation and real potential) is the one that is speaking up for a section of Irish society who seek to resist the new purely secular socio-political orthodoxy that ignores or suppresses what is best and finest in the old (Judeo-Christian) orthodoxy.
Orthodoxy is an accepted view, belief or practice of a society. Thus, orthodoxy, a word often used in matters of faith or religious practice, seems an odd word to apply to a system of thought and communication that actually governs and permeates Irish society in 2022 to a remarkably pervasive degree. The new orthodoxy has in fact nothing to do with religious faith or practice at all. It is firmly rooted in an ideology that often openly sets itself against religious belief and morality. The old orthodoxy was evident at a time when Church-State relations were harmonious and a prevailing system of thought and values encompassed all that was best in the heritage of religious believers. (That is not to deny the very real flaws and wrongdoings within that orthodoxy).
It has been replaced by a very new orthodoxy. It is one that, for example, associates compassion for women with facilitating the ending of the life of her preborn child. It demonizes anyone or any section of society that seeks to empower women by helping them to embrace every aspect of their femininity including motherhood. Help for an abortion-minded woman is deemed (by those who enforce the new purely secular orthodoxy) to be no help at all if it leaves out the offer to end the life of her baby.
What has this got to do with the Philippines elections? I think we can learn a lesson from that society that the holders of power – politicians, those who control our mass and social media, educationalists and others – have to be held to account by people of faith, including bishops, priests, religious and lay people, if we want to have a say in the prevailing orthodoxy that prevails in society. For orthodoxy there will be, whether we like the word or not. There are politicians and there is a party (Aontú) that resists the new, narrow orthodoxy of contemporary Ireland, an orthodoxy that dismisses or suppresses a world view held by political figures of dignity and stature (such as Leni Robredo) in places such as the Philippines. It is time in Ireland, just like in the Philippines, to call out what is less than human, less than respectful of human dignity if we still want to call ourselves a people of faith.
Neil Carmody