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hould a Roman Catholic Bishop ever concern himself with the impeachment
of a President accused of a host of unconstitutional misdeeds in office? In
other words, is it proper for a man of the cloth to join the political fray and
demand that the highest official of the land be tried in an impeachment court for
violating her oath of office?
A lawyer, Mr. Bagares, 32, is a junior fellow at an evangelical think-tank, the Institute for Studies in
Asian Church and Culture (ISACC). He holds degrees in communication research and law from the
University of the Philippines. An associate at the Roque and Butuyan Law Offices, he is a member of the
legal team supporting the citizen-led impeachment complaint against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
In 2003, the UP College of Law Faculty awarded him with the inaugural Myres S. McDougal Prize for
Excellence in Legal Writing in the field of International Law and Jurisprudence and the Justice Irene
Cortes Prize for Excellence in Legal Writing in the field of Constitutional Law.
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That such a concern is being raised at all in a country that, for many years,
has been under the spell of someone like the late Manila Archbishop Jaime
Cardinal Sin exhibiting a most public involvement in sundry political issues seems
so odd now, not to mention the explicit pronouncement in the present Philippine
constitution that no religious test shall be required for the exercise of political
rights.
But placed in the expanded context of a country with a predominantly
Roman Catholic populace and a three hundred year-history under Spanish
ecclesiastical supremacy, the question is really directed at the proper place of faith
as a source of stability as well as renewal in the public square.
The issues the question draws unto itself come into a sharper focus when
we realize that there too is a growing segment of the Filipino population drawn
into New Religious Movements (NRM) Roman Catholic-based and otherwise
which are also beginning to flex their political muscle in the Philippine political
landscape.
Freedom of Religion as Preferred Right
The religion clauses in the Constitution are not meant to throw the baby
out, along with the bathwater, so to speak. They are not a repudiation of religion;
they are in fact, a recognition of the important role religion plays in the democratic
polity. They are fundamentally only a restriction, indeed, a prohibition, on any
governmental act that tends to promote one religion over the others, or
discriminate against one in favor of the others. It is also a protection against any
state-sponsored move coercing people to act against their religious consciences.
It should be well noted that the 1987 Charter itself carries a preamble that,
for all intents and purposes, acknowledges the primordial role of religion in
society: We, the sovereign Filipino people, imploring the aid of Almighty God...2
[emphasis mine]
In Philippine jurisprudence, the freedom of religion, along with the freedom
of expression, occupies a preferred position;3 that is, it occupies the top rung in
the ladder of rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Hence in a constitutional
adjudication involving the freedom of religion versus another freedom, the former
The present preamble is in stark contrast to the one found in the 1973 charter, which invoked, in a rather
impersonal tone, the aid of Divine Providence. The records of the 1987 Constitution show that the
constitutional commissioners precisely adopted the change in recognition of the importance of spirituality
to Filipinos as well as the idea of God as having a personal, and direct hand, in the shaping of a countrys
history. It should also be noted that not even the American Constitution carries a preamble with such an
express and personal invocation of God in the ordination and promulgation of the fundamental law of the
land.
3
Philippine Blooming Mills Employees Organization v. Philippine Blooming Mills, G.R. No. L-65366,
November 9, 1983; 125 SCRA 553 (1983).
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Also, the 1987 Charter contains a new provision allowing optional religious
instruction during regular class hours upon written request by the parent or
guardian, to be taught by a teacher approved by authorities by the religion of
which the child is a member, provided it is without cost to the government. 18
Under the old Administrative Code, the instruction could not be within regular
class hours. Under Art. 359 of the Civil Code, religious instruction may even be
made part of the curriculum as a graded subject, so long as the parents ask for it.
Except sectarian schools, all schools most be owned by citizens or
corporations 60-percent owned by Filipinos. Furthermore, they cannot be
established exclusively for aliens, and the alien population in the school should not
exceed 1/3 of the total population of the school.19
And so, the question: If a priest may run for public office in the
Philippines under the 1987 Constitution, why may not a Roman Catholic Bishop
file an impeachment complaint against a President accused of a host of
unconstitutional misdeeds in office?
A man of the cloth may not be barred from exercising his political rights on
the ground that he is a member of the clergy; that is the essence of the
constitutional proscription on any religious test imposed on the exercise of
political rights.
Given this constitutional history, any present-day challenge raised against a
cleric running for public office will not stand up in court under the 1987 Charter.
In the same vein, objections on the ground of the Non-Establishment Clause to the
involvement of Roman Catholic Bishop Deogracias Iiguez in the move to
impeach the President is at best, a misinformed campaign, and at worst, a
deplorable exercise in desperate political spin-doctoring.
Towards a postmodern sociology of faith in the public sphere
Of course, in the Philippines, when it comes to politics, anything, in fact,
everything, is fair game. So, what usually happens is selective separation.
Otherwise, politicians, or the Presidents apologists, dismiss counter-cultural faithbased political initiatives as so much blather.
When it is convenient to them (especially during the election period),
politicians court churches for their support. In this way, a peoples faith is
caricatured and denied of an integrity that otherwise should serve as a deep moral
resource for citizens in their conduct of public life. Even the so-called progressive
the AFP, or to any penal institution, or government orphanage or leprosarium.
18
See Art. XIV, Section 3(3) of the 1987 Charter.
19
See Art. XIV, Section 4(2) of the 1987 Charter.
groups could be guilty of this when they dismiss objections by religious groups to
say, artificial contraception, or sex education in the public schools on the ground
of religious or faith-based reasoning as sheer moralism or irrational meanderings
of medieval thinking.
Thus they call such objections a violation of the separation of Church and
State. In this, they harken to secular, modernist aspirations. But when it tallies
with their own political agenda, they will not hesitate to link up with church
groups to advance their favored revolution and here, they suddenly transform into
postmodern accommodationists.
As Yale Law Schools Prof. Stephen L. Carter would put it in his book The
Culture of Disbelief (BasicBooks,1993) a faith pushed into the private sphere is no
faith at all. If faith is an important aspect of self-identity, then under the
Constitution, it must be protected and allowed to flower, because self-identity and
its public aspect, self-expression, as an embodiment of the freedom of religion and
of conscience, are a protected constitutional right. For the legal theorist Michael
Perry, forcing religious arguments to be restated in other, secular-sounding ways,
requires a citizen to bracket the convictions of her faith from the rest of her
personality, as if it were at all possible to split her personality between the secular
and the sacred: To bracket them would be to bracket indeed to annihilate
herself. And doing that would preclude her the particular person she is from
engaging in moral discourse with other members of society.20
But the best example of manipulative political duplicity is Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo herself. She has become quite adept at harnessing the language
of faith, or religion, for her cause, as can be seen in her most recent trip to the
Vatican to present the newly-signed law abolishing capital punishment to Pope
Benedict.
Strict separationists will right away raise flags of alarm over this as a
needless expenditure of public funds she flew with an entourage of 150 or so
hangers-on, remember? For all intents and purposes, she was using public money
to curry favor from the Vatican. If that wasnt enough, the visit to the Vatican was
also meant to lobby for the canonization into Roman Catholic saints of dead
relatives of the First Gentleman! If there ever was a violation of the constitutional
Non-Establishment Clause, this is it.
Her spinmeisters were also quick to claim support from the Pope himself
for her government, which has been under steady assault from many quarters
because of charges of electoral fraud, among other unconstitutional misdeeds. One
need not be a strict separationist to see how Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo musters her
religious capital where it suits her political ends.
Michael J. Perry, MORALITY, POLITICS, AND LAW: A BICENTENNIAL ESSAY, 72-73 (1988), as
cited in STEPHEN L. CARTER, THE CULTURE OF DISBELIEF, 56 (1993).
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took over in the course of many centuries, one where the moral order exists only to
promote the mutual benefit of individuals and defend their rights.
In such a society, the notion that moral order is ultimately grounded in
God may appear to threaten to upset the kind of polite sociability and tolerance
that ideally characterize the modern public sphere, says Taylor, a noted Hegel
scholar who is also best known for his work Sources of the Self: The Making of
Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989). From this perspective,
Christianity becomes not only something that you dont need but it actually
becomes a danger. But is this decidedly modern social imaginary still valid or
tenable? In a multi-cultural world, or if you will, the postmodern era, the modern,
secular idea has become only one explanation of political reality. If it is any
consolation to the secularists, there are competing understandings, mutually
contradictory, but none is capable of a knockout blow against all the others,
argues the philosopher.
That, says Taylor, is the meaning of living in a secular civilization. And he
is dismissive of fears that the revival of the religious imagination, perhaps, at least
in liberal democracies, would result in a kind of unanimity that existed in preRevolutionary France, the great bete noire of the philosophes of the Age of
Enlightenment. (But the fear, let it be said, has remained deeply ingrained in
contemporary French politics, where an anti-clericalism bordering on the irrational
continues to hold government authorities in a tight grip, as can be seen in their
harsh actions against the wearing by Muslim women of the veil in public schools).
Taylor argues:
That will never exist again in human history unless we
catastrophically destroy modern civilization and go back to
the caves. And any attempt to impose such unanimity,
whether of an atheist or a theist kind, will come to a terrible
end as Communism did.
In this new scheme of things, there is a new space for God in the secular
world, where religion occupies a different place, and is compatible with the
sense that all social action takes place in profane time.
He explains thus:
Just as in personal life the dissolution of the enchanted world
can be compensated for by devotion, by a strong sense of the
involvement of God in my life, so in the public world the loss
of sacred time and an unquestioned transcendent order can be
replaced by a strong sense of God in our political identity.
Gods will can still be very present to us in the design of
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democratic polity over their specific ethnic, religious, or familiar contexts and
allegiances.
But where the secular idea of citizenship once reigned, todays societies
now face a situation where citizens do not necessarily privilege their membership
in the democratic polity over their membership in a church, or an ethnic group. Of
course, others may even find it highly arguable whether the Philippines ever
reached that point where a majority of citizens were able to totally shed off their
commitments to faith in exchange for their membership in the political sphere or
what Prof. David calls a modern civic culture.
Liberal democracy, as a political arrangement, is supposedly built upon free
and equal citizens who, in Bridges words, are ruled in their own name: they rule
themselves. Yet in a developmental sense they are not free and equal first; they
are produced through the influence of a particular kind of culture one shaped by
a public education that encourages and produces forms of culture able to sustain
identities consistent with citizenship. Modernity has failed to produce that kind of
culture because it in itself is a rhetoric, or language, of exclusion. Such failure has
tremendous implications on any project of nationhood.
For to build a nation, in a certain sense, is to build first of all, a community;
the project of nationhood or the narrative of nationhood must be one of inclusion
of a greater community where people from various ethnic backgrounds, faiths, and
economic classes find a common meaning in existing as a democratic polity.
But how do we now achieve a nation at a time when the secular idea of
citizenship a crucial concept in the discourse of nationhood has been
undermined? How do we sustain a democratic polity in the on-going project of
nationhood when the fundamental philosophical premises upon which such polity
has been built have come to question in the postmodern onslaught?
Locating God in the Overlapping of Consensus
Bridges goes farther than Taylor by proposing the creation of a
postmodern civic culture. For Bridges, the development of a postmodern civic
culture, or in Taylors words, a new social imaginary, able to transcend the
limitations of a modernist liberal ethic must depend upon an overlapping
consensus on the part of particularistic cultural communities that now
characterize many societies.
He argues that in order to contribute to this consensus in support of liberal
moral ideals, adherents of particularistic cultural traditions must identify or
develop resources within those traditions that encourage the pursuit of civic justice
and civic freedom. The task of citizens and government is to discover and to
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et, I too, would like to believe that by working hand-in-hand with Bishop
Yiguez (and of course, with Bro. Eddie, who is also a complainant!) in
the new impeachment case against his kabalen, Prof. David reaffirms the
important place in the public sphere of the kind of religion the prophets had
spoken of in the Old Testament: that religion whose unceasing prayer it is to
Yahweh to let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing
stream.24
On this latter point, see Glenn H. Stassen, Just Peacemaking: A New Paradigm for a New World, in
CHRISTIANS & POLITICS BEYOND THE CULTURE WARS, 205-227 (David P. Gushee, ed., 2000)
23
Isaiah 59: 14 (NIV).
24
Amos 5: 24 (NIV)
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