Why the Church keeps getting elections wrong
Credit to Author: RICARDO SALUDO| Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2019 16:24:47 +0000
(The column on multilateral security is deferred, to address concerns raised in the CBCP pastoral letter read at last Sunday’s Mass.)
IT happens election after election. While Filipinos value the voting advice of local religious leaders, as shown in surveys on endorsement clout, the collective admonition of bishops doesn’t seem to be heeded.
In presidential elections of the past quarter-century, the bishops’ public preferences lost. The late Manila Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin backed the late House Speaker Ramon Mitra in 1992, but former armed forces chief Fidel Ramos won as the first Protestant president, backed by his predecessor Corazon Aquino.
Six years later, Cardinal Sin and Cory Aquino supported former Manila mayor Alfredo Lim against the hugely popular then Vice President Joseph Estrada, the first of four consecutive landslide presidents winning with around two-fifths of the vote. In 2013, the Catholic Church opposed the so-called “Team Patay” senatorial candidates who voted for the reproductive health bill. Many of them won anyway.
And in the last elections in 2016, Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas, then President of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), failed to dissuade the electorate from voting Rodrigo Roa Duterte as chief executive.
Urging Catholics to play politics
Now, bishops are again advising voters. The CBCP message read at Sunday mass stressed the need to “elect public officials who are principled, courageous and who have the common good as their main concern and not their own political interests.”
Prelates called on “lay groups [to] engage in discernment circles to help one another know the candidates well and choose the candidates with the common good of the whole country in mind …” (bold text in original).
In the CBCP’s view, “checks and balances in the government are being undermined. So far the Senate is the institution … holding out as our country is inching towards total control.”
The CBCP statement does not explicitly favor or oppose any candidate or party. But it seems to show opposition influence, especially in claiming that restraints on the government are being eroded, and the nation “is inching toward total control.”
If the administration’s grip is supposedly tightening, how does one explain the bitter row between congressmen and the Cabinet, backed by Malacañang, delaying the 2019 budget?
If the Senate were the sole holdout, is the Supreme Court no longer reviewing state actions like martial law in Mindanao and the Bangsamoro Organic Law? Is the Commission on Elections no longer running the coming May polls, and the Commission on Audit disallowing dubious expenditures?
Speaking of elections, the bit about the polls being scrapped under the House-approved draft charter was clearly off the mark. Next time Congress gets back together to deliberate Cha-cha, the May voting will be long over.
As for eroding checks and balances, one checked what the CBCP said about the impeachment of then Chief Justice Renato Corona, for which then President Benigno Aquino 3rd aggressively campaigned, despite the independence of both Congress and the Supreme Court.
Pork barrel funds and the illegal Disbursement Acceleration Program were also used to induce congressmen to impeach and senators to convict. And what did the CBCP say?
Its September 2013 statement criticized pork barrel, but said nil about checks and balances. Evidently, the dominant faction of bishops found nothing amiss in Aquino’s ouster of Corona and appointment of his Ateneo classmate Maria Lourdes Sereno, despite far more senior CJ nominees. Aquino also named his former election lawyer Sixto Brillantes as Comelec chairman, and removed both the Ombudsman and the CoA chairman in his first year.
Bishops must listen to all sides
If the 2013 and 2019 statements appear to show a double standard, the solution is plain: The bishops should listen to all sides, as they did at the height of the 2005-06 unrest over allegations of cheating in the 2004 presidential elections.
During the CBCP plenary conference in January 2006, the Association of Major Religious Superiors, which had called on then President Gloria Arroyo to resign, urged the prelates to demand an election recount, even if it would be both unconstitutional and hugely destabilizing.
The plenary asked former Comelec chairman Christian Monsod for his views on the election controversy. The bishops also invited this writer, who was then the Cabinet Secretary, to give the administration side.
This writer presented the facts and figures of the campaign and the elections, including the canvassing by both Congress and the watchdog National Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel). Plus voter surveys of both Pulse Asia and Social Weather Stations (SWS), and exit polls by Radio Veritas, ABS-CBN, GMA News, and DZRH.
In the last Pulse and SWS surveys a week before the May elections, Arroyo led her top rival Fernando Poe Jr. by 6-7 percentage points, the equivalent of about 2 million votes. She also won in all exit polls, as well as Congress and Namfrel counts. The ratio of votes won by each candidate in the Congress results differed by less than 1 percentage point from the Namfrel figures. They were statistically identical.
Plainly, if Poe really won, then Congress, Namfrel, Pulse Asia, SWS, Radio Veritas, ABS-CBN, GMA News and DZRH all conspired to fabricate results. Impossible.
The report persuaded the CBCP to set aside the vote recount idea, and push for electoral reforms instead. (The 2004 election data is presented in the following articles: https://www.manilatimes.net/who-won-the-2004-presidential-elections-1/100253/ and https://www.manilatimes.net/who-won-the-2004-presidential-elections-2/100448/.)
The lesson here is that engaging in and commenting on politics demand far more than lofty moralizing and motherhood admonitions like voting for candidates who put the nation’s welfare above their own political interests (like who?). Especially if the bishops are unduly swayed by one faction, whatever ideals it purportedly espouses.
Today, the CBCP is rightly appalled over drug-war killings, blasphemies against God, and threats against clergy. But in advising voters, prelates must do their homework on the national situation, tapping a variety of viewpoints. Then the electorate might just listen to the bishops’ advice, not dismiss it as favoring partisan slants, rather than the common good.
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