Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Religious denominations and sects shall not be registered (as a political party,
organization or coalition, by the Comelec)
-Art. IX, C, Section 2(5)
S 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?
1
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.
1
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.
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.
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]
2
should be privileged over the latter. The preferred position approach to
Constitutional adjudication of rights is borrowed from American jurisprudence,
and was first broached in a well-known footnote by Justice Stone in the case of
United States v. Carolene Products Co: [t]here may be a narrower scope for
operation of the presumption of constitutionality when legislation appears on its
face to be within a specific prohibition of the Constitutionality, such as those of
the first ten amendments4 The American Supreme Court later on fully
expressed this in the 1943 case of Murdock v. Pennyslvania: Freedom of the
press, freedom of speech, freedom of religion are in a preferred position.5
3
Certainly, it is not specious to say that such a constitutional idea that of
the freedom of conscience as expressed in the exercise of ones religion finds
some root in a particularly religious grounding8 although it is also argued that the
influence is not entirely religious, or biblical, but also involves some philosophical
sources.
In fact, the constitutional scholar shows that The Framers' Lockean view
was grounded in a set of ideas with both religious and philosophical roots. On the
other hand, he also argues against those who claim that the Non-Establishment
Clause was motivated by an evangelical Christian impulse to keep religion free
from the corruption of worldly affairs. In Feldmans historiography, the
evangelical supporters of separation, as much as the rationalists, argued for
separation on the basis of the twin Lockean views that the temporal power lacked
authority to coerce in matters of religion and that individual reason and choice
must be paramount in religious belief.9
4
soldiers in active service, persons receiving salaries or compensation from
provincial or national funds, or contractors for public works of the municipality.11
The ruling, as characterized by the ponente,
Given the reasoning by the ponente in this case, and under the 1987
Constitution, which also prohibits religious tests, the legal effect of Pamil v.
Teleron remains in doubt. The present Charter is clear enough. As justice Palma,
in her dissent, put it:
5
evidence to the contrary, that the public officer will perform
his duty in the manner the law requires. I may add that there
are legal remedies available to the citizenry against official
action violative of any existing law or constitutional
mandate.13
In any case, the prohibition has been limited to a municipal office, there
being no similar law banning ecclesiastics from seeking public offices higher than
a municipal office.
6
There is a long line of cases illustrating the various permutations of this
constitutional problematique. But in all this, the principal holding remains that the
Non-Establishment Clause means that government must remain neutral in matters
of faith; it must not privilege one faith over the others. It cannot promote one at
the expense of the others. It supports the cause of freedom best when it takes its
hands off religion, when it lets religious adherents be, free to express in public
their self-understanding of their self-identities as defined by their faith of course,
within limits of utmost amplitude.
While it is true that the Constitution mandates the separation of church and
state through the clauses of Non-Establishment, Free Exercise, No-Religious Test
and the Disallowance of the Religious Sector (from being appointed or elected as
party-list representatives), other provisions of the Charter outline some exceptions.
Public funds, while generally prohibited from being spent for religious
purposes as an application of the Non-Establishment Clause, may be applied to
priests working as chaplains in the armed forces, a government orphanage, or a
penal institution.17
15
64 Phil. 201
16
Art. VI, Section 28 (3), 1987 Charter provides: Charitable institutions, churches and parsonages or
convent appurtenant thereto, mosques, non-profit cemeteries, and all lands, buildings, and improvements,
actually, directly and exclusively used for religious, charitable or educational purposes shall be exempt
from taxation.
17
Art. VI, Section 29 (2) 1987 Charter provides: No public money or property shall be appropriated ,
applied, paid, or employed directly or indirectly, for the use, benefits or support of any sect, church,
denomination, sectarian institution, or system of religion, or of any priest, preacher, minister or other
religious teacher or dignitary as such, except when such priest, preacher, minister or dignitary is assigned to
7
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.
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.
8
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
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.
20
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).
9
So now, look whose talking?
Here in the Philippines, if he were still alive, Prof. Mario Bolasco, in his
time, arguably one of the finest scholars of religion this country has ever had
yes, he who had systematically studied the dynamics of liberation theology in the
Philippine setting will have vigorously objected to the suggestion.
Fr. Robert Reyes, will definitely have something important to say about that
too, considering that all the running he has been doing in the name of his
progressive causes he attributes to his being, first and foremost, a Christian who
believes that it is his duty to God to serve his country well and to fight for what is
moral and what is right in this day and age dominated by a discourse of
contingencies, to borrow from Rorty. (At least, Rorty speaks from sincere belief
and strong conviction; but the same cannot be said of someone like Michael
Defensor or Ignacio Bunye Jr , who only speaks from the comfortable confines of
political convenience).
And yet, in the run-up to the last Presidential elections, with the emergence
of Bro. Eddie Villanueva as a serious contender, even someone as esteemed a
10
scholar of political sociology as Prof. Randolf S. David would take exception to it
as yet another symptom of the regrettable dissolution of modern civic culture. In
his April 18, 2004 Public Lives column in the Inquirer, Prof. David wrote (on
Religion and Democracy):
Perhaps, Prof. David, who is now one of the lead complainants in the new
impeachment case against Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, was only expressing some
concern about the political ambiguities that seem to attach to the rise of NRMs
such as the Protestant charismatic group led by Bro. Eddie (or perhaps, of Bro.
Mikes Roman Catholic-based El Shaddai, for that matter); but his objection to
what, according to him, is the erosion of modern civic culture that is, the
dissolution of the church-state dichotomy by the advance of religiously-
motivated or faith-based politics exemplified by Bro. Eddies presidential
aspirations may be assuaged by the philosopher Charles Taylors idea of the
social imaginary. (Let it be said that I have my own questions about the
theological underpinnings of Bro. Eddies candidacy and their practical
implications on governance but thats another story altogether).
For the social imaginary of the Middle Ages, God was inescapable. It
was taken for granted that both moral and political order were ultimately founded
upon the divine order, as the natural law theology of St. Thomas Aquinas would
put it. However, the rise of modernity demolished that notion. A secular system
11
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.
Taylor argues:
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:
12
things, in the cosmos, in both social and individual life. God
can still be the source of our power to impart order to our
lives.
The challenge, then, is how to cope with this new epoch where diversity
could sometimes be frightening. It is one where on the deepest level, we would
be disagreeing with our fellow citizens on many points. But under the
circumstances, we couldnt be more happy, counsels Taylor, because we have
worked so hard over the centuries to get to where we are now, which, as yet, is the
best political order there could be (at least, in his own estimation of the North
American situation).
Where once, the ideas associated with thinkers like Locke, Rousseau,
Bentham, Kant and Mill held sway, providing the dominant interpretation of the
basic liberal democratic ideals of individual freedom and equality, today, such
ideas no longer provide a rhetoric that appealed to notions of popular
sovereignty, social contract, natural human rights, and to related ideas of authentic
individuality and autonomous personhood with an immediate intelligibility and
validity.
13
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.
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?
14
capitalize on those religious or faith-based tendencies that will support a civic
culture that promotes the liberal idea of the common good.
Our own history shows that it was mainline Protestant churches, some
evangelicals, and the progressive ranks in the Roman Catholic Church that took up
the cudgels for victims of the human rights violations committed by the Marcos
Regime. Yes, it was the Church that became a haven of refuge for those escaping
from the minions of Martial Law; yes, it was that Church that had the moral
strength to stand up to the abuses of the agents of the State. And yes, it was the
Church that protected Messrs. Ramos and Enrile in what is now known as the
February 1986 Edsa Revolution. Or to go back farther into the past, the first
progressive labor unions in the country where established by churchmen like
Isabelo De los Reyes, who was one of the founders of the nationalist Iglesia
Filipina Independiente.
Well, today, one can also talk about the Couples for Christs Gawad
Kalinga, a highly admirable community-building initiative that is decidedly faith-
based. Yet many politicians and local governments endorse and support its
ambitious project, and even provide it with government resources, in certain
instances. So much then, for the separation of Church and State. Which also says
so much of Marxs dictum that religion is the opium of the masses. It simply does
21
CARTER, supra note 20 at 227-229.
15
not help to dismiss religion altogether as a bulwark of political conservatism. Such
a blanket rejection of religion betrays an ignorance of the nuances of faith as an
important source of political and societal renewal.
Prof. David himself has written, in a more academic setting, about the
power of religious symbols to draw people together in a common cause of
freedom as what the world witnessed in Edsa 1986, or in the tearing down of the
Berlin Wall, which started really as a prayer movement of citizens in East German
churches, the only places were public gatherings were allowed by the Communist
regime.22
Today, we are in a crisis of civic culture, where our political leaders and
even some of our spiritual leaders refuse to take up the demands of truth, so that
Y 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
22
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)
16