Thousands of Filipinos to march through Manila over President Rodrigo Duterte’s repeated attacks on the Catholic Church

Catholics and Christians of other denominations are set to join the church-led interfaith protest in Manila’s commercial centre of Malate on Friday

The Philippines

Michael Beltran

Published: 9:00pm, 24 Jan 2019

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Thousands of Catholics and Christians of other denominations are preparing to attend a church-led interfaith protest in Manila’s commercial centre of Malate on Friday against Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.

Since coming to power in 2016, the populist leader has launched numerous attacks against the Roman Catholic Church and its representatives, who have been critical of his drugs war that has claimed at least 5,000 lives so far, according to official figures.

Roman Catholic devotees attend a mass in celebration of Easter in 2014. Photo: AFP

In June, he called God “stupid” in a televised address, prompting a swift backlash that saw his approval rating hit a record low, according to Manila-based pollster Social Weather Solutions. Yet the outrage did little to temper the firebrand leader’s rhetoric.

In November, he told a crowd at an event in Davao City, in his native Mindanao, “you don’t have to go to church to pay for these idiots”, referring to Catholic religious leaders. By December he was calling Catholic bishops “useless fools” and saying that people should “kill them”.

This hit a particularly raw nerve, as since the end of 2017, three Catholic priests have been killed in separate attacks across the Philippines.

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More than 80 per cent of the population of the Philippines self-identified as Roman Catholic at the last census.

Mary John Mananzan, a Benedictine nun who was previously involved in a resistance movement against the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, said the protest that she helped organise was designed to make a statement.

“When the president openly calls on the public to take violent action against leaders of the church for no good reason, we have to send a clear message that this is not acceptable,” she said.

Members of Promotion of Church People’s Response prepare to protest against President Rodrigo Duterte. Photo: Handout

Planning for the protest began on January 12, at the suggestion of activist religious group Promotion of Church People’s Response, whose secretary general Nardy Sabino said “the contempt and dissatisfaction among the clergy and their parishes are more palpable than ever”.

The deaths of the three priests last year were “a direct result of the president enabling violence” against the church, he said.

Students from the 200 or so schools in Metro Manila that are members of the Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines are expected to join the protest, including the likes of Hannah Rondilla, from the University of Santo Tomas, who described Duterte’s comments as “a wake up call for students to be more Christ-like and sacrifice our comforts to stand [up] for the marginalised”.

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The 73-year-old Duterte previously said he was sexually abused by a Catholic priest when he was in high school – an event that has coloured his politics ever since, he told Al Jazeera in 2016.

In 2002, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines issued an apology for sexual abuse committed by hundreds of its priests over the previous two decades. Mananzan, the activist nun, described such abuse as “a sad reality we have to face”.

“It is not as rampant or institutionalised as the president would say. But it is certainly not uncommon,” she said. “The church has always admitted to having sinful members, but that does not overshadow the good we do.”

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