Murder, they wrote
IN a country such as ours where religious beliefs are unchanged from the Spanish era, logic and reason have taken a backseat to the supremacy of the Church in the people’s way of thinking, with the men (or women) of the cloth given an automatic free pass in their various transgressions.
There’s the case of Sister Patricia Fox, whom immigration officials had earlier charged with involvement in partisan politics and ordered her immediate deportation. That should have been the end of it, if you look at the state’s right to defend itself from foreigners engaging in illegal acts.
Due to a loophole in the law (or maybe because the top justice officials are fearful religious folks, too), the Department of Justice granted the petition of Fox’s lawyer arguing the Bureau of Immigration had no right to forfeit visas. Fox was allowed to stay in the country, for now, but her deportation and visa cancellation cases are still ongoing.
It was amazing to see how the media treated Fox like she was some kind of saint being persecuted by the authorities. The Catolico cerrado bloc refused to see the other side of the issue and immediately put up their religious blinders: she cannot be a bad person, she’s a nun!
Fearful of their “salvation” at the End, the religious (and even the leftists, what do you know) rallied to support Fox and give her all the media mileage she needs. Lost somewhere were government’s charges that she violated the country’s laws, her being an “undesirable alien,” and her active participation in anti-government rallies and procommunist rallies.
Recently, we had the case of another representative of the Church, Father Mark Anthony Ventura, being in the news. Except that in this case, the priest was killed by still unknown assailants, after holding mass in a gymnasium in Cagayan province last April 29.
Ventura, just like Fox, was again portrayed as the innocent victim with the government again the bad guy. Without proof, the state was tagged as the perpetrator just because President Duterte expressed skepticism over the “creation story” of Adam and Eve (anyone who has ever read about evolution and the big bang theory will agree with Duterte).
Was Ventura really just an innocent priest? If logic and reason were predominant in this country rather than superstitious nonsense (such as the belief in dwendes, kapres, aswangs, and the devil), more people would be asking why Ventura was killed and what profit can be gained from his death (i.e. motive).
According to police, they are looking at various motives in the murder of Ventura, including politics and his anti-black sand mining advocacy. But there is also the possibility of a love triangle or a vengeful husband, amid the revelation that the priest reportedly had several affairs with married women.
The women linked to Father Anthony had powerful and well-connected husbands, including a vice mayor, a soldier, and a rich businessman. Did any of them murder the priest because of his alleged illicit relations with their wives?
A police-detective in P.D. James novel, The Murder Room, pondered what a former superior told him, that all murders can be explained by the “four Ls”, which are Love, Lust, Lucre, and Loathing. “They’ll tell you, laddie, that the most dangerous is loathing. Don’t you believe it. The most dangerous is love.”
Another murder story being blamed on the government is the killing of Tanauan City Mayor Antonio Halili. While not a man of the cloth, Halili was a top local official and was linked to the illegal drug trade (charges which his family denies).
The destabilizers were quick to pounce on the killing and the strains of “EJK, EJK” were heard all over again. The Western and local media, who dislike Duterte because of his cussing and his independent foreign policy were quick to ride on this and refused to consider the other angles in the killing.
We do not condone EJKs or extrajudicial killings and despite what Western media says, neither does the Philippine government. There is no evidence of any state-sponsored policy to kill people outside the law. However, there is clearly a campaign to destabilize the Duterte government and discredit its program against illegal drugs and drug traffickers.
One need only to look at the experience of other countries battling drug lords (such as Colombia and Mexico) to see how easily these criminals can undertake killings and shift the blame to whoever they want to be blamed. Thus the question again: who benefits from the killings?
Murder investigations are complex and complicated. So let’s leave these to the professionals, our police organization, which are doing the best they can despite the brickbats thrown their way. They have some rogue members, but so does the Church, with its officials’ human failings well-documented in the book, “Altar of Secrets: Sex, Politics, and Money in the Philippine Catholic Church,” by Aries Rufo.