Dangerous

Harboring fugitives, giving aid and comfort to enemies of the state violates the rule of law. Bishop Antonio Tobias, when he hid then escapee Lt. San Juan, violated his responsibility as a citizen.

That should be fairly clear.

Before most courts of law stands the statue of a blindfolded woman holding up a weighing scale. That symbolized the equal applicability of laws. Regardless of status in life, every citizen stands equal before the law. That includes men who choose to wear skirts and profess greater intimacy with the divine.

When they propound on issues they know very little about, clergymen tell us that they have the right to do so being citizens. But when they run into conflict with the law, they tend to say that they are guided by superior moral discernment and ought not to be treated as mere citizens.

That is not only unfair. It is also dangerous.

It makes the law less than absolute and subject to the vagaries of moral opinion – a terrain where some claim superior cognition over others in the most insidious tradition of feudalism. It installs clergymen as interpreters of the law and disregards the function properly assigned to the courts by modern republicanism.

This is a concern that cannot be taken too lightly.

When the application of the law becomes elastic, the community could descend into chaos. When exemption from the effects of the law becomes the reward for being able to throw tantrums, then dangerous precedent will build on dangerous precedent.

The good bishop did admit extending his very political hospitality to then fugitive Lt. San Juan – although not to the extent that the soldier recounts having enjoyed that hospitality at the expense of parishioners. The question now is whether the gravity of that indiscretion is to be measured by the courts or by the bishop’s friends.

Not too long ago, we will recall, Bishop Tobias was admonished by his peers for apologizing, on the behalf of his whole church, to former president Joseph Estrada for the role clergymen played in deposing him from the presidency. The bishop clearly overstepped his bounds in this instance. What has not been clarified is what sort of newfound partisan affinity compelled the bishop to make that strange apology.

In the face of San Juan’s sworn testimony and the bishop’s own admission, the normally feisty Justice Secretary seemed meeker than usual. He uttered something about the noise that might be generated should he insist on exacting legal accountability for what the bishop had done.

By hesitating to exact legal accountability from a bishop who already confessed, the Justice Secretary sounded like he was willing to allow the majesty of the law to be undermined if only to avoid the discomfort of a run-in with the bishops.

More disturbing are the sounds we hear from the bishop’s colleagues. Like a chorus, the group of militant bishops tried to preempt the tide of public opinion by saying that since Tobias acted by his best moral sense, he did no wrong.

That is like saying that someone who steals bread because he was hungry cannot be assigned culpability before the eyes of the law.

That is like saying all prophets can commit no crime because their moral sense holds superior ground to mere human law.

The implications are shuddering. The precedent that could be set here is terrifying.

Should it be that the nation’s bishops be allowed to act as they please and assign themselves the role of final interpreters not only of moral questions but of judicial ones as well?

We might as well issue out special licenses to priests so that they may drive as they please, immune from traffic citations, for as long as they declare that religious discernment led them to do whatever they did. The other bishops, who are so quick to exonerate their kind even as Tobias may be prone to so much political eccentricity, might as well appoint themselves judges in their own separate republic impermeable to the effect of laws that only ordinary mortals need to endure.

It is time for the state to draw the line.

For years, we have complained about clerical interference in the formulation of state policy. That has, indeed, abetted populism and incoherence in our national policy architecture. It has, specifically, caused us to reverse gears on our population policy – bringing the Philippine population growth rate to among the highest in the world. Economists now point to population growth rate as the single most important factor explaining the prevalence of poverty.

It is quite another thing to tolerate blatant acts of subversion involving senior clergymen.

When Tobias helped conceal San Juan from the authorities, he was not providing asylum to the persecuted or protecting freedom of conscience. He was helping abet a conspiracy to grab state power by the barrel of the gun. In fact, it was a conspiracy, as the evidence suggests, that was prepared to use terrorism to achieve its goals.

Where must the line be drawn to enforce the obligations of citizenship, even to men of the cloth?

If the line is not drawn on the Tobias case, it can never be drawn at all. For here, so obviously, a felony is committed. All the angels of obscurantism and moral vagary cannot conceal that.

We can possibly tolerate policy interference some more. That, at least, is subject to the dynamics of public deliberation and vulnerable to the force of reason.

We can possibly tolerate Tobias’ eccentric political opinions that have made him vulnerable to making pacts with opportunists because he is enamored with a deposed presidency that failed the nation.

But we cannot tolerate abetting an armed conspiracy prepared to impose its will – naïve as that will might be – by bombing and assassination. The line must so obviously be drawn here.