WHY does this government feel so threatened by a frail looking Sr. Patricia Fox, that its Bureau of Immigration has ordered her deportation? Is she: A member of the National People’s Army? A terrorist? From the United Nations tasked to investigate extra-judicial killings (EJK)? She is “nun of the above” (corny pun intended).
To justify her deportation, she is judged to have been engaged in partisan political activities. I am not a lawyer but it seems that the use of such terms is overly simple and lacks precision. For clarity, let us discuss what is political, and what is partisan.
The term “political” is full of ambiguities. Many of our activities – even seemingly harmless ones like paying taxes and teaching history - have political ramifications, whether we are conscious of it or not. After all, we are political animals.
Organizing laborers, educating the poor of their human rights, defending peasants from oppressive landlords, protesting against extra-judicial killings, would have political consequences. But what is political for the establishment may be concretization of the Gospel values for some religious persons.
Our Lord Jesus himself says that the presence of God is not limited to temples. In a conversation with a Samaritan woman, our Lord says that the Father is worshiped not only in temples but in Spirit and in truth.
Our country’s recent history is replete with examples of foreign missionaries who have conscienticized ordinary Filipinos. The Jesuit John Delaney (American) contributed to the evangelization of a highly secular environment of the University of the Philippines. The Columban Missionaries Brian Gore and Niall O’Brien (Australians) helped organize the farmers working in sugar plantations in Negros.
A Christian missionary, or any human being for that matter, cannot be neutral in the face of evil. Can one be in the middle ground between truth and falsehood?
Whoever says God is neutral must be reading a different Bible. God took the side of the Israelites against the Egyptian Pharaoh. Jesus was partisan for the poor so much so that he declared that what we do to them is the single determining criterion for our entrance into the reign of God.
The issue should not be the partisanship of foreign religious missionaries. For them, partisanship is an enfleshment of Gospel values. The issue should be whether one is on the right side of the moral divide.
What we should be wary of is not partisanship itself but the foreigner’s participation in partisan party politics. For instance, the CIA of the United States is known to have worked for the defeat of nationalist candidates in the past. Another more recent example is the allegation that Russia meddled in American elections that contributed to the victory of Donald Trump. And what if China interfered in the elections to ensure the victory of a national chief executive who is friendly to their ambitions?
The activity of Sister Fox is not party politics. It is her attempt to follow our Lord Jesus. Her deportation can only come from someone who is both a bully and a paranoid.--Fr. Ramon Echica, Seminario Mayor de San Carlos, Faculty of Theology, Pope John Paul II Ave., Mabolo, Cebu City.