I DON’T know how to swim, so when I got the chance to ask a fisherman whether being able to swim is an advantage when I am aboard a ship and the vessel sinks, I was surprised by his response. “Maybe for a few kilometers,” he said. His point was that even good swimmers eventually tire, so they will eventually succumb like the non-swimmers. He probably just wanted to ease my worries—but his logic was spot on.
I remember that story when the question surfaced about whether it would be good to arm priests or not in the midst of the recent killings of men of the cloth. If priests are armed, the effect would probably be only psychological. Because killers will eventually find a way to go around the fact that their target is armed.
We had a neighbor who spent much of his life in jail after he killed the lover of his wife. The man he killed, according to stories, was bigger than him and knew martial arts (the Cebuano term for that is, “maayo mangamot” or “may pangamot”). That obviously was why the man was even bold enough to hurl insults at our neighbor when they talked face-to-face.
Hurt, our neighbor went home and plotted his revenge. When he got the chance, he attacked his wife’s lover with a bolo. The wife’s lover eventually disarmed our neighbor and proceeded to wrestle him to the ground.
What the wife’s lover didn’t know was that our neighbor carried another weapon, a knife that he strapped to a part of his body that he could reach in case he was disarmed of the bolo. With the knife, he succeeded in getting his revenge. Which only showed that no matter how superior your defense is, you still can get killed.
Killers use the element of surprise, so even if a priest is armed, he may not be able to use his gun once attacked. That’s actually what happened in the past during the heydays of the so-called “sparrow” units of the rebel New People’s Army (NPA). They attacked armed law enforcers using the element of surprise and swiftly left the crime scene (thus the term “sparrow”).
I tend to believe that the killings of the three priests and the wounding of another in the past months were isolated and that there is no particular group, whether within the government or outside of it, that is orchestrating the attacks. The problem is that the bashing of the Catholic Church and the clergy could have indirectly contributed to those attacks.
Priests are among the respected people in Filipino communities. Or at least that was true in the past. But reports of sexual abuse by some priests and the failure of their superiors (the bishops) to impose the punishment commensurate to the crime committed presented a negative picture of the church. This has contributed to the erosion of the respect people reserved for the clergy.
What is unfortunate is that the recent killings of priests has been followed by President Duterte’s tirades against the Catholic Church and even of its God (whom he recently called “stupid”). This has conjured the feeling, wrongly I would say, that the Catholic Church and the clergy are being persecuted. I just hope this Catholic Church-bashing would end for the good of the Philippines, the only predominantly Catholic country in Asia.