CARDINAL SIN: WE OWE HIM ONE
By
Senator Aquilino Pimentel
Privilege statement of Sen. Nene Pimentel at the Senate
August 29, 2007
On August 31, three days from today, the Catholic faithful of Manila and Aklan and his numerous friends all over the land will remember the 79th birth anniversary of one of the most politically involved clergymen of our times, the late Jaime Cardinal Sin.
The Cardinal passed on to his maker on June 21, 2005, at the age of 77.
As a Cardinal, a prince of the Church, I remember him as the man who made no bones about his support for the presidential candidacy of a woman, Cory Aquino, who risked life and limb, fortune and family, to help restore the democratic space to the country in 1986. But that act is not what the country should remember him for as I will try to explain momentarily.
Contradiction
Sin was a contradiction in terms. His name alone contrasted with the rank of Cardinal that he held as a churchman already posed problems of comedic proportions. Early on in his cardinalate, he'd shock visiting innocent nuns with his tongue in cheek announcement that they were welcome "to the House of Sin!"
Indeed, his name was Sin. But he was actually a man of the cloth, an ordained priest in the order of Melchizedich, to borrow the words of the Good Book.
He was no politician. Yet in his prime as the archbishop of Manila, he shook up the political firmament in the country in a manner that no politician has done before or since.
More than any other person – politician or religious - in the country, it was Sin who mobilized people in 1986, to be exact on February 22, 1986 to “protect our brothers in Camp Crame” who had withdrawn their support from the then President, Ferdinand E. Marcos. Marcos, as everybody knows, had assumed dictatorial powers in 1972. He exercised powers that were not seriously challenged until in 1983, Ninoy Aquino, a leader of those who opposed Marcos came home from the US in an attempt to peacefully end the martial law regime. For his righteous efforts, Ninoy was assassinated upon arrival at the Manila International Airport that is now named after him.
No Richelieu or Fleury
To go back to Sin, let me say that he was a far cry from Cardinal Richelieu who became Louis XIV's prime minister or even of Cardinal Fleury who was Louis XV"s chief adviser in the 17th century.
The two French cardinals were, to my mind, first and foremost political – not spiritual - advisers to their respective French sovereigns. In the case of Sin, he never occupied a political position, not during the Marcos years or the years after. And his political thinking was apparently more focused on the need to protect the right to life of people – really a religious principle - than on what Richelieu and Fleury believed to be the divine right of kings or sovereigns to rule over others or to insist that the ends of the rulers justified the means that they resorted to.
Clueless in the desert
In any event, from 1972 and for three years after the Aquino murder in 1983, our people like the Israelites were travelling in the desert of nowhere clueless as how to get rid of the Marcos dictatorship. In 1986, however, an event of Marcos's own making provided a crack in the then impregnable Marcos machinery that kept him in total unaccountable power for 14 years.
Marcos had upon pressure by our people both here and in the US called for presidential election that he set for February 7, 1986.
Illegal arsenal
We, in the parliamentary opposition, put up Cory Aquino as our candidate against Marcos. We felt that we had the people’s support throughout the nation. But Marcos did not play coy about his intention to stay in power by all means fair or foul. He, thus, used all the legal and the illegal arsenal at his command, the Comelec, the military, the CAFGUs, the bureaucracy, government funds, the controlled media, the KBL, to keep Cory at bay in the presidential contest. What Marcos did reminds us, of course, of the 2004 presidential election and the 2007 senatorial elections where the administration also used all resources to win the elections at all costs.
Demonstrations
As a consequence, by all government accounts, Marcos had won the election in February of 1986. We did not think so. And we manifested our position contradicting the Marcos government posture by holding public demonstrations and public rallies denouncing the massive cheating that characterized the election.
Our stand was vindicated by two subsequent events: 1. The Catholic Bishops Conference issued a pastoral letter that was read in the churches that indeed "unparalleled" and blatant manipulation of the electoral will had taken place, and, 2. The rather stiff hint from US government sources that Marcos should not use force to quell the demonstrations or his government would lose American economic and military support. This was a most unwelcome development to Marcos because he considered the US President Ronald Reagan as his faithful friend and close ally.
Withdrawal of support
And so it came to pass that on February 22, the then Secretary of National Defense Juan Ponce Enrile and the Chief of the Philippine Constabulary Fidel V. Ramos withdrew their support from Marcos. The two erstwhile fervent Marcos backers decided to hole up with their supporters in Camp Crame which Marcos, through his Armed Forces Chief of Staff, Fabian Ver, threatened to level with canons.
It was at this point that Sin urged the people through Radio Veritas to come to the defence of the beleaguered troops in Camp Crame. Although he asked the cloistered nuns to pray for the troops under siege, Sin did not ask the people to just pray for the troops' deliverance. He categorically asked the people to go out of their homes and surround the camp to prevent Marcos’s forces from annihilating the insurgents.
And as the cliché goes, the rest is history.
We owe Sin one
I suggest that our people owe more to Sin than many of our domestic political observers including a number of our politicians have been willing to concede even if today they along with us enjoy some of the basic freedoms that were denied to us during the martial law years.
As a sign of our appreciation for what he had done specifically to restore our fundamental freedoms, I propose that we rename Shaw Boulevard that starts from Kalentong in Mandaluyong City all the way up to Barangay Bagong Ilog in Pasig City as the Jaime Cardinal Sin Avenue. For the record, Shaw Boulevard is named after William J. Shaw, an American businessman, who came to Manila in 1901 first as a clerk, but who later became the president of the Atlantic Gulf and Pacific Company. His main claim to fame was that he donated the land where Wack Wack Golf Club now stands.
Symbolic
It is really only a symbolic honor that we now seek to bestow belatedly on the man who did not allow his high religious office to deter him from getting his feet wet in the murky waters of political dispute in the country in defense of the fundamental and human rights of the people. We can leave it to future generations to conceive of more appropriate ways to give Sin the honor that is due him. The passage of a suitable number years could give them a better perspective of the proper place in the story of the nation that the man should occupy.
As I end this brief statement, let me say that the stint of Cardinal Sin as a prince of the Church ended on his 75th birthday in 2005. His resignation was accepted by the Vatican on the very day itself.
Since we are so far away from the sacrosanct enclaves of Rome, we do not know what standards the Vatican uses to retain or retire cardinals and bishops. But it certainly looks like getting involved in the political affairs of a nation - no matter how noble the motives or how beneficial the results might be - is not one of the criteria.
Recognition deserved
But If Sin is no saint to the Vatican, let it be said that a grateful nation knows how to pay due honor and proper respect to the man who had stood by the people in the hour of our need. For it was he who had successfully pushed the people to take the calculated risk that toppled the authoritarian regime of Marcos and restored the values of freedom, justice and peace to our land in the aftermath of what is now the world-renowned People Power Revolution of 1986.
The man more than deserves the simple recognition that is suggested in this statement. For he was the humble prelate from New Washington, Aklan who became the Archbishop of Manila and, subsequently, His Eminence Jaime Cardinal Sin, prince of the Church, man of God and of his people.