The spunky magazine Newsbreak scooped the rest of the media community last week when it published the story about a sexual harassment case being investigated by Vatican authorities involving the high-profile bishop. Bacani’s secretary filed a complaint before with the Papal Nuncio earlier, alleging sexual advances by the senior churchman.
Some time ago, Bishop Yalung of Antipolo was forced to resign his post after parishioners complained of his relationship with a woman despite the vow of celibacy. That relationship produced two offsprings.
The resignation of the brilliant young bishop of Antipolo was a serious blow on the Catholic Church. Yalung was considered a rising star in the Philippine hierarchy.
Breaches of the vow of celibacy are not new. Spanish priests, during the colonial period, spread their wild out throughout the islands. That explains the relatively extensive mestizo community.
The forbidden liaisons were never seriously investigated by a secretive clergy in the past. To the contrary, the offspring of those liaisons were often gifted with land grants and other concessions. The endowments drew them into the landed mestizo elite that dominated our social, economic and cultural life for centuries.
From childhood, I have heard many colorful rumors about the secret lives of priests. But they remained largely that: Rumors.
There was no known process through which laymen could file a complaint against churchmen and expect redress. As an institution, the Church was not fully accountable to the community. And priests in the parishes were barely accountable to their superiors.
It is quite telling that the complainant against Bishop Bacani went straight up to the Papal Nuncio. The choice of venue for the complaint seems to indicate a persistence of the traditional attitude that the clergy will cover up for those in its fold.
Lately, however, it has become fashionable to police the penises of priests. It is a fashion driven by the new sensitivity of politically correct groups to protect the vulnerable – women and children particularly – from predators violating their own vow of chastity.
The fashion has sprung a long chain of scandals involving priests throughout the world. These scandals, involving both homosexual and heterosexual encounters, took its toll not only among the clergy’s rank-and-file but also among respected senior churchmen.
In the face of what may be described as a tidal wave of scandals alleging sexual offenses, questions have been raised regarding the Catholicism’s ability to survive the modern age with its archaic and anachronistic prohibitions. Or at least survive with those archaic and anachronistic prohibitions intact.
All religions have what in modern English we might call a negative list. This includes practices of self-denial, abstention and challenging personal impositions.
Catholicism, with its firm hierarchy, elaborate doctrine and highly ritualized abstentions, has had to maintain a tightly regimented cadre of priests. Priests are not supposed to marry or otherwise indulge in normal sexual practice. It is a vow common among all priesthoods in all religions.
As a vow, there is expectation that it will be obeyed without need for enforcement. Thus very little mechanisms for enforcing such a demanding condition evolved within the Church. The need to maintain the myth of a pure priesthood often worked to encourage the cover up of breaches of the vow.
The scandal involving Bacani no doubt shakes the Filipino Catholic community profoundly.
The local hierarchy is one of the most doctrinally conservative in the world. Sometimes literally more popish than the Pope, the local hierarchy has stood firmly on all the key doctrinal issues: artificial contraception, divorce, homosexuality and abortion.
This conservatism of the Filipino hierarchy has created a large pool of discontent among more modernist groups in society: liberals and libertines, advocates of gay and lesbian rights, pro-choice women’s groups and others. These groups will be expected to leverage the present high-profile controversy involving Bishop Bacani to force the hierarchy to loosen its doctrinal grip or at least undermine the credibility of the most doctrinaire.
Bishop Bacani himself has attracted more than his share of antipathy.
To say he is outspoken is to put it lightly. He is opinionated, brash, confrontational and, apparently, a very active factional player in the labyrinthine internal politics of the Filipino Catholic community.
Like Cardinal Sin, he is doctrinally a conservative. He is identified with that nominally Catholic but doctrinally superfluous El Shaddai movement. Fairly or not, he was perceived to be one of the senior clergymen closely aligned with the deposed presidency of Joseph Estrada.
In addition to those groups and constituencies that would be interested in inflating this controversy to pressure a conservative clergy, there are groups and constituencies that might be inclined to inflate this controversy in order to apply pressure on Bacani himself – or at least play out old grudges.
Note that Bacani is one of those poised to succeed Cardinal Sin in stature if not in rank. There are enough people who would not want to see that happen. Many of those people, conceivably, are within the hierarchy itself.
To be sure, this scandal takes out Bacani from the short list of senior clergymen who might step into Cardinal Sin’s shoes. That has its own large set of political implications by itself.
Whatever the veracity of the charges against Bacani, we can now say that his star had fallen irredeemably. But this provides little encouragement for those expecting a more liberal hierarchy in the years to come.
The more liberal clergymen are simply not poised to rise up the hierarchy. Many of the most brilliant liberal priests were burned by their involvement in the quaint theologies of liberation that became popular from the late seventies. That involvement got many of them involved in the bizarre politics of the Filipino Left.
With the eclipse of leftwing politics, the personal careers of many clergymen have been compromised. Personified by Fr. Robert Reyes, they find themselves in some equivalent of purgatory.
Those that have risen spectacularly the last few years are precisely those that kept their priestly professions from the passing politics of their time. As a consequence, they have avoided controversy and quietly worked their way up the ranks under the aegis of a conservative Pope – ensuring the doctrinal conservatism of Filipino Catholicism for a long time to come.