Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle sees the problem of corruption in the Philippines as part of a larger global trend of poor governance, warning that Filipinos risk insulting themselves and the country’s overseas workers by repeating the phrase ‘only in the Philippines’ when scandals erupt.
Delivering the keynote address at the Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines (CEAP) national convention on Wednesday, October 1, the former Manila archbishop spoke bluntly about how corruption is often framed as if it is a problem unique to the Philippines.
‘I travel a lot. I visit refugee camps, forested areas, denuded places, polluted waterways. And I tell you, it is not only in the Philippines where we find this horrendous situation,” Tagle said.
“So please stop saying, only in the Philippines … I feel insulted,’ he added.
In saying this, Tagle drew from his experience as pro-prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization, particularly the sector for evangelization of young Churches, where he oversees mission territories across Asia, Africa, Oceania and parts of Latin America.
He added: “I think of our overseas Filipino workers. When we only show, what they say, are the ‘ugliness’ of the country, what will their employers think?… But not all Filipinos are like that,” Tagle said before an audience of some 3,500 Catholic educators and students.
Tagle also suggested Filipinos examine international connections to problems within the country, noting that corruption operates on a global scale.
‘So maybe you could also look at what the connection of other countries and other businesses might be to what is happening in the Philippines,’ Tagle said in mixed English and Filipino. ‘Because fraud and corruption are global, maybe there are other hands meddling here with us.’
‘Maybe the ones we are shouting at are small fry,’ he said.
This year’s gathering of CEAP members – the country’s biggest network of Catholic schools – comes as parallel investigations are held in the Senate and in the Independent Commission on Infrastructure on irregularities in public works projects. In one of the Senate hearings, Public Works Secretary Vince Dizon raised the possibility that “trillions” of public funds may have already been misused, stolen or lost due to corruption in flood control projects alone.
Revelations of anomalies have pushed Catholic schools, church leaders, civil society groups, and progressive organizations to take to the streets to demand accountability, with the last massive protest held on September 21, though local rallies were also held in the days before that.
While CEAP’s national convention this year has an official theme related to synodality – a word the Catholic Church uses to refer to a process of collective discernment and dialogue – CEAP officials in their speeches have also zeroed in on the current corruption scandal, especially how Catholic school educators can prevent their graduates from becoming part of the problem.
Given the timing of their gathering, CEAP president Fr. Karel San Juan, SJ, yesterday said their convention this year is meant to send a “strong message” to Catholic school graduates that the values they learned in classrooms must be lived out in public life.
Bishop Charlie Inzon of Jolo, who chairs the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines’ education commission, said in a speech on Wednesday that Catholic schools must not stop at protest actions when scandals break, but also invest in the long-term work of forming honest and conscientious Catholic school alumni.