Kill rich Bishops, Duterte tells ‘tambay’: Revisiting the

Responsibility of the Church towards the State

President Rodrigo Duterte last January said to the bystanders should kill or steal from “rich”
bishops, stepping up his rhetoric against Catholic Church. He also said that bishops are useless
and better off dead because all they do is talk and talk things against him. The president takes
great offense at the criticism of the Catholic Church leaders, warning the clergy not to use the
pulpit in discrediting him.

In the Philippines it is obvious that there is currently a tension between the Church and the
State. The current President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte wants that the Church should
not meddle with the affairs of the state; The Church has been vocal about their criticism
towards the current governance of the current president mainly because it deems to do away
morality for the sake of the State. These allegations of the Church Leaders of the Philippines
made the President furious because it would discredit his credibility as a leader of a nation.

Now, a question would be raised, Does the Church has the right to interfere with State affairs?
Or why would the Church interfere with the affairs of the state? And what is the relation of the
Church with State?

Throughout the history there had been many attempts on separating the Church and the State
and one of the nemeses of the church was the Marxist Utopianism, utopic in plan and inhuman
in its means of subordinating all other values to the dream of a new civilization built on blind
evolutionary forces culminating in humanity without God. The stand of the Church towards this
problem is that “The separation of the Church and state is equivalent to the separation of
human laws of Christian and Divine Legislation. For as soon as the State refuses to give to
God what belongs to God, by necessary consequences it refuses to give to citizens what as
human beings they have the right to receive.” Now we can draw from this claim that the
Church really has the right towards the State because they have a common denominator which
is the preservation of human existence by attending to its needs. Why should the Church
interfere? It is because the Church is the representative of the people it seeks to preserve the
dignity of human life and the morality of humanity (that’s why the church leaders had been
very vocal with the EJK). The relation of the Church to the State is as if they are the two faces of
a coin, different from each other and yet are in the same page which is “serving the needs of
the people”. Imagine a world where there is a harmony between the Church and the State that
kind of governance would surely prosper and flourish and this is the Ideal of the Church in
which a government is founded on the principles of the Gospel.
Towards the Church and the President does the Church condemn Rodrigo Duterte for the deeds
he has done? The answer is No, even his critic Bishop Pablo said in public after what the
President has said to the Mother Church “please bear with our president because he is a very
sick man.” In the Catholic Catechism it is said that “she does not, the church, on that account,
condemn those rulers who for the sake of securing some greater good, or for hindering some
great evil.” The Church is open to those who are ready to repent for the faults they have done
and the Church does not condemn anyone because Judgment is not of the Church but of God.

Whether the president is planning to separate the Church and the State no one knows but if he
does I know and am certain that the Church would never allow it because the consequences of
this would be grave especially on the Morality of Man and Value of Human Life.