Malacañang said Wednesday the Catholic Church, instead of being offended by President Rodrigo Duterte’s remarks seemingly scoffing at its teachings, should just welcome the scathing statements and use them to “strengthen further their faith” and enlighten the public.
Presidential Spokesman Salvador Panelo said this while defending the President’s latest tirades against the Catholic Church, expressing skepticism on the Church’s concept of Hell, Holy Trinity, and Jesus Christ.
Panelo said Duterte was just “shaking long-held religious tenets and beliefs that instead of molding them into being righteous individuals make them cling to religion as opium.”
“In so doing, the President puts to a test the validity of the religious rituals bordering to (sic) fanaticism as against the practice of genuine spirituality as taught by the different personifications of one God,” he said in a statement three days after the President’s controversial remarks.
“Rather than the Church and its believers being offended by such unorthodox narratives, they should welcome it as a process to strengthen further their faith or enlighten those who seek the truth of what they have embraced,” he added.
In his speech in Kidapawan City, Cotabato, Duterte, a graduate of the Benedictine-run College of Law in Mendiola, Manila, stepped up his attacks against the Church for the priests and bishops’ alleged interference in the affairs of the State.
“God is only one. There’s only one God, period. You cannot divide God into three. That’s silly,” he said, mentioning that the Church has become a “very lewd thing.”
He also doubted the Catholic’s belief on the scriptures, the saints, and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Panelo, however, viewed things differently, saying that given Duterte’s “unconventional discourses,” the President is “unmindful on any consequential erosion of his public support.”
According to the Palace official, Duterte only intended “to initiate an intellectual discussion for the faithful’s enlightenment and spiritual awakening.
“It could lead them to tread the path of uprightness so necessary in the moral regeneration of a nation so abundant with religiosity but wanting in spirituality,” he said, noting the President sets the limits of the freedom of expression to a notch higher than its common use.
To fulfill Duterte’s constitutional duty, the President endeavors to be “creative,” Panelo maintained.
“[He is] using means that may be unnerving to the conservatives unused to his ways of governance but effective in putting across the message he wants to convey to the majority of the people who, surveys show, approves (sic) of his maverick methods,” he added.
In his speeches, Duterte frequently lambasts the teachings of the Catholic Church.
He drew widespread flak in the country, where the majority of the population consists of Catholics, after previously calling God “stupid,” ridiculing the Catholic practice of assigning a patron saint to every parish, ordering the killing of prelates critical of his administration, and humiliating priests and bishops for their alleged homosexual acts.