It’s no secret that the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) and President-elect Rodrigo Duterte aren’t exactly friends.
READ: What Duterte said vs. the Catholic Chuch: 5 burning points
While Duterte is all for employing moves that human rights advocates frown upon in carrying out justice, the Chuch espouses forgiveness.
With Duterte’s administration taking over the seat of power in just a few days, the Church, as well as other concerned groups, fear that extra-judicial killings and vigilantes will become the norm.
That said, CBCP president Archbishop Socrates Villegas has released a statement that’s actually a pastoral appeal to law enforcers.
One segment of the pastoral appeal contains five guidelines for law enforcers. We’re posting the said guidelines below (unedited):
As your bishops, we offer the following guidelines:
1. One can “shoot to kill” solely on the ground of legitimate self-defense or the defense of others. Law and jurisprudence have sufficiently spelled out the elements of self-defense, and for purposes of Catholic morality, it is necessary to emphasize that you, as law enforcers, can “shoot to kill” only first, when there is unjust provocation; second, when there is a real, not only conjectural, threat to your life or to the lives and safety of others; third, when there is due proportion between the threat posed and your own use of a firearm aimed at the threatening subject.
2. To kill a suspect outright, no matter how much surveillance work may have antecedently been done on the suspect, is not morally justified. Suspicion is never the moral equivalent of certainty, and punishment may be inflicted only on the ground of certainty.
3. When the arrest of a suspect is attempted, and the suspect endeavors to flee or to escape from the scene, every attempt by non-lethal means should be made to stop the suspect from fleeing and if shot at, every attempt should be made to spare the fleeing suspect from death, unless the escape of such a victim clearly and immediately puts others in harm’s way.
4. It is never morally permissible to receive reward money to kill another. When bounty-hunting takes the form of seeking out suspects of crime, killing them, then presenting proof of the death of the object of the hunt to the offeror of the reward, one is hardly any different from a mercenary, a gun-for-hire, no matter that the object of one’s manhunt should be a suspected offender.
5. It is the moral duty of every Catholic, every Christian, in fact, to report all forms of vigilantism of which they have personal knowledge. For greater reason is it a duty to keep away from any participation and any form of cooperation with vigilantes and vigilante movements.
The CBCP has never really heeded the separation of Church and State and it’s definitely not going to do that now. Whether that’s a good thing or bad thing remains to be seen.
