The CBCP office. (Photo from the Wikimedia Commons)
MANILA, Philippines — The Catholic Church is adopting a policy where it will pull out its resources and reject donations from enterprises that are “destructive” to the environment, such as fossil fuel production, mining, and logging.
In a statement on Saturday following a two-day plenary assembly, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) said “many of the financial institutions in whom we place our trust have been instrumental [in] the rise of fossil fuels, as well as other destructive and exploitative industries like mining and logging.”
The CBCP called for the “rechannel[ing]” of financial resources “to disable the coal industry” and “pave the way for a complete phaseout of all other polluting energy.”
The statement also called on the Church to have “all institutions holding [its] financial resources … move[d] away from extractive industries.”
It also called for a withdrawal — “not later than 2025” — of Church resources from banks and other financial institutions “without clear commitments … to divest from fossil fuels.”
‘Laudato Si’’
The bishops said this position was in line with an earlier pastoral letter, issued in 2019, which also encouraged divestment from industries destructive to the environment, and with Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si’, Mi’ Signore” (“Praise Be to You, My Lord”), which tackled “Care for Our Common Home.”
At a press briefing also on Saturday, Bishop Pablo Virgilio David, the CBCP president, said a ‘’nonacceptance policy’’ with regard to certain donations will be adopted by the bishops in the respective dioceses.
“Our people need to be very critical, especially our parish priests,” he added. “You can see [the sources] providing donations, but their industry is destructive to our environment [and] that is very contradictory to our mission.”
“We will try to reach out to these people, especially if they are Roman Catholics. We will just tell them that there is also a sin against the environment … We can call them out, too,” David added.
“I’m sure most of them have well-meaning intentions. They are not even probably aware of the extent of abuse that their companies are involved with. We can have a dialogue on that,” the bishop said.
Some of the bigger dioceses and religious groups are known to own shares in financial institutions and other corporations.
As of Dec. 31, 2020, the Archbishop of Manila, for example, owned 7.3 percent of shares in the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI), according to the information posted on the bank’s website.
The founding shareholders of the bank were primarily charities and endowments associated with the Catholic Church, the website said.
‘Culprits’
Withdraw From Coal (WFC), a coalition of environmental activists, civil society groups and faith-based organizations, has identified BPI as among the banks that had financed coal projects from 2009 to 2019.
“For years now, communities across the Philippines have decried the contribution that financial institutions, especially domestic banks, made in enabling coal to dominate our power mix,” said Bishop Gerry Alminaza of the Diocese of San Carlos in Negros Occidental province, who is also a WFC convenor.
Alminaza said many banks had become “culprit[s] to the rapidly expanding pipeline of fossil gas projects.”
“We hope that these banks would finally listen to the voice of reason from the community of faith, in which some [are] their biggest clients and stakeholders,” he said.