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How can some Filipinos profess to be Catholics and at the same time approve of extrajudicial killings (EJKs) in President Duterte’s war on drugs?
For Cotabato Archbishop Orlando Cardinal Quevedo, the answer is a dichotomy in some Filipinos’ faith.
“Despite the teaching of the Church, we are a country where our faith is a dichotomy. We believe in it, but we do not practice our faith,” Quevedo told a press briefing in Manila on Tuesday.
Quevedo was one of the speakers on the second day of the fourth World Apostolic Congress on Mercy.
His comments referred to the observation that some Catholics have expressed approval of Mr. Duterte’s brutal campaign against illegal drugs.
More than 6,000 people have been killed by police and unknown assailants since Mr. Duterte launched the campaign after taking office on June 30 last year.
Human rights violations
Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas, too, has criticized the human rights violations in the campaign, though not in his capacity
as president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines.
Quevedo said he admired Mr. Duterte’s determination to end the drug menace, but observed that many Filipinos seemed to approve of the extrajudicial killings, as indicated by the President’s +85 percent rating in the fourth quarter 2016 survey of the Social Weather Stations.
Many Filipinos must be desperate for solutions to the country’s problems, he said.
“Corruption is in government offices, but there are 80 percent of Catholics in the government. If there’s corruption and murder, it’s because Filipinos do not practice their faith,” Quevedo said.
He added: “This dichotomy is a split-level type of Christianity. Our faith is in one level and the other level is daily life, they do not jibe.”
He warned that approval of the extrajudicial killings is “a symptom of split-level spirituality.”
Explaining split-level Christianity, Quevedo quoted a priest as saying that “we are saints on Sundays, but devils the rest of the week.”