De lima: Duterte, not bishops, out of touch with reality

Sen. Leila De Lima. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO/LYN RILLON

Sen. Leila de Lima has slammed the Duterte administration on Monday for berating the bishops for condemning the killing of drug suspects in the government’s war on drugs.

In a statement, De Lima said the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) was only reminding the country in its pastoral statement on Sunday of the “universal moral values that were lost and forgotten among our people since the start of the drug war.”

“For the Palace to say that reminding our people of these basic Filipino values is being out of touch with reality is like saying that our countrymen no longer value life, liberty and social justice,” said the archcritic of President Duterte.

Mr. Duterte, she said, is the one out of touch with reality—not the bishops—“when he thinks he can dispense with these basic values in this drug war and still manage to keep the country’s spiritual and moral fabric intact.”

De Lima warned that the country “cannot survive much longer” where she said “killing and death are seen as the solution to every problem of the nation.”

“The CBCP letter is a wake-up call to a nation that is in a nightmare,” she said, adding that the Church was just waking up the nation to the false dream of the President that the country can be saved by killing drug suspects.

“Our true father is still God in heaven, not the fake idol and false messiah in Malacañang,” De Lima said.

Sen. Francis Pangilinan, like De Lima a Liberal Party stalwart, urged the government to “uphold its responsibility to protect our people, to promote their welfare and to make them safe.”

“It must pursue justice to the families who have lost their loved ones to criminals,” Pangilinan said in a statement.

Senate President Aquilino Pimentel III said the principle of the separation of Church and State should be observed. “Let’s give the government some slack or leeway to run the government,” he told reporters.