February 27, 1980
Page 4022
FATHER EDICIO DE LA TORRE
Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, for several months now, I have been deeply involved in a matter of human rights in the Philippines. I am speaking of the case of Father Edicio de la Torre, a 36-year-old Catholic priest who has been imprisoned in the Philippines since December 1974, and who has remained in jail without a trial since then. He has been charged with conspiracy to commit rebellion and possession of subversive materials.
In December of last year, 31 of our colleagues joined with me in sending a letter of concern to Secretary of State Vance. I ask that the letter be printed in its entirety at this point.
The letter follows:
U.S. SENATE,
Washington, D.C.,
December 20, 1979.
Hon. CYRUS R. VANCE,
Secretary of State,
Department of State,
Washington, D.C.
DEAR MR. SECRETARY: We are writing you in respect to the case of Father Edicio de la Torre, a Catholic priest who has been in prison in the Philippines since December, 1974. A number of us have individually contacted you previously on this matter, which is of great importance to us.
Father de la Torre is an outstanding theologian and a dedicated worker with the poor and poverty stricken people of the Philippines. As you know, a year after he was arrested he was charged with conspiracy to commit rebellion and with possession of subversive materials. Four months later he was informed of the charges against him. At present, he has served more time in prison than if he had already been convicted and sentenced to the minimum allowable terms, even if those terms had been imposed to run consecutively. The fact is, other than a preliminary hearing, Father de la Torre has not even been tried.
Since Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos proclaimed martial law seven years ago, more than 60 priests and nuns have been imprisoned. Only Father de la Torre remains in jail.
We appreciate the involvement of Ambassador Richard W. Murphy in this matter. We understand that he has discussed Father de la Torre's case with Philippine officials at least three times. Yet we are concerned that there may still be other available channels which could be used to stress our belief that this continuing violation of an individual's human rights must be ended.
We respectfully request that you give the case of Father de la Torre your personal attention and that you meet with a group of us, and several prominent national religious leaders, to discuss potential actions which might be taken to ease Father de la Torre's plight.
We look forward to hearing from you on this matter. Thank you again for your assistance.
Sincerely,
Thomas F. Eagleton, Frank Church, Carl Levin, Edward M. Kennedy, Donald W. Riegle, Jr., John Heinz, III, John Melcher, Paul S. Sarbanes, J. James Exon, Edmund S. Muskie, Alan Cranston, Howard M. Metzenbaum, Birch Bayh, Adlai E. Stevenson, Dennis DeConcini, Rudy Boschwitz, Paul E. Tsongas, Max Baucus, Robert Dole, Jennings Randolph, Howell Heflin, Gaylord Nelson, Patrick J. Leahy, Harrison A. Williams, Jr., Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Mark 0. Hatfield, Gary Hart, Robert T. Stafford, J. Bennett Johnston, Lowell P. Weicker, Jr., David L. Boren, Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
Mr. LEVIN. In January of this year, I ended a trip to Southeast Asia with a visit to Father de la Torre in his cell at Bicutan prison, outside of Manila. For the better part of the evening, I spoke with Father de la Torre, and Father Florante Camacho, his provincial superior, about Father de la Torre's views of life, religion, and government. I learned of his reflections on the time he has spent in prison and of his hopes for an early release and his plans for the future.
I found Father de la Torre to be a charming and thoughtful man, with potential to make a great contribution upon his release. We discussed the possibility of his release from prison upon the condition that he leave the Philippines for a period of time. While his response was that he would naturally prefer to remain free in his native country, the opportunity to leave prison and go abroad was acceptable to him as a better alternative than continued incarceration.
Upon my return to the United States, I wrote to President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and suggested that such an arrangement would be acceptable to Father de la Torre. I ask that that letter be printed at this point.
The letter follows:
U.S. SENATE,
Washington, D.C.,
January 25, 1980.
Re Father Edicio de la Torre.
Hon. FERDINAND E. MARCOS,
President, Republic of the Philippines,
Manila,
Philippine Islands.
DEAR PRESIDENT MARCOS: I was most appreciative of the opportunity to meet at Bicutan Prison with Father Edicio de la Torre. I have taken an interest in his case and have spoken at some length concerning him with the head of his Order, the Society of the Divine Word. Father Camacho is most supportive of relief for Father de la Torre under the circumstances of this case.
As you know, Father de la Torre has been in prison for over five years and is still awaiting trial. I believe that, under all the circumstances, justice would be served by his being released on temporary leave on the condition that he go abroad to study. I have spoken with him and Father Camacho and such a condition would be acceptable.
Such an action on your part would also be a fine gesture of good will to the great number of Philippine-Americans who have brought this matter to the attention of so many of us in the Senate.
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
CARL LEVIN.
Mr. LEVIN. While I have received no official response from President Marcos, Ambassador Richard Murphy rpresented my letter to President Marcos and discussed its contents with him. The Ambassador was encouraged by the President's response.
I am most hopeful that President Marcos will respond favorably to the proposal and allow Father de la Torre to leave the Philippines. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my colleagues for their support in this matter and ask that an article, by Leon Howell, a friend of Father de la Torre, which was published in the February issue of Sojourner's magazine be printed at this point.
The article follows:
A PARABLE OF OPPRESSED FAITH
(By Leon Howell)
This year, for the first time in six, Father Edicio de la Torre was able to spend Christmas outside his Filipino prison, on a short pass. Ordained in 1968 and imprisoned in 1974, half of his years as a priest have been consumed by a very special prison ministry.
Father Ed, as he is known in the Philippines, wrote a letter to Jaime L. Cardinal Sin on his first Christmas behind bars six years ago. He told of celebrating the midnight mass with some prisoners and their captors:
I'm still quite tense and raw over the experience. Despite the caution that I shouldn't give a sermon (being a detainee), I had to express my anguish at celebrating a sacrament of brotherhood and unity in the midst of conflict — between captors and captives. I told them that Christmas should make us face up to reality — flesh and blood, our concrete situation.
I told them I didn't want to further heighten the conflict and tension, but neither did I want to use the liturgy as a mask to prevent us from seeing the truth.
Anyway, we made it through with some goodwill to spare, and the 30 or more recent prisoners who have hitherto been incommunicado had a short reunion after mass.
The imprisonment of de la Torre came more than two years after President Marcos imposed martial law in the Philippines. The charges against him, conspiracy to commit rebellion and possession of subversive materials, were not made for seven months. He has had only three hearings and has never been brought to trial. More than 60 priests and nuns have been arrested under martial law with similar charges. Only de la Torre remains in prison.
Last May, the Supreme Court ordered the government to comment within 10 days on the fact that de la Torre had already completed more time in prison than the total minimum time he would have served had he been convicted of the charges brought against him. The government has not responded.
"It is tragic that he rots in prison when he can contribute so much to our common work," Bishop Michael Bunluen Mansap, executive chairman of the Asian Bishops Conference, wrote last April to Andrew Young, then U.S. ambassador to the U.N. "He is widely respected throughout our countries for his writings on theology and social action and for his dedication to the poor."
Edicio de la Torre's journey to prison is a dramatic parable of the mounting tensions within the Philippines. And he is a prime illustration of the Christian community's growing involvement in challenging the direction of politics in the only "Christian" nation in Asia. His case, which is receiving increasing attention in the U.S. as well as the Philippines, seems likely to become an international incident if Pope John Paul II pays his expected visit to the Philippines this year.
Father Ed was born in 1943 on the economically depressed island of Mindoro, just south of Luzon, where Manila and Quezon City, the national capital, are located. His family was poor, and his father died when he was very young. He and his sister, Irene, were raised by their mother, Romualda de la Torre, a catechist instructor in the local church. An exceptional high school student, he went directly to seminary where he was awarded a masters in philosophy summa cum laude. In 1968 he was ordained by the Catholic religious order known as the Society of the Divine Word.
In the first years of his priesthood he was quickly exposed to the currents of discontent sweeping the Philippines, and became involved with rural farmers, urban squatters, and student activists.
As a chaplain to the Federation of Free Farmers, he "began to understand the actual situation of the Filipino peasant," in the words of a friend. In 1971 he met up with the Zone One Tondo Organization, a squatter movement located in the Manila harbor area where more than 200,000 people live in shanties. The organization's resistance to government attempts to remove or plan for the shanty-dwellers without their participation has received international attention. Father Ed served as chaplain to Khi Rho, a student organization,and was an early participant in the Student Christian Movement.
He was a leader in the attempt to relate liberation theology to the Philippines. As he himself describes, ". . . my involvement, like that of many church people, started with reformist organizations. We read the Papal encyclicals, reflected on the gospel, and advocated the need for peoples' organizations in order to achieve social justice." Yet such work often seemed ineffective and met with violent resistance. And, "when martial law was declared," writes de la Torre, "reform organizations and protest activities were banned."
Some of his colleagues went underground immediately, but Father Ed hoped to find ways to work legally in the new situation. When he returned to his seminary, however, he found that the special police had come to arrest him. So he went into hiding and continued his organizational work underground. He worked with the Preparatory Committee for a National Democratic Front, which included Christians, nationalists, businessmen, Muslims, and communists. Its purpose was to oppose martial law.
After two years underground, he was captured.
In the early days of his arrest, he was roughed up painfully but not severely tortured. But when he saw the bruised and battered bodies of other prisoners who had not escaped torture, he twice undertook extensive fasts in protest.
During one of the fasts, Father Ed wrote that it was not simply the torture of those in prison that he was protesting. The human body "is sacramental, for through it we come in touch with the world and our fellow men, and through them, with Christ."
For his protest efforts he was held in solitary confinement for 19 months.
His witness unquestionably makes some religious leaders in the Philippines uneasy. The Wall Street Journal noted a year ago that the Catholic hierarchy in this nation where 85 per cent of the 46.5 million people are Roman Catholics had always been "identified with the most conservative and regressive elements of society." The late Cardinal Santos said in 1972 that martial law "should be hailed and welcomed."
Only one-fourth of the active bishops have been consistently critical of martial law and its excesses. But as the economy deteriorates, corruption mounts, and state lawlessness increases, more and more people in the Philippines agree that martial law has produced few of the benefits promised by Marcos.
Thus Cardinal Sin, conservative and personally close to Marcos, has predicted civil war if the martial law machinery is not dismantled and civil rights restored. In October, 1979, all the bishops issued what one reporter called "a withering condemnation of current conditions" in the Philippines. The bishops said, "The existence of poverty and misery, of deprivation and injustices in our midst, increasingly weighing down the poor, the powerless and the marginalized sectors of our population, is obvious enough to all who have eyes to see."
Each year the National Council of Churches in the Philippines, which speaks for the islands' 4.5 million Protestants, calls for the restoration of civil and political liberties which it recently said are "in keeping with the democratic tradition of the Evangelical Churches."
In response to the deepening desperation of the poor in the Philippines, various forms of opposition have emerged, including those that call for the violent overthrow of the government.
Bishop Claver discussed the dilemma this poses for the church in the October, 1979, Sojourners.
Many times de la Torre has pledged to the government that if he is released he will work openly and through legal means. But he has been neither tried nor released. His mother refuses to leave the Philippines even to visit her daughter who works as a nurse in Illinois because she visits her son in prison every day "just to make sure he is there." She believes her son is being held simply "to prevent him from continuing the work he was doing before they arrested him."
"They are afraid of him," a close friend said recently. "He has promised to refrain from illegal activity. But he has the ability to talk with such a wide spectrum of people that they fear him."
For some months a group of Protestants and Catholics, responding to a request from Filipino Christians who are increasingly concerned about the toll the long incarceration is having on Father Ed's health, have worked through the U.S. Congress, the State Department, and the White House to get the U.S. government to impress upon the government of the Philippines its wish that de la Torre be tried or released.
This past December, 32 senators signed a letter (originated by Senator Levin) which called upon Secretary of State Vance to give the de la Torre case his personal attention.
As this effort was underway, several senators' offices were told that the Philippine government knew de la Torre to be a communist (obviously, if this charge could be proved in court, it would have been) and that Cardinal Sin did not want the priest released unless he agreed to leave the Philippines.
An angry Cardinal Sin replied in writing in November to this false information, which had been passed on by anonymous U.S. government sources:
I am greatly distressed to learn that a quotation to the effect that Father Ed is "a committed communist and if released should be sent out of the country," is being attributed to me. I have a lot of faults, but I like to think that stupidity is not one of them. And it is stupid for anyone to believe that a Filipino can be sent out of his own country, no matter what crime he may have committed.
As to the phrase, "a committed communist," it could not possibly have come from me because I am not in the habit of prejudging people and, to my knowledge, Father Ed has not been tried or convicted by any court.
Father Ed once commented that "every priest, religious, Christian, even bishop, who plunges into controversy over justice and freedom has been branded a communist — a troublemaker, wanting to turn the world upside down (Acts 17:6)."
In 1979 a book called "Pintig: Poems and Letters From Philippine Prisons" was released with an introduction by Father Ed. In it he related that he had told a new ordination class which he taught in prison, "There are no perfectly identical paths, and I do not claim that service to the people and incarnation in their struggle necessarily leads to prison. But it did lead me to captivity. Is it foolish to believe, and hope, that the same service and the same incarnation point the way to our liberation?"