Clerico-fascism

THE ISMS of the days of disquiet and nights of rage in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s – imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism – would never be complete without their philosophical relative in the campuses of elitist Catholic schools – clerico-fascism.
It was at the Ateneo de Manila University that I was introduced to the buzzword, which I thought – so naively – was crafted specifically with the Jesuits in mind. The numerous DGs (that’s discussion- group, the dialectical mode of education outside the classrooms in that period) under the Ateneo trees and at the cafeteria so focused on Ignatius of Loyola’s order that I forgot the quintessential clerico-fascist in the Philippine experience was not a Jesuit but a Dominican. That is Rizal’s Padre Damaso, remember?
Then – as now – an ardent student of history, I got hooked for sometime on the subject of clerico-fascism which got me into some trouble with my seminary formators. No, my being asked to volunteer to leave San Jose Seminary was not entirely due to that.
Anyways, my curiosity got me to one Don Luigi Sturzo as the originator of the term “clerical-fascism” in the mid ‘20s.
Sturzo, an exiled Italian Roman Catholic priest and Christian Democrat leader, specifically affixed the term to the faction of the Catholic political party Partito Popolare Italiano (Italian People’s Party) who chose to support the then-emerging dictator Benito Mussolini.
It was thereafter appended to any authoritarian regime supported by the clergy or by the Roman Catholic Church itself.
The first prominent exhibit of clerico-fascism was Monsignor Jozef Tiso.
Not your simple Roman Catholic priest but a doctor of theology, Tiso was alternatingly deputy of the Czechoslovak parliament, member of the Czechoslovak government, and finally the president of the Slovak Republic from 1939-1945 under the aegis of the Fuhrer of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler.
Tiso went the way of his patron Hitler after the Soviet Red Army conquered Slovakia in April 1945. Convicted of "internal treason, treason of the Slovak National Uprising and collaboration with Nazism," Tiso was sentenced to death.
He was hanged – in his priestly vestments – in Bratislava on April 18, 1947.
Tiso’s life and death paralleled that of the Dominican Fra Girolamo Savonarola who was installed as head of government of Florence in 1494 at the time of the French intervention.
Savonarola attempted to set a theocratic government but miserably failed. He was hanged and then burned in 1498, four months shot of his 46th birthday.
So why am I writing about this now?
Though not in the stature of Savonarola and Tiso as yet, there is an emergent clerico-fascist in our midst today, in the true meaning of the word.
All pronouncements of adherence to the democratic ideals and profession of liberal aspirations fall face first in the mire of clerico-fascist instincts in Gov. Eddie T. Panlilio.
Dissent is democracy’s very essence. Dissent is Panlilio’s pet peeve. And where dissent is suppressed, there fascism flourishes.
Witness now how he deals with the protest of the very people he himself cited as “heroes who put their very lives on the line” to achieve the miracle that was the tremendous quarry collections.
On their very first day of protest, the quarrymen of Balas were ordered dispersed by Panlilio, even to be bodily carried out of the picketline, if the need arose.
Panlilio not only questioned but even declared as legally “invalid” the declaration of Arnedo Park, where the Balas boys are holding their picket, as a “freedom park” by the sangguniang panlalawigan. There the Governor arrogating unto himself the powers of the judiciary.
Witness too the Governor’s cavalier dismissal of the SP as obstructionist to his programs for Pampanga: from their refusal to grant him a blanket authority to enter into all and any agreements with just about any Tomas, Carding and Asyong, to his “confirmation” of then as now still putative provincial administrator Vivian Dabu, to the hiring of quarry workers without so much as a courtesy of informing the SP, to his demand of supplemental budget sans specifics, ad nauseam.
A clerico-fascist, the Reverend Governor, most looks like it.
Sheer coincidence, it may not really be, that the entity from where I first heard clerico-fascism is the same one now serving as Panlilio’s braintrust – elitist Ateneo de Manila.
Come to think of it too, we Kapampangans did not even have to read Sturzo, Savonarola and Tiso, just to learn what clerico-fascism is. We have long had a word for it, enshrined in our very lore: “Ya na ing ari, ya pa ing pari.” Both king and priest best defines a clerico-fascist. And ain’t that what Panlilio is?