IT WASN'T surprising that most of the newspapers ran very similar
headlines on the death of Negros’s legendary bishop Antonio Fortich.
For in truth, there was hardly any other way to describe the man whose
courage and conviction were only matched by the steely determination
with which he fought off any and all efforts by the powerful classes
to marginalize the poor of Negros, especially during the dark days
of the Marcos dictatorship.
To Bishop Fortich, the countless times that the military lumped him
together with the communist rebels—Negros having been one of
the hottest of hotbeds of the insurgency—mattered not; he was
not to be cowed by any tarring; neither by any physical force or intimidation.
Just a few days before his death, a veteran of the Negros clergy
during Marcos’s time recalled how the rich and elite, the sugar
barons chiefly, of Negros tried to woo the bishop when he was new
in Negros. It was said he was invited to most social events and that,
as part of his getting to know a mission, he had obliged many of them.
But when the bishop also started to break fast with the poor and the
dispossessed of Negros, eventually becoming the leading inspiration
of the sugar workers’ organizations, the rich and the elite shunned
him. The snobbery didn’t affect him one bit. Neither did the
subsequent increasing intimidation by military elements who insisted
that he not protect the rights of thousands of peasants who had been
lumped together with “communist rebels” simply for their
membership in sugar worker organizations. In a sense, he had become
truly theirs, and the Negros poor embraced him.
It was during Bishop Fortich’s watch when the Marcos minions
arrested and jailed, on trumped-up charges, Columban priests Niall
O’Brien and Brian Gore, and Filipino priest Vicente Dangan, whose
case hogged headlines worldwide.
It was during Fortich’s watch when some of the most infamous
episodes of the Marcos military in Negros happened—the Langoni
and Escalante massacres, most notably. Consistently, he would take
to task all those who tried to grind further the dispossessed, notwithstanding
the occasional grenades lobbed at his convent and parish center.
Nothing, it seemed, could faze the bishop who stood tall among his
people, because he had plunged headlong into their midst—their
lives, their misfortunes, their ceaseless misery.
“Love your priests,” Cardinal Jaime Sin counseled the faithful
last week, as the Church found occasion anew to ponder the complications
wrought by human frailty on such a difficult life as the priesthood.
And homilists called for a minute of prayer for the priests last Sunday,
the feast of the apostles Peter and Paul.
It was easy to love Bishop Fortich. Here was a man larger than life
itself, a man who made clear choices early on in his long apostolate,
and stood by them till the end. It will be hard to find someone remotely
approximating his legendary zeal and courage. But it should not be
so hard to try and understand the priests and religious leaders still
among us, and find a way to support them as they work in the vineyard.
