Bishop Pablo Virgilio Siongco David of Kalookan, Philippines, one of the 21 cardinal-designates to be elevated at the 7 December consistory at the Vatican, was thrust into the spotlight and singled out by his country’s president in 2018 at the height of a bloody government anti-drug war there.
The bishop, known as “Bishop Ambo” from the diocese situated just north of Manila, the capital, told OSV News in an email interview 21 October, “We were just among the people whom the previous government tried to intimidate for daring to question such inhumane government policies.
“Hopefully this new appointment can lend a greater credibility and legitimacy to the resistance to government policies that violate human rights and trample on human dignity.”
At the start of the killing campaign in 2016, Bishop David, an outspoken critic, began taking victims’ families under his wing.
He called his diocese “the killing fields,” where some of the most impoverished residents became overwhelmingly targeted as alleged “users and pushers” in the anti-drug war, alluding to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge rule in the 1970s that pushed millions into forced labour on farms where they were executed and died of other causes.
Former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has admitted that he kept a “death squad” to crack down on crime while mayor of one of the country’s largest cities, BBC News reported 29 October.
Bishop Ambo said everything red—from red hat to red socks—that he will get for the consistory “is mainly to rub in the call to martyrdom, the call for readiness to shed one’s blood for the Gospel.”
“To think of it mainly as an honour is to totally misunderstand it,” he said, adding that Pope Francis has “asked us to get increasingly used to being regarded as ‘servant’ (rather) than to being called ‘Eminence.'”
The cardinal-designate has been president of the Catholic bishops’ conference of the Philippines since 2021 and is incoming vice president of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences.
