To the nation’s nearly two-year-old Covid-19 pandemic and all the woes associated with it, President Duterte has added something new and scary as far as the voters are concerned.
He has announced his plan to run for Vice President with his former aide, Sen. Christopher “Bong” Go, as presidential candidate in the May 9, 2022 elections.
In less than twelve months, Rodrigo Duterte will be stepping down as the sixteenth president of the Philippines. He will have spent six years trying, among other things, to change the course of history between the Philippines and the United States, China and the rest of the world. Has he succeeded or failed? The jury is still out.
Manila—The Catholic Church in the United States has fallen into a deep crisis. At the heart of the crisis are the issues of abortion and the Eucharist. Can the US bishops continue to teach what the Church teaches on these issues, or should they now ask President Joe Biden to show them the way? A huge fallout cannot be avoided, and it could affect even our own church in the Philippines.
President Rodrigo Duterte once threatened to have Fatou Bensouda, the Gambian lawyer and chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague, arrested if she ever came to the Philippines to inquire into his government’s drug killings…
Five hundred years of Christianity has produced a vibrant Catholic Church in the Philippines, making it (in 2021) the third largest Catholic nation in the world. Yet seventy-five years of self-styled “democracy” has produced (in the same year) a highly erratic democratic state. Most Filipinos believe in democracy, but they are likely not to act in its defense, even if the Constitution and the rule of law are debased—-unless and until the tipping point has been reached.
He assigned his spokesman Harry Roque to debate with Carpio instead. And Carpio quickly honored Duterte’s turnaround by proposing that the Filipino comedian Vice Ganda debate with Roque instead. I never heard whether or not Vice Ganda accepted.