Tuquib’s birthday gift

Uriel C. Quilinguing .

NOT all legal actions are morally upright; those who hold the strings could legalize inherently immoral acts in the guise of regulatory measures. These are obviously true to all forms of gambling, prostitution, human rights abuses, and killings either judicially or extra judicially.

Those who are about my age, whose memory is still as vivid as mine, may recall events that transpired in Cagayan de Oro more than two decades ago. Those who wield power and influence exceptionally well steered the historical direction which Cagayanons are pursuing today, except for a few who may have memory gaps.

Archbishop Jesus B. Tuquib’s assumption of Cagayan de Oro archdiocese’s pastoral governance came when Cagayanons where on the cusp of political maturity, having been tamed for 23 years under Malacañang’s strong man through his local puppets. That was less than two years after the dictator was miraculously driven out by People Power from the Palace in 1986.

Tuquib who, at 89, passed away Thursday last week, whose body was laid to rest Wednesday at the St. Augustine Metropolitan Cathedral, will be remembered by Cagayanons, regardless of religious affiliations, because of his extraordinary moral strength.

While the then Mayor Pablo Magtajas and the 12 members of the City Council, with the backing of Cagayan de Oro’s lone member in the House of Representatives Erasmo Damasing Jr. then, were unanimous in opposing the operation of a casino in the city, yet the two ordinances they brandished were just pieces of paper.

City Ordinances 3353 and 3375, both passed in 1993, had no legal effect on Presidential Decree 1869 which gave the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (Pagcor) the authority to operate a casino in any part of the country.

Not even the then newly crafted Local Government Code, whose principal author is Cagayan de Oro’s son, the then Senator Aquilino Pimentel Jr., could render PD 1869 inoperative, hence the Supreme Court sided with the respondents.

Named respondents were Pagcor, through its chairperson Alicia Reyes and Pryce Properties Corp., the owner of Pryce Plaza Hotel where the casino started operating June 8, 1993. The Supreme Court only affirmed an earlier decision of the Court of Appeals which rejected the petitions the Cagayan de Oro City government filed.

But while the legal process was underway, as early as January of 1993, Tuquib had already alerted all 45 parishes under the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cagayan de Oro that extended up to Misamis Oriental and Camiguin provinces. They would eventually—for almost six months— stage a series of mass action under the Peoples Alliance Against Casino (Paac). There were occasional street march protests, daily placard pickets at the hotel’s entrance and persistent anti-casino commentaries, and news stories in local and national  media.

At the height of the protest vigils at the iconic Pryce Plaza Hotel, which was situated on top of a hill in Barangay Carmen and overlooking the city’s skyline, protesters from all over the archdiocese numbered more than 15,000.

Malaybalay Bishop Jose Cabantan, who belonged to the first batch of seminarians Tuquib ordained to the priesthood, recalled that he brought with him over a hundred youngsters with him from Camiguin to join the mass actions in the city.

In a letter to President Ramos, the then archbishop stated: “We want to express in very strong terms our conviction that the spirit of restraint and dedication to honest works is still the fundamental dimension of human existence.”

Without the ordinances, the archdiocese’s first Filipino prelate, who succeeded after American James Thomas G. Hayes of the Society of Jesus and Irish priest Patrick Henry Cronin, would have done the same—relentless mass protests until Ramos issued a Pagcor closure order on its Pryce Plaza Hotel casino on June 27, 1993 which, incidentally, was Tuquib’s 63rd birthday.

Despite the legal victory, Pryce Properties Corp. decided not to proceed with the casino because the host community—as shown by the protest actions—was against it.

Cagayan de Oro’s success in blocking casino operations inspired people in other parts of the country, including Baguio City where mass protests were also staged against a casino.

Tuquib, however, did not confine himself to the casino issue; he had other social issues and advocacies, unmindful of repercussions, like when he openly opposed the move of the City Council to legalize prostitution sometime in May 1993.

The then Councilor Luz Sabanal had the backing of the Women in Government  Service (Wings), through its president Heide Cervantes and lawyer Remedios Llego, then the president of the Federacion Internacional de las Abogadas, in a controversial measure to legalize the flesh trade. There were media reports then that the city ranked second nationwide in prostitution.

The issuance of identification cards to commercial sex workers, other than the health cards which they use every month for hygiene checkups, was proposed. The then Vice Mayor Antonio Soriano even opined that the flesh trade would always thrive as a lucrative industry if there are customers who continue to patronize them. With the Church’s open criticisms, Sabanal’s proposed ordinance vanished in air.

Cabantan said Tuquib also focused on the proper formation of aspirants, providing future priests the ideal atmosphere for devotion, reflection, and learning, hence the establishment of the St. Vianney Theological Seminary which involved building constructions, the design of which was patterned from the College Seminary in Pagadian where the Boholano first became bishop. 

About a year before he retired in 2006, the archbishop once again caught media attention when he publicly announced that he had ordered a priest to issue a public apology for hitting his altar boy with a golf club, suspended him for a month and placed him under “archbishop house arrest,” and made him undergo retreat before he could resume his priestly obligations. Clearly, he had a low tolerance against human rights violations.

If until today, Tuquib is Cagayan de Oro’s archbishop, he would encourage priests, nuns and Catholic believers to join him in protests against all forms of immorality. UCA News quoted him as having said: “The Church is always against any form of immorality, and there’s no such thing in the mind of the Church to silence itself when there are moves of legislators to legalize immorality.”

(Uriel C. Quilinguing is a former president of the Cagayan de Oro Press Club. He also served as editor-in-chief of this paper. E-mail: uriel_quilinguing@yahoo.com)