Fr. Godofredo Alingal SJ

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A QUIET MAN

by Fr. Vincent Cullen SJ

As I sit at my desk in Impasug-ong, Bukidnon, a bend in the dusty road from Cagayan de Oro City to Malaybalay in northern Mindanao, I wonder how I can write about the quiet man I have known and worked with for thirty years. I might, of course, just list the places he had been and the assignments he filled, but those are merely milestones on the road he travelled and tell us little about the person. Better just to let the memories pass in review, like an old film; for even if some of the frames are clouded, somehow there emerges the pictures of Ling. 

He was born in Dapitan, Zamboanga del Sur, on the northern shore of Mindanao. That is important, for Ling was above all taga-Mindanao, a Mindanao man and a Jesuit. Both the soil and the sea mark the people who work them with a quality of quiet, stubborn endurance: antos na lang, “just endurance it” they say, whether it be the vagaries of nature or the harsh social conditions of generations. Antos na lang doesn’t mean mere resigned acceptance or passivity, but rather that one must keep at it, no matter what; one mustn’t give up; one must endure. So, when the storm has passed or when the drought is over, they are back in their boats; back behind the plow; usually with a smile and unsaon ta man? “what else can we do?” Ling inherited this quality, bred into the Mindanao man, from his ancestors, from the soil and the sea. 

Dapitan is also significant in Ling’s life because it is Jesuit country. It was Jesuit priests who brought the faith to the north coast of Mindanao, and their memory lives on in Dapitan. 

 Ling entered the Jesuit-run San Jose Seminary in 1939 and then joined the Society of Jesus, entering the Novitiate at Novaliches on May 30, 1940. Ling spent the war years at the Ateneo de Manila Compound and later on at La Ignaciana in Sta. Ana, and in 1945 continued his philosophical studies in Manila. During regency, where I first met him, he was teaching at the Ateneo de Naga, a Jesuit provincial high school and college in southern Luzon. Because it was off the beaten track, the Ateneo de Naga was affectionately known by the scholastics of that time as Lower Slobbovia. Yet Ling liked Naga, perhaps because it too was a land of farmers. 

After regency, we travelled together on the old French ship Champollion to the U.S., stopping over in Rome for the celebration of the Holy Year, and then went on to Woodstock College. For Ling, despite the presence of a Philippine Jesuit group, it couldn’t have been an altogether pleasant experience, what with the harsher climate, different customs and different food and above all it was far from the Philippines, far from home. 

As I recall, Ling, being quiet, all but disappeared into the ‘Long Black Line’ as the Jesuit formation program at the time was called, because of the long lines of black-habited scholastics on their way to chapel, to meals and to classes. Thursday holidays were the only break in the regime, when everyone got out of the house and into the woods or onto the country roads around Woodstock. Filipino scholastics often invited friends to picnics that featured Filipino food--a brief touch of home. 

On June 21, 1953, Ling and I were ordained together, and while the families of the new priests gathered on Woodstock’s lawns, Ling’s guests were Filipino friends from Washington for in those days before easy air travel his family did not attend. In the Philippines an ordination is very much a family affair, so it must have been a bit lonely; but if it was, Ling never mentioned it. 

Then from August 1954 to June 1955, we passed through the last phase of Jesuit training, Tertianship or the third year of spiritual formation at Auriesville in northern New York state. Mostly we froze, and once almost literally. Ling and I on a walk in the country got a bit lost and since the weather was well below zero, we sought shelter from the biting wind by walking along the side of the Thru Way, only to be chased off by an unsympathetic state trooper. It was our first brush with the law, but not the last; there would be more. On June14, 1955, the doors of the Tertianship opened and we passed out of the Long Black Line. 

The Long Black Line doesn’t exist anymore. It was a standardized form of spiritual and intellectual formation, which today would be considered as suppressive of individuality and maybe it was, but it gave us something, it certainly gave Ling something: a well-grounded knowledge of the faith and skill in communicating it, and the ability to undertake a job and keep at it, win, loss or draw. Discussing the course in those days was like discussing the weather, an entertaining occupation and about as productive, but I never heard Ling discuss it. If asked, Ling probably would just have smiled his quick smile and answered: “Unsaon ta man, antos na lang”- “What else can we do but see it through.” 

 Ling and I parted company after Tertianship. I was going to language school at Georgetown to learn Ling’s language, Cebuano, and Ling was going home, and on the first plane he could get.

After a short training period at Talisayan on the coast of Misamis Oriental, Ling was assigned to Linabo, Bukidnon, and I joined him there in 1957. There were three of us living in the small convento at Linabo: Ling, as pastor, and Phil Boyleand I taking care of distant barrios. While I was struggling to improve my newly-acquired Cebuano, Ling was at last at home, at home in his own language, among his own people on his own island, Mindanao. There is a lot of talk about the deculturating effect of foreign ecclesiastical education, and it may be all quite true, but it did not seem to have decultured Ling much--he was a Mindanao man. 

The work in those days before Vatican II was traditional rural pastoral work. There were Masses in the centro and in the barrios; marriages and baptisms galore, catechism for the children, meetings with the Catholic Women’s League, trouble with our jeeps and hours of hiking over muddy trails to barrio fiestas. It was, looking back, an idyllic time, suffused with an aroma of wood smoke in the early morning and the greetings of farmers returning from the fields at sunset. But it is a time and a way of life that is gone. And, in our innocence, although we didn’t suspect it, the roots of serious social problems were already deep in the soil just waiting to sprout forth.

In 1957 Ling and I parted ways again; he going to Talakag, a parish in western Bukidnon and I to Impasug-ong in the northern part of the province. From Talakag, Ling went to Dancagan as director of the Catholic school, and then taught for a few years, 1962 to 1967, at his old school, the Ateneo de Naga. In 1969, he returned to Bukidnon. During those years, changes were occurring in Bukidnon and the Church that would put forces in Bukidnon and Church in Bukidnon on a collision course--and they still are.

The province of Bukidnon (the name Bukidnon means mountainous) was still frontier country in the days right after the Second World War; it was still cowboy country. The local mountain people, the Bukidnon and the Manobo, not being plow agriculturists, had gradually ceded the grasslands of the central plateau to the ranchers and to some farmers, withdrawing to the forested hills and mountains. Thus it was the ranchers and some farmers, withdrawing to the forested hills and mountains. Thus is was the ranchers and some old-time settler-farmers who ran the province. They controlled the politics and the distribution of land in the sparsely-populated province. Then came the loggers, opening up roads into the hills and valleys east and west of the main highway, and following these roads came a flood of settlers, mainly from the Visayan islands to the north seeking land. It was the old Indian-cowboy-farmer story all over again. The few ranchers striving to control the ranch lands (mostly rented from the government), and the politics; then the settlers ever reaching out for more land, with the mountain peoples often caught in the middle. 

The population of the province doubled between 1960 and 1970 from 194,000 to 425,000. New towns sprang up in southern Bukidnon, which but a few years before had been forest: Don Carlos, Kitaotao, Dancagan, Kibawe, Damulog. Politics in Bukidnon was rough and ready, where often bullets counted more than ballots, as the ruling group sought to maintain control of politics and, through politics, control of the land. It was the old story of the powerful, entrenched few against the many, the poor settlers seeking land in Mindanao. 

In 1969 Ling was assigned to Kibawe, which even by Bukidnon standards was a violent town. Even the name Kibawe, “place of recovery of liberation,” is derived according to a local legend from a battle in which the local Manobo tribesmen liberated the area from the domination of the Moslems from Cotabato.

Just as Bukidnon had changed, so had the church in the post-Vatican II era to meet the challenges posed by the social conditions of the times. Masses and baptisms and marriages were performed as before, but now after the Papal documents Gaudium et Spes, Mater et Magistra and Populorum Progressio a new wind was blowing, and the Church was searching anew in the gospels for answers to the social problems of poverty and exploitation. 

The gospel now was to be preached beyond the walls of the church; in the fields and in the marketplaces and in the hills among the people, to help the people realize their God-given dignity and assert their God-given rights. And Ling had grown with the times; he had absorbed the Church’s teaching on social justice and began at once to preach it from the pulpit and practice it along with people. 

 The people were victims of local usurers, so Ling helped them start a credit union. The farmers were at the mercy of middlemen who bought their corn cheap in Kibawe and sold it high in Cagayan; so Ling with the help of extension workers, started a grains marketing cooperative. When Bukidnon became a Prelature and Francisco Claver S.J. was named its first Bishop, the focus on the gospel and justice was sharpened. When the Federation of Free Farmers, a nation-wide rural labor union was organized in Bukidnon, Ling helped set up a local chapter in Kibawe. This brought him into conflict with the ruling junta that had vested interests in controlling the politics and the land. Ling was branded as a communist, and that by some “pillars” of the church in Kibawe. 

This movement for social justice was checked in 1972 with the declaration of Martial Law and the taming of the FFF. Ling waited for the dust to settle a bit and then started a Community Organization program, the first of its kind in the rural Philippines. With the help of trained organizers and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, who conducted bible reflection meetings with the barrio folk, the farmers organized to defend their rights to their land; mothers were organized to demand better health care; vendors were organized so that they could demand a fairer price for their produce. At the times of periodic referenda, the people, now organized, despite harassment and threats, valiantly defended the few political rights remaining to them, particularly the right to vote according to their own choice. The frauds and threats and harassment were denounced from the pulpit and in the Prelature newspaper the Bandilyo, and Ling had made some more enemies. 

Kibawe, since it is not far from the Cotabato border to the south had been exposed to the danger of raids since 1970, and in some raids, houses in the far barrios were burnt and people killed. To protect the town and barrios, a Company of Constabulary Rangers was stationed in Kibawe, and while the Rangers may have offered protection against possible raids, their undisciplined behavior, drunkenness, beatings and on two occasions the killing of civilians merely added to the Martial Law burden of fear imposed on the people of Kibawe. These abuses were denounced in the Bandilyo and from the altar, a very dangerous thing to do. 

When in 1977 the government closed down DXBB, the Prelature Radio Station (which despite a judgement of innocence on the charges made and the lifting of Martial Law is still closed down) Ling started his Blackboard News Service, a giant blackboard in front of the Church, which continued to defend the people and denounce abuses both civilian and military. When the blackboard was vandalized and destroyed, prudence might have dictated that it would be wise to let well enough alone. But Ling would not let it alone. He appealed to higher authorities and put up a new blackboard.

After the province wide elections in January of 1980 where Ling and the people had worked for free and honest elections in the face of threats and harassment, Ling received his first death threat: “Stop using the pulpit for politics….your days are numbered.” Denouncing force and fraud from the pulpit at election time is generally denounced as the Church getting involved in politics. In December, Ling showed me a second threatening note which he had received. There was little he could do about these threats. Whom could he appeal to? In the name of truth and the gospel, in behalf of the human dignity of the little people he had spoken out against the abuse of political and military authority and had made enemies in doing so. He knew he was in danger, so he might reasonably have asked for a change of assignment. He might have remained quiet; muted the gospel message. But he would not. Antos na lang, unsaon ta man - “Endure it, what else can we do?” Rejecting the doctrine of violence as a means of defending human rights or righting political wrongs, Ling was defenseless, armed only with the gospel, and the gospel is not bullet-proof. It never was. 

And so on April 13th Ling returned from the weekly informal Jesuit meeting at Maramag. He didn’t know that the killers had already been there. At about 3:00 p.m. two men came to the convento and bought a copy of the Bandilyo, the issue carrying the results of the plebiscite to amend the constitutional held the previous Tuesday. One asked for a drink of water--how ironic-- “A cup of cold water given in My name.” When the cook went upstairs to get it, the man went with her, checking out the upstairs layout. At about 7:30 p.m. when the two young house boys had come back from locking up the church, they were grabbed by five armed men who had entered the convento. Three wore masks and the other two were the ones who had come earlier in the day. Threatening the boys with pistols, they made them call Ling to the upstairs door, and as soon as Ling opened the door one of them shot him with a .45 caliber automatic, and, as the autopsy later indicated, right through the heart killing him almost instantly. The two then entered the upstairs rooms and cut the electric wires connected to the amplifier in the church bell-tower. One purpose of the amplifier in the tower was to notify the people in case of trouble, and the killers must have known that. They then left the convento and escaped on a motorbike. A private doctor living across the street and hearing the shot arrived soon after and found Ling in his last moments of agony. Before he could name his killers, Father Alingal died. 

We might think that was the end, the end of a quiet man, the first Catholic priest to be liquidated or ‘salvaged’ as they say in Mindanao since the beginning of Martial Law eight years ago. But it wasn’t the end at all, and it might only be the beginning, for now as never before it was the people’s turn. Though shocked by the death of their pastor and frightened by the sinister professionalism, they came by the hundreds to the church where Ling lay, and stayed on for days and nights, for a whole week, in solidarity with their slain pastor. 

Who did it? While we leave the investigation of the crime to the National Bureau of Investigation as to exactly who was responsible for the crime, we do know this. Ling continually spoke out against injustice and the violation of human rights and human dignity. He was warned to be quiet and when he would not, he was shot. This we know and the people know. 

On April 20, Easter Monday, a crowd estimated at about three thousand gathered in and around the church in Kibawe, from the town itself and from the surrounding barrios, from nearby towns and from throughout Bukidnon. Groups carrying placards proclaiming their outrage; Hain ang justicia? “Where is justice?” walked the ten kilometers from Kitaotao and from Dancagan six kilometers away. 

 The funeral Mass was concelebrated with Bishop Claver being assisted by Auxiliary Bishop Dosado of Cagayan and about seventy priests from Bukidnon, Cagayan, Davao and Cotabato, including Fr. Provincial (J. Bernas) and the local Jesuit Superior, Fr. Raviolo. Present too were the Sisters, Seminarians, and Church workers from Bukidnon and Cagayan. Bishop Claver in his homily simply stated what Ling lived for and what he died for: Christ, His gospel of justice and peace, and the people. 

The people of Kibawe had a tomb built in the local cemetery for they wanted to keep their pastor with them, but this was not to be. For at the Mass was Ling’s mother, age 85 years, who very simply asked the people of Kibawe for the body of her son: “You have had him in life to served you. Now that he is dead, I am asking that you give him back to me.” And the people, though reluctant to part with their pastor, agreed. And Fr. Provincial though it was counter to Jesuit custom according to which a Jesuit Parish Priest is buried with his people, granted her request. So after the Mass the body was taken back to his hometown, and with Bishop Zafra of Dipolog and many of the diocesan priests in attendance was buried in Dapitan, there by the sea. 

Today Dapitan has a second favorite son. The first was Dr. Jose Rizal, the Philippine national hero, who spent sometime there in exile before the turn of the century and who was shot, executed by Spanish colonial order, for speaking out in his novels and pamphlets about the dignity of the Filipino people and their thirst for freedom.  

Bishop Claver, in a moving piece entitled “The Empty Tomb of Kibawe” comes closest to expressing the meaning of Ling’s death in these words: “So his tomb in Kibawe is empty--just like Christ’s in Jerusalem the day He rose from the dead. There was no wondrous rising from the dead at Kibawe, true, but the promise was there, and the faith in that promise. 

“Nonetheless, there was a real resurrection. The people who came in throngs to the wake and funeral Mass of their pastor were not intimidated, fearful people, cowed by the violence of his death (it was supposed to be object lesson to those who would stand up against the powerful). Their numbers spoke not of fear but of courage, not of despair but of hope, not of death but of life. A glorious rising of the spirit. 

“I pray that the empty tomb, no matter what other heinous crimes will still be perpetrated against the people of Kibawe, will always be a memorial and a pledge of their rising in the spirit from all that now, for them spells death: poverty, exploitation, injustice, hatred, manipulation, fear, unfreedom, tyranny, violence--the list of evils is long …

“Death-dealing evils, all. And because Father Alingal sought in life to fight them, to lessen them, to ease the pain they brought his people, he met a death of violence. Like Christ. Though unlike Christ, he did not himself rise again.

“But there are no two ways about it: there will be a rising from the dead, not only in the spirit but in the body as well. The conviction is unshakeable, the faith and hope firm.” 

This conviction, this faith and hope was there in the stillness of the night as the students and graduates of Ling’s High School kept watch over his body: Tinuod napilay ang punuan apan daghan ang magsalingsing. “True, the tree has been cut down. But many, many shoots will grow.” Thus, the spirit of a quiet man has been communicated, and in the meantime, Unsaon ta man? Antos na lang. “We will endure. What else can we do?”