To kill a priest

“So what could be in the mind of priest killers besides simple fits of anger? They could be driven by some passionate and blinding causes that nobody, not even a man of the cloth, can stand between”

In a fit of rage over rumors that his wife was having a relationship with a priest, a police officer barged in the priest’s office and, pointing his gun, emptied the shells on the victim.

The priest was a dear classmate of mine in the seminary. When counselees in episodes of psychological transference finds more than comfort in the priest, then counseling may just be hazardous to the job of the priest.

In 1995, somewhere in Cavite, another friend of mine, a missionary, was stabbed 16 times on his way home from a youth gathering. The suspects were believed to be drug dealers who were losing their clients to the priest who provided an alternative way of life to the teeners in the area by hooking them into God instead.

In August of 1993, in the squatter’s area in Tatalon, Quezon City, I used to have a street Mass and always, as if in a refrain, would caution the young people to stay away from some drug personalities in the area. In fact, I had the boldness to mention their names. But when I received a neatly wrapped gift box with a dead chicken inside and on its bloodied neck a note that said, “If you won’t stop, you’ll be like this,” I got the scare of my life.

A police officer friend of mine cautioned me to tame my tack because these drug personalities have all the money to silence me forever.

I shifted to drug rehabilitation in 2001 by putting up the Well Spring Foundation, Inc.

However, one evening, after adamantly refusing to surrender a resident in the rehab to a group of armed men, I got the shock of my life when the group started strafing our front fences. We decided to close shop even as the residential community shoved us out of the area!

During the Edsa revolution, I had a car chase with a military jeep that was trailing me. I was on my way to Sto. Domingo church to take a shower and a good rest after a marathon broadcast on Radio Veritas denouncing the Marcos regime and calling on people to rally and support the breakaways. As soon as I noticed the military jeep behind me, I shifted to high gear and made a U-turn back to the station for safety since the Ramos boys were securing Radio Veritas.

However, I made a detour to a short cut which most of us RV employees wouldn’t take since the street humps were inches high. Yet, in that chase, I didn’t notice the humps until I reached the radio station. Besides, I was driving a Toyota Cressida! I lost them eventually.

So what could be in the mind of priest killers besides simple fits of anger? They could be driven by some passionate and blinding causes that nobody, not even a man of the cloth, can stand between. They believe it is not the truth that would set them free but the bullet in their pistols.

The recent priest killers who took the lives of three priests in a span of three months, namely, Fathers Tito Paez, Mark Ventura and Richmond Nilo, in comparison appeared to be cold-blooded, hired killers — all for the money. And, according to some sources, the rates of service have gone down to a low of a few thousand pesos to get the job done.

Gone are the days when hired killers were ‘‘professionals,’’ in the sense that before they agreed to do the job, they would conduct their own research on whether the victim scheduled to meet his creator really deserved to die. And the professional hired killer could refuse a murder contract when an innocent person was the target.

I should know; I counseled a hired killer years ago, but he was shot dead on his way to surrender himself to the authorities.

The persecution of Church clergy in history, such as the hundreds of thousands of priests guillotined in the French or Bolshevik revolutions, showed some compelling fanatical revolutionary ideology, such as uprooting the society of Church elistism, that drove the killing.

Today, the priest killer is a machine that whirls when turned on by a mastermind or paying clientele. It’s all about getting paid. The murders were cold as ice, brutal, swift and without any qualms or conscience — senseless.

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