Palace: Duterte ‘not serious’ in remark blaming priest in Benguet church collapse

Malacañang on Monday defended President Rodrigo Duterte's remarks apparently blaming the priest for the collapse of a church in landslide-hit Itogon town in Benguet after Typhoon Ompong barreled through Northern Luzon over the weekend.

Duterte's spokesperson, Harry Roque, said he believes the President did not mean what he said.

"Ang tingin ko naman po hindi naman po seryoso ang Presidente. Let us not take his word always literally," Roque told reporters in Benguet.

Speaking at a briefing on the assessment of Ompong's damage in Cagayan on Sunday, Duterte said the building would not have collapsed had they replaced the priest. He also called priests stupid.

Roque, however, said the building that collapsed was being used by the United Church of Christ in the Philippines, which belongs to the Protestant denomination.

"It is not a Catholic church,"  Roque, a UCCP member, said. 

Duterte had earlier said he respects the Catholic Church even as he has developed the habit of bringing up supposed misdeeds of clergymen in response to the church's criticism of the rising death toll in the administration's war on drugs and killings of priests.

The President, in a speech on August 30, vowed to help uncover the sexual abuses by priests in the Philippines amid allegations of a Catholic Church coverup on sex abuse in the United States.

Duterte himself claimed he was sexually abused by an American priest when he was a young student in Davao City. — RSJ, GMA News