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CBCP exec: Red-tagging Catholic universities is ridiculous
By JOVILAND RITA,GMA NewsAn official of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines slammed the claims of the anti-insurgency task force that some Catholic schools are recruitment haven for communist groups.
In a press conference on Thursday, CBCP vice president Bishop Pablo Virgilio S. David said the red-tagging [campaign] of security agencies are becoming worrisome.
“We heard also about the Catholic universities that had been called the breeding ground for communist. It was really ridiculous,” David said.
“We're glad that these universities bonded together and came up with a collective statement in order to question that kind of red-tagging,” he added.
National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) spokesperson Lieutenant General Antonio Parlade Jr. recently identified schools that the military has tagged as among the initially 18 learning institutions that are hotbeds of recruitment for Communist Party of the Philippines – New People’s Army.
Later on, the NTF-ELCAC updated the list to 38
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The schools already denied Parlade's claims.
During the recent plenary assembly of the CBCP, David said that members have discussed the issue of red-tagging in the country.
He said that a group of bishops in Western Visayas shared their own pastoral statement about the killings in their region, which they said were connected to red-tagging.
“They shared their pastoral statement to us. It had to do with the killings happening in the Western Visayas region. Much of which are also related to red-tagging,” David said.
“We expressed our solidarity with our brother bishops,” he added.
According to David, this action of authorities is one of the reasons the CBCP opposed the Anti-Terror Law, which he called an exaggeration of response to threat of terrorism that compromises human rights. —LBG, GMA News