Published December 2, 2005
Two distant archdioceses celebrate a year of partnership
In Cotabato City on the Philippine island of Mindanao, Maria Ida "Deng" Giguiento grew up hearing the chiming of Catholic church bells alongside the daily Muslim call to prayer filtering through city’s streets at dawn.
Giguiento, who still lives and works for the Catholic Church on Mindanao, feels totally comfortable in both settings, Muslim and Christian, she told parishioners during a recent visit to the Anchorage Archdiocese.
Giguiento works for Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops’ international development agency. She’s a dynamo in the church’s efforts to build lasting peace in the Philippines and East Timor — places that have been marred by civil strife and war in recent years.
Giguiento’s Nov. 4-13 visit to Southcentral Alaska parishes, schools and other Catholic groups aimed to further cultivate the "global solidarity partnership" between the Anchorage Archdiocese and her Cotabato Archdiocese on Mindanao. The year-old partnership, facilitated by Catholic Relief Services, is like a long-distance relationship between two friends, she said.
Her Nov. 6 visit to Anchorage’s St. Anthony Parish, featuring Mass and a celebration afterward with Filipino food and dancing, marked the first anniversary of the signing of the solidarity partnership by Cotabato Archbishop Orlando Quevedo and Anchorage Archbishop Roger Schwietz, who had traveled to Mindanao with seven laypeople from the Anchorage Archdiocese.
Giguiento commended the Anchorage Archdiocese for this "concrete act of solidarity" with Filipino people and said that the partnership’s meaningfulness depends on the participation of the people of both places.
Based in the Mindanao city of Davao, Giguiento, 50, is project officer for Catholic Relief Services’ Peace and Reconciliation program on the island, and a facilitator at the Mindanao Peacebuilding Institute, which trains youth groups, church organizations, village elders and entire nongovernmental organizations to become catalysts for peace. They learn how to mediate conflict, repair relationships and advocate for change nonviolently.
After witnessing violence and armed conflict in her homeland and in East Timor, the tiny half-island that seceded from Indonesia in 1999, Giguiento said building peace through Catholic Relief Services is the "answer to my dreams — blending my passion for change and my faith."
In 1999, she was on loan from Catholic Relief Services Philippines working in East Timor, a former Portuguese colony and overwhelmingly Catholic country, as a special aide to Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo of Dili. The bishop, co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, had called for a democratic referendum to decide whether East Timor would remain a part of Indonesia or split from the country that had invaded East Timor since 1975.
Some 300,000 people had been killed or died of starvation during the occupation.
The Catholic Church’s justice and peace commission was the only group allowed by the Indonesian government to monitor the U.N.-sponsored referendum, according to Giguiento.
Because she speaks Tetum, an East Timorese language, Giguiento was able to organize and educate hundreds of catechists, youth leaders, priests and nuns about the referendum and how to monitor the situation and report results.
In recalling the momentous vote for independence, she said she noticed that elders wore their finest clothes as they walked to polling places. When she asked why, she was told they were preparing for death, which in the local custom included being buried in elaborate dress.
An old man explained to Giguiento that he expected to be killed for taking part in the vote, but that he was doing it for his grandchildren.
As expected, the vote, in which about 80 percent of East Timorese chose independence, sparked violence.
Victims fled to Bishop Belo’s residence, which was attacked and burned by pro-Indonesian forces, forcing the bishop to flee. Giguiento hid 50 refugees in her own home until she, too, was evacuated with other foreigners by an Australian SWAT team. From inside a SWAT car, she watched "the burning, the dead people and the looting" in the streets.
From Australia, Giguiento immediately began organizing relief efforts and promised the East Timorese and Bishop Belo that they would return and rebuild.
When it was relatively safe, she went back to the new nation and stayed to promote peace and teach reconciliation until April last year when she returned to the Philippines.
Following the large-scale, scorched-earth campaign led by the Indonesian military in 1999, East Timor’s infrastructure was in ruins. Approximately 1,300 people had been killed and 300,000 more displaced.
"In their struggle for independence, the church played a key role," Giguiento told one of her Anchorage audiences. "Bishop Belo was often at the forefront of lobbying for the freedom of his people. He was the voice in the wilderness."
In Giguiento’s home country, frequent battles have raged between Muslim liberation fighters and Philippine government forces on Mindanao. The factions have been fighting since the 1970s, in the process killing 100,000 people and leaving more than a million displaced. Since 1997 Mindanao has seen four major armed conflicts.
At the root of the conflict are colonization and land issues that began more than a century ago.
In 1900, 75 percent of Mindanao’s residents were Muslims who farmed the island’s rich land alongside indigenous people. Under U.S. rule (1899-1946), Christians from other parts of The Philippines were resettled on Mindanao and given deeds to much of the land.
By 1990, the island’s Muslim population had fallen to 18 percent.
Violence on both sides of the conflict is buoyed by claims of defending religion, Giguiento said.
She saw a Catholic priest rallying Knights of Columbus to take up arms to defend their churches. At a mosque, she listened as a Muslim leader called for a jihad against those who murdered Muslim people and desecrated mosques. A cycle of killing was justified with Scripture from holy books, she said.
But, she added, there is also justification in religion for reconciliation, for acts of reparation, for building a lasting peace.
Peace education efforts are spreading in the southern Philippines. In 1997, after Bishop Benjamin de Jesus was gunned down on the island of Jolo, the church could have closed its headquarters, withdrawn missionaries and left the island.
Instead, Giguiento said, a "peace center" of interreligious dialogue was born at Notre Dame College of Jolo, a Catholic institution where the vast majority of students are Muslim.
With the help of religious leaders, Muslim, Christian and indigenous people of Mindanao, tired of evacuating their villages during wartime and returning to burned out homes and rotting crops, have worked together to convince warring factions to leave them out of the conflict.
A cluster of villages, or barangays, have become a "space for peace" where opposing forces have agreed to pass peacefully without firing a shot, and all children are "zones of peace" that cannot be harmed. Nine more barangays have stepped up to be trained to monitor peace, learn tolerance, and dialogue with people of different religions as a way to mediate conflict and prevent violence.
"When you go to the peace zone, Muslims, Christians and indigenous people live together, work together and decided together that they don’t want to be involved in any war in the future," Giguiento said.
In addition to training the victims of war to advocate for peace, Giguiento has also brought together major leaders of opposing factions.
In 1997 she helped form a "quick response" team made up of five leaders of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, five members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and also priests, Muslim leaders and an international fact finding committee.
When conflict began to escalate, the team was plucked from the sight of the conflict. Catholic Relief Services, a sponsor of the quick response team, rented an entire hotel so unarmed leaders could come together in a neutral place to discover the facts behind the conflict and facilitate their reconciliation.
"They started talking about their families and found out: Oh, my child goes to the same school as your child. They are human," Giguiento said.
The quick response team signed a peace agreement and has evolved into what is now the Coordinating Committee on Cessation of Hostilities.
"That’s why I love CRS (Catholic Relief Services)," Giguiento said. "Imagine — they took the risk" of extracting representatives of warring factions and renting a hotel. "We couldn’t have done that without CRS support."
As the daughter of a politician, Giguiento, grew up being escorted to school by armed bodyguards. She was educated by the Congregation of Religious of the Virgin Mary nuns and Oblate priests in Cotabato City.
The sisters taught her to examine her conscious nightly making sure that she didn’t cause anyone to "commit a sin or cry," she said. You’ll sleep peacefully at night if you shoulder your responsibility to care for others, they told her.
She earned a degree in medical technology from Notre Dame University in Cotabato City and went to work in a Manila hospital, where patients had to pay up front before being treated.
Giguiento pleaded with the administration to make exceptions for the poor. When that didn’t work, she paid their hospital fees out of her own pocket. She frequently owed the hospital money at the end of the month instead of receiving a paycheck.
Witnessing these and other injustices led her toward political activism. In those days, though, Ferdinand Marcos ruled the country under marshal law and people speaking out sometimes "disappeared," she said.
In what Giguiento called an "act of God," American Oblate Bishop Philip Smith appointed Giguiento as the first lay woman ever to coordinate the Cotabato Archdiocese’s justice and peace commission.
"He saw me on the streets, he heard me on the radio. He said that girl is going to get into trouble. … I know what’s in your heart but you’re going the wrong direction," Giguiento remembers him saying.
With Giguiento as coordinator, the archdiocese’s justice and peace commission demonstrated against disappearances of young people and the arrest of priests who, "because they are standing so much on behalf of the people, were called communists," she said.
The church provided legal aid to the poor in land disputes and supported striking workers fighting for better wages.
But disagreement among church leaders about how to handle a dispute between employees of a corporation that was affiliated with the church led Giguiento to seek a "change of atmosphere," she said.
"We can teach and speak justice but the practice of it can be impacted by our own interests," she said.
For a while, Giguiento lived among the poor and learned the Maguindanao dialect, shucking so much corn with the women that she still bears a scarred callous on her finger.
Eventually she went to work for Oblate priests who encouraged her to translate her "revolutionary zeal" into civil society work.
For four years as director of Notre Dame University’s Peace Education Center in Cotabato City, she developed service-learning programs and helped raise awareness about the Muslim victims of armed conflict in the region.
She helped indigenous people draft their own agenda for peace, which was included in the peace accord between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in 1998. She also facilitated dialogue workshops between Catholic and Protestant bishops and Ulamas, Muslim religious leaders.
Giguieneto reflected on her years of working for peace through her archdiocese and through Catholic Relief Services. When she was younger she said she was aware of so many issues of injustice but didn’t see a way to bring about change.
Catholic Relief Services has focused her passions, she said.
"This is perfect," Giguiento said. "We’re working toward change, we’re trying to build God’s heaven here on earth in a way that is very respectful of all people whether you’re bad or you’re good. When you’re bad, you have something in there that’s really good and I’m going to touch that.
"One day they have to understand, they can’t forever kill each other. They can’t forever burn each other’s houses."