For President Rodrigo Duterte, all Catholic priests and bishops are “stupid.”
“Is there an intelligent priest? They are all stupid. If they aren’t stupid, they wouldn’t enter [the] priesthood,” Duterte said in a speech in Negros Occidental on Friday. “You are a man, but you chose to be a priest. You keep on looking at all the beautiful women that you can’t court. My God.”
The President attacked religious officials for failing to observe the separation of Church and State.
“The priests shouldn’t overstep their boundaries. You know that they started it first. Tell them that there is a separation of Church and State. The sons of b****** attack me in the pulpit using the religion,” Duterte said.
“If you are a priest and you want to attack me, don’t do it in the pulpit because this is the spokesman, the table of the church. Step away from it… Because if you do, when I retaliate, the church will be hit as well. And that is what happened,” he said.
Duterte recalled an instance where a priest supposedly prayed for his death as a Mass was being held in support of the President’s outspoken critic, Senator Antonio Trillanes IV.
In December 2018, the President hit back the Catholic Church, urging loiterers and drug addicts to rob and kill rich Catholic bishops. Duterte surmised that some priests became rich from taking the donations from the people.
Two months after the President’s verbal attacks, Archbishop Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle informed the President about the death threats received by clergymen. Duterte then retracted his previous statement, calling on the public not to take his verbal attacks against clergymen too seriously.
But on Friday, his anti-church rhetoric resurfaced.
“If a priest dies, the first person they point their fingers at is me. You started it. I’ll hit you, that is your problem,” he said.
The Palace insists that the President’s remarks were not to blame for the threats against priests.
The President also expressed doubts about the concept of “original sin” in the Bible’s creation story cited in the book of Genesis.
“That’s not God’s handiwork. That’s not the real story of how earth came to be. Would you do that? And from then on, everyone who will be born into this world will be born with the original sin. Nah, you’ve been had. It was just Adam and Eve who had sex there. So why are we all born with the original sin? What did I do wrong?” he said.
Duterte, who previously said he does not believe in heaven and hell, urged others to do the same.
“Don’t believe in heaven and hell. They only use that to scare you. The nomadic tribes in the desert, some time 3,000 years ago, may be smarter than us,” he said.
“That is what they used to scare us, the concept of hell. They say that if you go there when you die, you will burn. You will burn in hell. But if you are kind, you will go to heaven,” he added.
In the same speech, the President also told women to avoid the priests.
“The women should refrain from going near the priests because when you are near him, he will just smell the scent of your body. And if he corners you in the church, you’re dead, he will court you. Do you know why? It’s because he is a man,” the President added, saying that it is in the nature of the priests, as men, to feel affection towards women.
“God gave him a penis. What will they do with that? Will they slap it against the door every morning? But he created a woman. The woman has a vagina. So that’s it, the end. Yes, that’s true. Frankly speaking. I’m not joking with you. Right? If he didn’t create a woman”•what for?”
Duterte issued this latest remark on women as the country celebrated the International Women’s Day.
READ: Duterte takes up cudgels for priests