Catholics in the Philippines, Southeast Asia’s most Catholic nation, mourn Pope Francis with a special fervor. Pictures of the late pontiff hang on the walls of chapels and cathedrals throughout the archipelago, with families at home glued to live feeds from the Vatican. Churches here have been full since news of Francis’s passing broke on Easter Monday.
Francis, who came from the geographical margins as the first pope born in the New World, spent his whole papacy drawing attention to the marginalized. This was one of the reasons he was especially important for Filipinos. “Poverty is not an accident. It has causes that must be recognized and removed for the good of so many of our brothers and sisters,” Francis said in 2017. Shortly after his election, he declared, “I would love a church that is poor and for the poor.” Such words endeared to him to Catholics in a country where poverty is never far away. In 2024, the United Nations found that nearly half of the Philippines’s population was “food insecure.” The Ibon Foundation found that the country has some of the highest inflation and unemployment in Southeast Asia.
The twelve years of Pope Francis’s pontificate also coincided with the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte and his brutal drug war, waged mainly in the sprawling Filipino slums. The official casualty count of that war is about seven thousand, but independent observers say the real death toll is really closer to thirty thousand.
The leadership of the Filipino Catholic Church opposed the drug war. Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David, the bishop of Kalookan, faced heavy backlash from Duterte’s supporters when he criticized the cruelty of the regime’s anti-narcotics campaign. Pope Francis backed David in 2019, saying, “I am praying for you. Please continue.” Six years later, Duterte is in the custody of the International Criminal Court (ICC), facing charges of crimes against humanity related to the drug war.
Fr. Ben Alforque of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (MSC) is among the convenors of the Rise Up for Life and Rights, an ecumenical coalition supporting drug-war victims. “There is no nook or corner of the Philippines that has not been violated. Therefore, the task is really to transform Philippine society because at the moment, it is not supportive of human rights,” he told me. According to Alforque, the papal office could be “transformative” for the Philippines. “Hopefully, the new pope will pick up where Pope Francis left off.”
Alforque hopes that, with Duterte standing trial at the ICC, justice can finally be achieved for the thousands of families directly affected by the drug war. With human rights again at the forefront of political discourse in the Philippines because of the ICC proceedings, Alforque urges the Filipino public “not to imbibe the dreams of the oppressor and become oppressors themselves.”
Meanwhile, in the wake of Francis’s death, three Filipinos—David, Luis Antonio Tagle, and Jose Advincula—are said to be among the papabili, potential candidates to become the next pope. That means that Filipinos who have been glued to their screens to watch coverage of Pope Francis’s funeral will now likely be just as interested in the conclave.
The Filipino public is understandably excited about the prospect of one of their own becoming the first Asian pope. But for the Filipino clergy who are directly involved in social-justice and human-rights work, it matters less where the new pope comes from than what his priorities are.
Fr. Wilfredo Dulay spent six years as Councilor in the Missionary Disciples of Jesus’ General Council in Rome before returning to the Philippines as its General Coordinator. “The papacy is not about ethnicity. It’s not about nationality. It’s about Christianity,” Dulay told me. “A pope who can fulfil the pastoral needs of the people—that’s what we need.” Dulay believes the legacy of Pope Francis to be primarily a pastoral one, focused on direct service to one’s flock. According to Dulay, pastors ought to avoid politicking and factionalism but cannot shy away from the inherently political act of serving the poor and oppressed.
Kej Andres, chairperson of the Student Christian Movement of the Philippines (SCMP), witnessed Pope Francis’s 2015 visit to the Philippines and felt emboldened by what he saw and heard. When Pope Francis visited the survivors of the devastating Typhoon Haiyan, Andres says he showed himself to be a “beacon of strength.” Echoing the language of Vatican II, Andres says he hopes the next pope will possess “compassion with the ‘joys and hopes’ and ‘fears and anxieties’ of the oppressed and marginalized.” This, he insisted, is the quality the next pope must have if the Church is going to move forward.
Fr. Dulay believes the Church still has a long way to go in implementing the progressive reforms set by the Second Vatican Council. Locally, he points to a practical problem among his fellow priests. Because most Filipino clergy are busy celebrating Masses at understaffed parishes, Dulay says “they have no time to know the situation of the poor, of the sick, of the farmers who are exploited, and so on. And they were not trained to be sensitive to it during the formation of the seminary.” He says the Filipino Church has generally “played [it] safe” in responding to the pope’s demand that priests seek out the marginalized. And despite voicing official opposition to state violence, the Catholic Church in the Philippines is still widely seen as a servant of the status quo. In short, Pope Francis’s call for reform may not have reverberated inside the clerical spaces of the Filipino Church as much as it has within the country’s lay Catholic social movements.
But there are important exceptions. Cardinal Luis Tagle, said to be among the leading candidates for pope, received the families of drug-war victims back in 2017. During Holy Week of that same year, he washed the feet of people from Manila’s poor neighborhoods, including some who had lost family members to Duterte’s drug war. Although Tagle avoided direct confrontation with the Duterte government, his position on its abuses was never in doubt. As a pastor, he sided with the powerless against the powerful. For that reason—and because of his openness to Church reform—some have referred to Tagle as the “Asian Francis.” If he does turn out to be the next pope, Filipinos expect Tagle to do his best to protect Pope Francis’s legacy. Indeed, that’s what they hope for from the next pope whoever he may be and wherever he comes from.
