Jaime Sin

Jaime Sin: The Cardinal Who Called a Million People

On the night of 22 February 1986 a voice came over Radio Veritas that most of Manila could identify within three words. "This is Cardinal Sin speaking," it said. "Please come. Lend your support to Enrile and Ramos and protect them." Within seventy-two hours something close to a million Filipinos had put their bodies on a highway between three hundred mutinous soldiers and the tanks sent to crush them. Nobody fired. Ferdinand Marcos left the country on 25 February. It remains the most consequential radio broadcast in Philippine history, and it was made by a fifty-seven-year-old priest who had spent the previous decade insisting he was not a politician.

The Fourteenth of Sixteen

Jaime Lachica Sin was born on 31 August 1928 in New Washington, in the province of Aklan, the fourteenth of sixteen children. His father, Juan Sin, was a merchant of Chinese descent; his mother, Máxima Lachica, was Aklanon and devout, and her son stayed close to her all his life. The family called him Jim, or Ame. He entered St Vincent Ferrer Seminary at twelve and was ordained on 3 April 1954, at twenty-five, for the Diocese of Capiz.

Father Ame

He spent three years as a missionary among peasant communities, where the name Father Ame stuck, and then a decade building an institution: from 1957 he was founding rector of St Pius X Seminary, and simultaneously its principal, dean, professor and a diocesan consultant. John XXIII made him a domestic prelate in 1960. The ascent that followed was extraordinarily fast. Titular bishop of Obba and auxiliary of Jaro in February 1967; apostolic administrator of Jaro from 1970; Archbishop of Jaro in 1972; and on 21 January 1974, at forty-five, Archbishop of Manila — only the third native Filipino ever to hold the see. Paul VI made him a cardinal on 24 May 1976. At forty-seven he was the youngest member of the College of Cardinals.

Critical Collaboration

He inherited the archdiocese two years into martial law, and the position he devised for it was deliberately double-edged. He called it "critical collaboration": the Church would work with the state where the state behaved, and reserve the right to say so loudly when it did not. "Separation should not necessarily mean isolation," he argued. Critics on both sides found the formula slippery, which was rather the point — it let him keep a line open to Malacañang while refusing to bless it.

The line moved on 24 August 1974, when soldiers raided the Jesuit novitiate at Novaliches and arrested the Jesuit provincial by mistake. Sin answered with a protest Mass at Manila Cathedral and a pastoral letter that amounted to his first outright denunciation of the Marcos government. From that point the collaboration was mostly critical.

The Voice on Radio Veritas

On 22 February 1986, weeks after a stolen election, Sin learned that Defence Minister Juan Ponce Enrile was about to break with Marcos. He went to his private chapel, prayed, drafted a statement and telephoned Radio Veritas. He then returned to Villa San Miguel and stayed there in prayer through four days, having been told an order existed for his arrest.

What made the appeal work was not novelty but authority. He was asking a Catholic country to walk unarmed toward armour on the word of its archbishop, and priests and nuns led the crowds that answered. After Corazon Aquino was sworn in, Sin revised his doctrine to "critical solidarity" — a warmer phrase for the same reserved right. He opposed the return of Marcos's remains, pushed agrarian reform and attacked economic policy shaped by the International Monetary Fund.

Kingmaker

He was less warm to what came after. He called Fidel Ramos a "Marcos clone" and fought him over population policy, national identity cards and constitutional amendment. In August 1994 he put hundreds of thousands on the street against a government campaign to promote condoms and pills.

Then in January 2001, with Joseph Estrada's impeachment trial collapsing after prosecutors walked out, Sin told the president he had "lost the moral authority to govern," summoned a prayer rally to the EDSA Shrine and declared: "We know in our hearts that the president is guilty." Estrada resigned; Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was sworn in with Sin standing beside her. He had now unmade two presidents from the same stretch of road. Critics called the second one an unconstitutional power grab by the Catholic Church, and the charge has never gone away.

The More, the Merrier

Sin's public warmth was a political instrument in its own right — the jokes, the mission-priest manner, the readiness to be photographed with anyone. His doctrinal positions were unbending: he opposed artificial contraception absolutely, said condoms were "only fit for animals," and when pressed on Philippine population growth replied, "The more, the merrier." He also opposed capital punishment and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He built as well as denounced, founding the Domus Mariae Foundation for social housing in 1983 and the Lorenzo Mission Institute in 1987 to train priests for Chinese-Filipino communities. He voted in both conclaves of 1978, and was said to have predicted the election of Albino Luciani.

Why Jaime Is Called a Genius

The gift was political timing of a rare kind, exercised through an institution rather than a party. Sin understood something no Philippine politician of his generation understood as well: that in a country where the Church reached every barangay, moral authority was a mobilisation technology, and that it could only be spent a few times before it stopped working. He held it in reserve through twelve years of martial law behind the ambiguous shield of "critical collaboration," and then, on one night in February 1986, spent it all at once in two sentences. The judgement was operational as much as moral — he read the Enrile defection correctly within hours, understood that unarmed crowds were the only asset that could neutralise armour, and knew his own voice was the only instrument that could summon them.

The counter-case is that he could not stop. The Philippine Church-affairs writer Nelson Navarro put it bluntly after his death: "He was correct in taking the Church to tackle the issues of the day. But he got enamoured with power and became a power broker." Where 1986 confronted a dictatorship, 2001 removed an elected president mid-trial, and many Filipinos regard EDSA II as a precedent that damaged the constitutional order Sin had helped restore. His absolutism on contraception, imposed on one of the poorest and fastest-growing populations in Asia, is defended by few outside the Church. And "genius" in his case is not intellectual — he left no theology of consequence. It is the genius of a man who knew exactly what he had, and exactly when to use it.

Legacy

Sin retired on 15 September 2003, worn down by kidney disease, heart trouble and diabetes, and died of kidney failure at Cardinal Santos Medical Center on 21 June 2005, aged seventy-six. Arroyo declared national mourning and a state funeral; on 28 June, after a Mass attended by thousands, he was buried in the crypt of Manila Cathedral. He held the Philippine Legion of Honor, the Order of Sikatuna and the Order of Lakandula, along with honorary doctorates from Yale, Georgetown, Notre Dame and Boston College, among dozens of others. A museum in New Washington marks the house he came from. Forty years on, Filipinos still argue about what he did — which is the surest sign that it mattered.