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This clip shows Father Brian Gore, who was a Columban missionary on Negros Island in the Philippines during the dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos. Gore explains that the Marcos regime used fear to keep the people on the island powerless. He describes how he and his fellow missionaries tried to empower the peasant farmers to bring about change in society. The clip shows an interview with Gore and footage of a farmer who became a leader in this movement for social justice. The farmer is shown using an ox and plough to till the soil while his wife and daughter walk behind him adding fertiliser and seed.

Educational value points

• Father Brian Gore trained as a Columban priest and was sent to the Philippines after his ordination in 1969. Gore had a conservative Catholic background, but after witnessing the brutality of the Marcos regime (1965–86) and the injustices experienced by peasant farmers on the island of Negros, who were exploited by wealthy sugar-plantation owners, he came to believe that the Catholic Church had a duty to support the poor and dispossessed in their struggle for social justice. As a foreigner he was often able to attract international media coverage of these issues.

• People on Negros were kept in a state of fear during Marcos’s repressive regime. Negros is the main area of sugarcane production in the Philippines and during Marcos’s rule the military often used brutal means to uphold the interests of wealthy landowners. For example, some small farmers who refused to hand over their land were murdered by military death squads. Opponents of Marcos were imprisoned, tortured and murdered; civil liberties were curtailed; and the military was given the power to search, arrest and detain civilians at will.

• Father Gore advocates a form of Christianity that includes non-violent activism against social injustice and exploitation. He believes that 'Christianity is radical, ... and it is not the job of priests to be hijacked by conservatives whose main goal is to use Catholicism as a weapon of social control’ (www.catholic-life.co.uk). In Negros he and his fellow missionaries promoted church teachings on social justice and spoke out against the Marcos government and the hypocrisy of plantation owners who made substantial donations to the Church but refused to pay their workers fair wages.

• During the 1980s Father Gore was involved in establishing Basic Christian Communities (BCCs), which provided pastoral care, particularly in rural provinces where there were no priests. BCCs were led by trained deacons. In addition to providing pastoral care, BCCs organised rallies and strikes to demand fairer wages and conditions, and engaged in acts of non-violent resistance. For example, if a plantation owner tried to illegally seize land from a peasant farmer, hundreds of people would prevent him by occupying the land.

• In 1982 Father Gore, Irish missionary Father Niall O’Brien, Filipino priest Father Vicente Dangan and six BCC laypeople were arrested on charges of murder and sedition. The Negros Nine, as they came to be known, were accused of murdering the local mayor and collaborating with the Maoist New People’s Army. They spent six months in prison before international pressure forced the charges to be dropped. The case was designed to silence the priests and discredit the BCCs by linking them to Marxist groups, but it actually focused world attention on the situation in the Philippines.

• About 80 per cent of Filipinos belong to the Catholic faith, which was introduced to the Philippines in the 16th century by Spanish colonists. The dominance of Catholicism means that priests are very influential in the community. Father Gore was able to use this influence to mobilise the community to take charge of their lives.

Father Brian Gore is being interviewed.
Father Brian Gore We realised that fear was the greatest tool, if you like, or the weapon of a dictatorship. Keep people in fear and you’ve got them powerless. So having realised that ourselves in our own life, and the circumstances, we had to sort of help to empower people to overcome that fear. So it was a very constant and sort of a thing that we tried to do all the time was to not show fear ourselves and always put on a brave front. You know, it became habit after a while. People would say, ‘Oh, you’re going to be picked up, Father.” I’d say, 'Oh, let them pick us up, you know?’ It was sort of contagious, empowering people not to be frightened because we realised that fear was the greatest weapon.

Binong, a farmer, is using an ox and plough to till the soil while his wife and daughter walk behind him adding fertiliser and seed.
Father Gore (voice-over) Binong is one of the leaders that emerged from the program we started through education of human dignity and organisation. We realised that one thing that the poor people didn’t have was any sense of self-worth, that they were powerless. They didn’t feel that they had had the capacity to bring about the change. If there was going to be any change in society, then they had to be organised in order to bring about that change. And Binong was one of the many that surfaced as new leaders within this new church. We became very close friends, especially over our problems with the sugar planter who ran the hacienda which he was working, and over the years, because of that struggle that they’ve had to survive, we’ve become very close.