On Dec. 7, 2024, during the public consistory for the creation of new cardinals at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, Bishop Pablo Virgilio David achieved a number of firsts.
He became the first Filipino non-archbishop to be elevated to the cardinalate and the first from his suburban diocese of Kalookan to receive the red hat.
He is also the first sitting president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) to become a “Prince of the Church,” as three of his predecessors, Julio Rosales, Jaime Sin, and Ricardo Vidal, became cardinals first before being elected by their brother-bishops to lead the episcopal conference.
But the 65-year-old native of Betis, Pampanga chafes at the idea of having princely status, complete with scarlet regalia and being addressed as “Your Eminence,” a title and dignity instituted by Pope Urban VIII in 1630.
“I mean, I’m honestly scandalized by that. It’s one of the things I wish mawala sa Simbahan (will be gone from the Church),” David told CBCP News.
The second cardinal from Pampanga after Rufino Santos, the first Filipino cardinal, David prefers his moniker “Ambo” paired with “Apu,” Kapampangan for grandfather.
The shock of Pope Francis’ Oct. 6 announcement of his latest picks for cardinal was still fresh during the sit-down interview at the newly renovated basement library of the Pontificio Collegio Filippino, home of Filipino clergy enrolled in Roman universities.
He was in Rome to lead the country’s delegation to the “Synod on Synodality,” the important month-long assembly that sought to craft a path forward for Church reforms, when he received news that he would become the tenth cardinal to come from the Philippines.
The CBCP president had made a mark during the synod, which called for a more inclusive way of making decisions in an otherwise hierarchical organization where parish priests and the diocesan bishops above them often had the last word. The synod defined “synodality” as the “walking together of Christians with Christ and towards God’s Kingdom, in union with all humanity.”
David acknowledges that he will have to get used to protocols and ceremonials as Pope Francis has, not just as a spiritual but also a temporal leader who regularly receives heads of state and other dignitaries at the Apostolic Palace.
Technically, cardinals outrank everyone except emperors, kings, and crown princes, according to James-Charles Noonan Jr., who wrote the book on Church protocol.
Bible professor to bishop
Schooled by the Jesuits at Ateneo de Manila, the theologians of Leuven in Flanders, and the French Dominicans at École Biblique in Jerusalem, David had settled to a life of scholarship as a Bible professor in the Archdiocese of San Fernando, in his province of Pampanga.
Pope Benedict XVI, however, appointed him auxiliary bishop in 2006, starting the chain of events that would see David rise in prominence in the universal Church.
The auxiliary role allowed him to keep teaching seminary bible courses, specializing in the Old Testament, but not for long.
“Kenosis,” the motto on David’s coat of arms, seemed a portent of things to come. It means one’s self-emptying to receive God’s will.
David said former nuncio to the Philippines Fernando Filoni, now a cardinal, once explained that the cross that bishops sign before their names means “you’re good as dead the moment you accept being a bishop.”
Ten years later, David became the second bishop of Kalookan, putting him in the center of the ministry of the urban poor that years later, gave him an enriched perspective on marginalized sectors at the Synod on Synodality.
In 2019, David came at the receiving end of then-president Rodrigo Duterte’s fulminations, and along with three other bishops, was accused of sedition and other charges (eventually dropped for lack of basis).
The bishop, steeped in social activism from his student days when he opposed the Marcos dictatorship, had become the staunchest critic of Duterte’s bloody war on drugs, whose victims were mostly from the poor.
In 2017, he buried Kian Loyd delos Santos, the Kalookan youth who became Exhibit A of extrajudicial killings carried out by Duterte-enabled police. Seventeen-year-old Kian’s death enraged well-meaning Filipinos and turned the tide of public opinion against the drug war.
David received death threats. “That’s really our calling. Hindi naman sa gusto naming magpakamatay o magpaka-martir. But we will not run away from danger,” he said.
Support poured from all over, including from the southern Italian commune of Guardialfiera, David’s titular see when he became auxiliary bishop.
Bishops are always in-charge of a pastoral territory upon their consecration, and if not assigned to shepherd an actual diocese, are given a titular see, an ancient see that had been suppressed.
But the Christian community surrounding the cathedral of Guardialfiera still exists. In 1998, it mourned the assassination of one of its former titular bishops, Juan Jose Gerardi, a human rights defender who had investigated civilian deaths in Guatemala’s civil war. It was not about to lose another titular bishop.
“They wrote, and they were saying, ‘Please take care of yourself. Because we know what happened to our previous bishop. And he died a martyr,’” David recalled.
Guardialfiera has never had a cardinal either as a residential or titular see. It’s another first for David.
Cardinal-priest
Now that he’s a cardinal, David has been assigned a titular church in the Diocese of Rome, the Church of the Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The possession of a Roman church by its cardinal-protector follows tradition that cardinals are part of the Roman clergy, the closest ministers to the pope.
Within the Sacred College of Cardinals, David takes the rank of cardinal-priest, usually given to diocesan bishops. It’s one notch above cardinal-deacon, given to heads of Vatican offices, called dicasteries, but below cardinal-bishop, a rank that signifies a pope’s “additional respect and esteem,” according to Noonan.
Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle, who was plucked from Manila archdiocese to become pro-prefect at the Dicastery for Evangelization, was co-opted to the order of cardinal-bishops in 2020.
For now, David expects to stay put at San Roque Cathedral in Kalookan, an unusual situation in which there will be two red hats within one ecclesiastical province.
The Kalookan see was erected in 2003, carved out of Manila which was split into a number of dioceses in the waning years of Cardinal Sin. While Kalookan remains a suffragan diocese to the Archdiocese of Manila, David is on equal footing with Jose Cardinal Advincula, the metropolitan archbishop who is also a cardinal-priest.
There are no special assignments yet for David, apart from being a member of a council tasked to implement the synodal process.
“I would presuppose that I just stay in Kalookan, and continue to serve as bishop of the local church of Kalookan. But being a cardinal gives you a certain stature,” he said.
“It’s something on top of my office as bishop of Kalookan, as president of the conference of bishops, and as vice president of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences,” he added.
But his mission is now profoundly tied to that of the pope. This is the second time Francis has changed his life, David pointed out, the first instance being his appointment to Kalookan.
“Santo Padre, usted ha cambiado mi vida otra vez,” David blurted to the pope one morning before the opening of a synod assembly in October.
Bridge to heaven
David stressed that he, like the pope, remains a bishop, the formal term for which is “pontiff.” Pontiff comes from the Latin “pontifex,” meaning “bridge-builder.”
The pope is “pontifex maximus” or the supreme bridge-builder who takes after Christ, the “primary bridge between God and humankind.”
David cites his favorite Old Testament passage, Genesis 28, in which Jacob dreams of a stairway connecting heaven and earth, where angels ascend and descend. The Lord stands on top of this stairway.
This symbolism, according to Noonan, is also rooted in the early Latin terms from which the word “cardinal” is derived: carda and cardinis, which can mean a “hinge” but more accurately, “pivot” or “tenon.”
“Upon this pivot, which is a small nail-like device, symbolically hangs the relationship between Heaven and Earth, between Christ and His Church on Earth. The stem of this pivot is the Sacred College. The pivot’s head is the pope, who, together with the College, serve the Church as her guardians on Earth,” writes Noonan in “The Church Visible: The Ceremonial Life and Protocol of the Roman Catholic Church.”
David, priest-scholar, shepherd, leading advocate of synodality in the Church, and now cardinal, would like to extend this bridgeway to the rest of humanity that is fraught with political, social, and economic divisions.
“If he (Christ) is the bridge, then we all have to be bridge-builders ourselves. Binagtas ng Panginoon ang malaking agwat ng langit at lupa para tayo matutong bagtasin din ang mga malalaking agwat sa lahat (The Lord crossed over the huge chasm between heaven and earth so we can also learn to cross the huge gaps that separate all of us),” he said.
