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missionary priests mainly from Ireland, the United States, Australia and New Zealand - who are doing all they can to fight plans for a major expansion in open-cast mining funded by foreign investment.
The Columbans say that mining for gold and other minerals has already destroyed houses and rice fields, polluted rivers and streams and threatened mangrove forests and coral reefs. They fear further work on the scale envisaged would rob indigenous people in re¬mote areas of their ancestral lands. The bish¬ops of the Philippines have also taken a united and powerful stand against the mining pro¬posals, stating, “The right to life of people is inseparable from their right to sources of food and livelihood. Allowing the interests of big mining corporations to prevail over people’s rights to these sources amounts to violating their right to life.” It is notable and impres¬sive that the Church is standing strongly along¬side tribes, who follow a traditional religion that reveres nature, without striving to con¬vert them and showing full respect for their sacred stories and rituals.
I had never visited the Philippines and had no plans to do so but my friendship with a parish priest in London led me to meet Fr Frank Nally. Fr Nally had previously served in the Philippines and first told me about the problem of mining. In early 2006 he came to see me and said that things were getting worse, with smaller companies applying for licences to mine in remote and ecologically fragile areas that were sacred to the local peo¬ple. These applications, he said, are being en¬couraged by the Philippines Government and the World Bank, which say that a mining re¬vival will bring prosperity to a country strug¬gling with debt and poverty
Last month, accompanied by Fr Nally, I was able to see for myself what was hap¬pening. We visited Mindanao, a southerly island of great beauty and many mining applications. From the 1960s onwards, settlers from other is¬lands had been encouraged to come to Mindanao and the indigenous population had been pushed inland, living with the forests denuded by il¬legal logging and dependent on the gifts of nature that surround their sa¬cred mountains.
Our first meeting was with a group of local people gathered by a Catholic project including a tribal leader who was awarded title to his ancestral do¬main by two presidents. He told us that he had been prevented from entering his land by a mining company, TVI Resource Development Philippines (TVIRD), an affil¬iate of the Canadian firm TVI Pacific. We also met a family who told us that their house and rice fields had been bulldozed from beneath them and showed us pictures of what had hap¬pened. Later the diminutive but vigorous Bish¬op Jose Manguiran of the Diocese of Dipolog spelled out his deep anger at the company’s action and his determination that the tribal leader’s authority should be acknowledged. He also said that he planned to make it clear to the authorities that Mass should not be said within the mining area as a mark of the disapproval of what was happening.
On our second day in Mindanao we left early for Mass in Midsalip where Fr Frank was previously parish priest The service took place in a big, open-sided church. Instead of a sermon, Fr Nally and I
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