[The Wide Shot] Cardinal Ambo David, the shepherd who wore red

Hours before he joined the College of Cardinals, Kalookan Bishop Pablo Virgilio “Ambo” David made a 1,077-word post on Facebook about that “red day.” 

On Saturday, December 7, Pope Francis led a consistory that formally made him, along with 20 others, a cardinal of the Catholic Church.

A cardinal is a high-ranking clergyman tasked to advise the Pope and, if under the age of 80, to one day elect his successor. In the nearly 1.4-billion-strong Catholic Church, there are only 253 cardinals, of whom 140 are “cardinal electors” who can join a papal election.

What did this mean for the 10th cardinal in Philippine history?

In his Facebook post on Saturday, David focused on the color of a cardinal’s vestments — red — a symbol of willingness to shed blood for the Catholic faith.

“Red is a dangerous color,” David wrote in a November 2020 homily for Red Wednesday, which he reshared on Saturday.

The bishop said, however, that “it is not right to equate red with just suffering and death” as this “tends to be too morbid and pessimistic.”

“Red is also the color of Valentine’s Day, is it not? And so it is also the color of love,” David explained. “Red is about being ready for the consequences of loving as Jesus has loved us, including suffering and death, if necessary.”

Red, the color of martyrs, is a color he had worn even before he became Cardinal David.

David, 65, is a bishop known for criticizing Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs and defending human rights victims. He even received death threats in early 2019, and said Duterte “was the first to pose a grave threat” to his life by suggesting he was a drug addict. 

Shrugging off threats to his security, David said in a 2017 interview, “Well, if I fear for my life, I shouldn’t have been a priest or bishop.” Shedding blood, in other words, is part of a shepherd’s job.

The new Filipino cardinal shows the kind of courage we need from bishops and priests, at a time when rights are threatened and people are afraid to speak. 

‘The Lord has a plan’

I first met Bishop Ambo, as he is fondly called, in a church conference in 2015 and went on to cover him starting 2016, when he became bishop of Kalookan.

The Diocese of Kalookan had not been as newsworthy as the archdioceses of Manila and Cebu, especially when the politically outspoken Manila Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin and Cebu Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal were still in office.

The Diocese of Kalookan is a territory of 1.33 million Catholics in the southern part of Caloocan, Malabon, and Navotas. 

It is a relatively young diocese, having been carved out of the Archdiocese of Manila in 2003. 

But the diocese started making headlines a year after Duterte took office, when cops murdered 17-year-old Kian Loyd delos Santos on August 16, 2017.

David sheltered Delos Santos’ family in the aftermath of the killing, and condemned how Duterte’s drug war has turned his diocese into a “killing field.”

From that time on, the Kalookan bishop turned into one of the strongest voices against Duterte’s abuses. 

This surprised church watchers, who had known David more as a biblical scholar — holding a theology doctorate from Belgium’s Catholic University of Louvain, no less — than as a bishop at loggerheads with the government. 

On national issues, David kept a relatively low profile when he was auxiliary bishop of San Fernando in his native Pampanga, from 2006 until 2015. 

There’s also the context of his place of origin. Pampanga is a devoutly Catholic province where parishioners, according to the late Rappler investigative reporter Aries Rufo, “revere their priests to the point of spoiling them.” This is not to say that David was spoiled, but the context isn’t one that frequently puts clergy at odds with people in power.

Perhaps, as prominent lawyer Tony La Viña said in an interview in 2017, “there must be a plan” behind David’s installation as Kalookan bishop. 

La Viña, a devout Catholic who, like David, was educated by Ateneo’s Jesuits, said the bishop could have been assigned to “safer” dioceses, but “why was he put in Kalookan?”

“The Lord has a plan to put him there,” La Viña told me. “There is for me a clear sign, a clear plan, to protect the flock.”

Following Maximilian Kolbe, Oscar Romero

Protecting the flock, indeed, is David’s priority, and he is not afraid. 

In our interview in 2017, I asked David, “Do you have a role model in your ministry — a saint or a priest — who gives you strength especially now?” 

“There are many: Maximilian Kolbe, Oscar Romero…. Pope Francis himself is a great role model,” he said in Filipino.

Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan priest who was martyred for helping the Jews during World War II. He died on August 14, 1941, and was canonized or formally declared a Catholic saint on October 10, 1982, under Pope John Paul II. 

Oscar Romero was an archbishop in El Salvador who was assassinated while celebrating Mass on March 24, 1980. A critic of violence during his country’s civil war, he was canonized on October 14, 2018, under Francis, the first Latin American pontiff. 

“Why Maximilian Kolbe and Oscar Romero?” I asked David.

The bishop said it was because Kolbe and Romero “dared, really, to offer their lives” and “didn’t mind about their personal security.”

David explained: “Martyrdom is witnessing. It’s not about dying. I’m not obsessed about dying, I would like to live to the full. But witnessing to the Gospel, witnessing to the truth, is something that can cost you your life. So that’s part of the hazards.”

“When these things come,” the bishop said, “the Lord will probably say, ‘I beg your pardon, I didn’t promise you a rose garden.’”

David’s definition of martyrdom speaks volumes for a world on fire. 

Red, it turns out, is not only for cardinals. It is for all of us. – Rappler.com

The Wide Shot is a Sunday column on religion and public life. If you have suggested topics or feedback, let us know in the faith chat room of the Rappler Communities app.