Almost a martyred hero—Rev. Edgar Saguinsin
I was reminiscing earlier this evening about an incident when I was a child—which led to thoughts about the people who cared for my family during those early years. Then I thought about my childhood church and the priest who appeared at its doorstep the same year I was born.
His name was Rev. Edgar S.A. Saguinsin of Bacolod, Philippines.
Father Edgar, who was always welcome in our home, would later baptize my brother and cousins and bury my grandmother—and be a figure of awe as he offered spiritual counsel and love to my household.
I was too young to understand his story and only recently became aware of what the elders already knew of him.
He was an exile.
He was an agitator.
He was called a Communist and Marxist.
He was tortured and beaten in dungeons and hidden police-state facilities,
He was hooked up to electrical wires that were cranked to give him excruciating shocks in intimate parts of his body.
He was forced to exile in order to survive.
This is all because he dared to speak truth to power—attempting to hold leaders and corrupt officials to account.
This is all because, he saw the injustice of sugarcane workers in his home province being abused and imperiled to a state close to feudal serfdom—and organized those workers.
Father Edgar received the blessing of his like-minded but ever-so-brave bishop of Bacolod, the late Most Rev. Antonio Fortich, to start the National Federation of Sugarcane Workers.
He organized. He wrote. He wrote a lot.
He spoke. He spoke a lot. He spoke to growing numbers of workers.
He was arrested for unionizing against the hacenderos—the sugar planters and the companies who profited from near-slave labor—writing and speaking about them.
To unionize and freely protest in words was to critique the powers of injustice.
To call out injustice was sedition.
Sedition was treason.
Treason was to be met with violent death. Or at least the threat of it.
He was arrested, tortured, and released three times.
I took for granted all those times I wrote articles about marriage equality and LGBTQ civil rights—words published and received attention and reaction from politicians—and was never made to suffer the indignity of being kidnapped, stripped naked, forced to prostrate on bare dirt floors in a hidden shack, have wires clipped to my nipples and penis, and endure hours of electric shocks coursing through my body. I never had to suffer direct threats of death for my words.
Father Edgar is a true saint for having to endure near-martyrdom just for standing up for people that needed defense—for choosing to stand his ground on the right side of human rights, the right side of history.
His experience pales against what we think is oppression.
After two People Power revolutions in the Philippines, Father Edgar finally returned to the Philippines and his home diocese. He continued to serve the poor—following the example of his mentor, Bishop Fortich.
And then he was struck by stroke—bedridden for years. He lived in a nursing home with few visits from family—a whole different kind of torture, or rather, a whole different kind of exile.
I don’t think I could face such things with the bravery Father Edgar has shown. I could only wish to have a small amount of the bravery he had—or has.
Father Edgar is one of my heroes.
