On Dec. 7, Pope Francis gave the red hat to the Most Rev. Pablo Virgilio Siongco David, making him the 10th Filipino cardinal in the history of the Catholic Church, and one of three Filipinos eligible to vote in the next papal conclave.
At the time of the pope’s announcement of the elevation on Oct. 6, 2024, Bishop David was serving his second term as president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, the country with the third-largest number of Catholics in the world, after Brazil and Mexico. He was also vice president-elect of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences.
Weeks after the papal announcement, Cardinal David was elected as a member of the post-synodal council at the second session of the Synod on Synodality at the Vatican in October 2024.
Cardinal Ambo, as he is popularly known in the Philippines—“Ambo” being a term of endearment for Pablo—is a polyglot who, in addition to Filipino and English, knows eight other ancient and modern languages and is “brushing up” on his Italian.
He granted this exclusive interview for America at the Pontifical Filipino College in Rome on Dec. 12.
An early vocation
Cardinal David was born the 10th of 13 children in Pampanga, in central Luzon, northwest of Manila. His father was a lawyer and public prosecutor in Manila, and his mother considered “having a priest as a son as the greatest achievement of her life,” he said.
At an early age, he was moved by the words of a catechist in his hometown that “Jesus is present” when the votive candle in the chapel is lit and would visit the chapel whenever he passed by during his grade school years. At age 10, he asked his mother if he could enter the minor seminary to become a priest, and she agreed. He studied there during the week and came home on the weekends.
He studied philosophy and theology at the Jesuit-run San Jose Seminary at the Loyola Heights campus of the Ateneo where he was influenced by three things: “spiritual indifference,” which is more akin to the word disponibilité (availability) in Gabriel Marcel’s philosophy; “the discernment of spirits” found in the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola; and the importance of “listening” in the accompaniment of others.
Ordained a priest in March 1983 at the age of 24 for the Archdiocese of San Fernando, he spent the next year in a parish, before becoming director of the archdiocesan Mother of Good Counsel Seminary (1984-86).
In preparation for teaching at the seminary, his bishop then sent him to do biblical studies at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, where after four years he obtained a licentiate in theology. He did a further year’s study at the École Biblique in Jerusalem and gained his doctorate with a dissertation on the Old Testament Book of Daniel.
Cardinal David then returned to the Philippines to teach Scripture in the seminary and became head of its theology department. He was elected vice president of the Catholic Biblical Association of the Philippines and is the author of many articles on the Bible, both academic and popular.
In May 2006, Pope Benedict XVI appointed David auxiliary bishop of San Fernando and titular bishop of Guardialfiera in southern Italy. “I was very hesitant to say yes to the episcopacy,” he said. “I was a professor of Scripture, and my first love was teaching. I finally said yes because they said maybe a Bible scholar is also needed in the episcopal conference.”
Meeting Pope Francis
The cardinal said he first came to know Pope Francis as the organizer of the papal visit to the Philippines in 2015.
Reflecting on that visit, Cardinal David revealed something that “was never reported.” He said that before Mass for six million people in Rizal Park in Manila, “a package was found under the seat of the Holy Father.” The Mass was delayed while bomb experts inspected the package and surrounding area. “They finally discovered what it was,” the cardinal said. “A whole package of rosaries! Later we learned from the donor of the seat that since he wasn’t confident that he would be able to ask the Holy Father to bless his rosaries, he decided to put them in a package under the pope’s seat at Mass!”
“We never told the pope about that,” he added. “I think he would have laughed out really loud.”
Later that year, in October 2015, Francis named David bishop of Kalookan, in the metropolitan Manila area. The diocese is home to some 1.2 million Catholics, many of whom are domestic migrants who came from the provinces and poor areas of the country.
Not having sufficient priests in the Diocese of Kalookan to serve his flock, Bishop David invited religious congregations to assist in the establishment of mission stations in areas where the vast majority of people were not reached by the church. He said he shares Pope Francis’ vision of a church that goes out to the peripheries—both geographical and existential.
Duterte and the war on drugs
Six months after Bishop David became chief pastor in Kalookan, the newly elected president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, took office in Manila on June 30, 2016, and began a deadly war on drugs. “In the bloody, bloody drug war, we were literally picking up dead bodies in my diocese, in all three cities, and the carnage was really awful,” the cardinal recalled.
Professor Ed Garcia, one of the drafters of the Filipino Constitution and a well-known human rights advocate, told me in an interview, “Estimates as to the number of victims of the extrajudicial executions nationwide during Duterte’s term vary, from between 20,000 to 25,000; however, since many are never reported or recorded there could be much more than that.”
“The Diocese of Caloocan,” he said, “encompasses three mostly urban poor areas—Kalookan, Navotas and Malabon—where certainly there have been more than a thousand victims.”
In May and June of 2019, the Filipino bishops made an ad limina visit to Rome. Cardinal David recalled: “When we met Pope Francis, he gathered us in a circle and said: ‘You can ask me any question that you like. You can even criticize me to my face, but I just hope that you do it straight to me, instead of talking to social media.’”
During the audience, Cardinal David told Pope Francis about the killings in his diocese and that he had established a community-based drug rehab program, called Schindler’s List, “if only to be able to save a few lives, because parents were desperately asking me to save their children.”
He explained that when young men enrolled in the program, he could negotiate with the police on their behalf. “At the graduation of the patients in the community-based drug rehab program, the police were invited, and they would publicly say, ‘I now declare you officially delisted from the drug watchlist,’ and the families would cry,” the cardinal said. “But the police behave very arrogantly, like they are in control of people’s lives. Many of the people were killed.”
“At the end of that encounter,” Cardinal David said, “on our way out, we bishops normally just say goodbye to the Holy Father and make un abrazo. So I said goodbye to him, and then turned my back to go away, but he held my arm and said, ‘Espera, espera! [Wait, wait!] Puedo, bendecirte? [May I bless you?].’ My heart melted. And then he prayed over me like that. I was so deeply moved. I literally shed tears, and after blessing me he said: ‘Stay alive. Stay alive!’ I could see he was worried for me. It’s like he was being prophetic, that he knew I was going to face death threats because of what I was doing.”
Death threats
In our interview, Cardinal David confirmed that he had received “a lot of death threats.” They started arriving some months before he came to Rome for the ad limina visit, and after returning from Rome, he said, “I had to face five criminal charges: sedition, inciting to sedition, cyber libel, and others. I started receiving death threats on my cell phone.”
Because of his preaching against the injustice committed against people in his diocese, and in particular against the extrajudicial killings, he was charged with obstruction of justice by the Department of Justice and on five criminal counts by the Philippine National Police during the Duterte presidency (2016-22).
He recalled that “the families of the victims of the extrajudicial killings campaign would come to me for help.” He said he felt like he was living in biblical times, “when they speak of widows and orphans,” and decided to create a support group.
Cardinal David remembered one woman in the support group, Jennifer, in particular. She asked if she could get a scholarship for her two children because her husband had been killed a year earlier by a death squad. “Just days later, after she pleaded with me, they killed her, too,” he said. “She was 27 years old, a mother of two boys. And now we had to care for the orphans.”
“In those years in Caloocan,” he said, “I was often threatened by [President] Duterte; he even went to the extent of saying, ‘Bishop David, I know you roam around at night, you must be taking drugs.’ So the security at the cathedral asked me to stop praying the rosary at night.”
The cardinal explained: “I have two prayer habits. The first, early in the morning, I call it ‘coffee with Jesus.’ I wake up at 4:30 in the morning and make myself a cup of coffee, but I don’t drink it alone. I go to the chapel for my two-hour prayer…. And then in the evening, after dinner, I take a walk. I just walk, walk, and keep walking with a rosary, I go for ‘a walk with the Blessed Mother.’ That’s my daily routine. But the cathedral security stopped my daily routine after Duterte threatened me.”
When I asked if he had ever spoken directly to President Duterte, he replied: “I never had a real personal encounter with him. I only responded to his public attacks, like when he said, ‘You must be into drugs.’ I responded to that publicly on social media, on Facebook, and said, ‘With all due respect, Sir, I don’t even take maintenance drugs.’ I said: ‘What I do is I take blended vegetables and fruits with moringa leaves. You might want to try it, Sir. It’s a nice concoction.’ I think he got even more upset because I was responding to him like that with humor.”
“My attitude is never to hate anybody,” he explained. “And this is one thing my own people could not accept when I preach holiness and say that I could never get myself to believe that there are evil people because that is blasphemy. To call anyone evil in this world is to commit blasphemy because you would need an evil god to create evil people…. People are capable of evil action, but they are not, by nature, evil. So it is good always to ask: ‘What makes people commit evil? What’s wrong with them?’ So when people do something really depraved, then something has gone wrong with their humanity, and that saves me from resentment.”
