For clergy across faiths, as well as politicians and activists, former Philippine Senate President Jovito Salonga was a rock of principled politics in a nation of political butterflies.

The 95-year-old Salonga, who died March 8, was “a patriot, an incorruptible leader, a statesman and a lay leader of deep spirituality,” according to Reuel Norman Marigza, secretary-general of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines.

Few Philippine politicians have had so many brushes with death as Salonga. He opted out of bar exams to become a guerrilla during World War II and was arrested, tortured and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor by the Japanese.

He was pardoned in 1943, took the bar the following year and topped it. The triumphant young man was going home with the bar results, on a bicycle with makeshift wheels, when American planes arrived and started bombing Manila.

Years later, just before the late President Ferdinand E. Marcos declared martial law, Salonga almost died from wounds sustained during the 1971 Plaza Miranda bombing.

Doctors gave him just a 35% chance of survival – he was blinded in the left eye and became deaf in his right ear; he had a hundred pieces of shrapnels in his body. Salonga was still in the hospital when news came that he had topped the 1971 senatorial elections, the last before martial law.

Marcos would later jail the frail man in 1980, accusing him of involvement in the bombing of the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC). He was freed after a global campaign, went into exile, then came home in 1985 to help unite the democratic opposition.

In 1987, he again got the most votes for the Senate in the first post-Marcos democratic elections.

He had also briefly served as the first chair of the Philippine Commission on Good Government (PCGG), the body created in 1986 to run after Marcos’ hidden wealth. Salonga estimated the total Marcos loot at between $5 billion to $10 billion – a figure that has stood the test of time

Political career with soul

"His political career has a soul. His government service has a conscience. His life witnessing is edifying,” Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines president, Bishop Socrates B. Villegas wrote in a comment to one of Salonga’s books.

Salonga became close to Villegas, the head assistant of Jaime Cardinal Sin, one of the key “People Power” players.

“From his intimate encounter with God in prayer, he entered politics. From his political engagement, he returned to his prayer corner and submitted all to Him who is Everything,” said Villegas.

Former Chief Justice Reynato S. Puno, another prominent Protestant lay leader, said Salonga’s gift was “the unseen sword of the Christian faith and the shield of his unyielding moral courage."

“The values of truth, integrity and selflessness...the Christian anchor of both his public service and private life," Puno said.

Salonga was Senate President when he defied his good friend, President Corazon Aquino, and broke a deadlocked vote on the lease extension of the biggest American military bases outside of mainland United States.

“I vote ‘No,’ and if it were only possible, I would vote 203 million times, ‘No’,” Salonga thundered as bases opponents wept with joy.

His vote was a bitter defeat for Mrs. Aquino, for whom he stepped aside during the 1986 snap elections that eventually led to the fall of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and who had led a big march in support of the US bases.

Steadfast

Marigza said Salonga’s entire political life was one of “unstained service,” marked by a willingness to sacrifice life and to struggle against injustice without being consumed by hate.

The respect cuts across faiths for the man dubbed “Mr. Clean” even by his critics.

Vice President Jejomar Binay, a comrade in the anti-dictatorship struggle, described Salonga as "a pillar of the protest movement who steered the Senate during the difficult years of transition from dictatorship to democracy."

Sacred Heart Father Benjamin Alforque said even Salonga’s political passions could not tempt him to play fast and loose with Senate rules.

“A group of us church people, from the Promotion of Church People’s Response (PCPR) and the Justice and Peace Commission of the Association of Major Religious Superiors in the Philippines (JPC-AMRSP) were lobbying for the termination of the US Bases,” Alforque recalled.

“We made a call on the Senate President. He welcomed us into his office. He said, ‘You know my position on the issue. But I am Senate President presiding the hearings. You should not see me but the senators. You must convince them. I must keep and protect the integrity of the office of the Senate President’.”

“There and then I understood the meaning of incorruptibility and integrity of a sacred political office, of Jovy’s strength of character, respect and faith in fair play,” Alforque said.

Former Commission on Elections chairman Christian Monsod, who introduced Salonga when he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for government service in 2007, described “a life devoted to making our government work within a democratic setting, whether in or outside of it.”

Salonga, he said, risked not only political fortune and professional stature, but life itself, for his beliefs.

“In a world of broken promises where vows of fidelity to a person, a nation or a vision are high on the list of perishables, our awardee has kept faith with his vows, regardless of the consequences to himself,” Monsod said.

Salonga won Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize long after his retirement from politics in 1992, following his lone electoral defeat – for the Presidency.

Former national treasurer Leonor Briones, who also is a fellow member of the UCCP, recalled his love for classical music.

She said Salonga was also an opponent of indiscriminate debt appropriations that failed to consider unjust, corrupt deals. He spoke out against onerous conditions imposed by multilateral funding agencies on a recovering Philippine state.

Salonga, she pointed out, resigned from Sigma Rho, one of the country's most powerful fraternities, after the death of a government scholar due to injuries sustained during initiation rites.

"He went against the grain and condemned the brutal initiation," said Briones.

Siliman University, one of the country's top universities and one founded by Protestant ministers, named a hall after the senator.

Dark nights

Salonga believed Philippine communist rebels staged the 1971 Plaza Miranda bombing that almost cost his life to rouse public anger against Marcos.

That belief did not shake his commitment to democratic reforms and he pushed for the release to top rebel detainees following the People Power revolt.

Nor did that belief stop him, after retirement from politics, from establishing the Bantayog ng mga Bayani Foundation to honor Filipinos who fought against the Marcos dictatorship – including those who had joined the communist underground movement.

A believer in ecumenical action, he gathered Catholic, Protestant and Muslim good governance advocates under Kilosbayan in 1993, "to arouse public interest and participation in important questions of public policy” and a more inclusive democracy.

Salonga wore his faith on his sleeve, crediting the influence of his parents for anchoring his politics on Christianity.

But he also confessed publicly about his struggles to hold on to it during World War II.

In his Ramon Magsaysay lecture, he said: “In truth, I had been assailed by many a doubt about my Christian faith (I sometimes considered myself a skeptic) when, after going underground to counteract the Japanese propaganda, I was captured and imprisoned by the Japanese kempeitai in Pasig during Holy Week of 1942.”

He said torture “in the presence of my aging father,” and incarceration in the national penitentiary rekindled his broken faith. His fellow prisoners would not let the minister’s son turn away from his roots.

“For almost a year, by common consent, I led in the evening prayers in my brigada where convicted criminals and political prisoners were together on bended knees,” Salonga recalled.

Writing the foreword to Salonga’s last book, another former Chief Justice, Artemio V. Panganiban said, “our good Lord had granted him a long and purposeful life, because he wanted him to be the conscience of the nation... "

And he was just that, in and out of government, tackling issues as broad as the dispute over ownership of Sabah, human rights violations, corruption, economic justice and the American war on terror till the end of his life.