[Pastilan] Iglesia ni Marcoleta

A good lawyer knows there are some information you simply don’t volunteer because they might come back and give you more problems.

Senator Rodante Marcoleta did the exact opposite.

He admitted receiving P75 million in early 2025, while he was still a congressman, after being asked by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to explain why he should not be disqualified for failing to report the money.

His defense was that he wasn’t yet a candidate yet when it was given. The campaign period hadn’t begun, so the money wasn’t included in his Statement of Contributions and Expenditures.

Existing jurisprudence supported that position, and the Comelec accepted it. Case closed. Lusot.

But legal arguments have an annoying habit of refusing to stay where you leave them.

If the P75 million was not, legally speaking, a campaign contribution that should have been reflected in the SOCE — as Marcoleta himself declared under oath — then what exactly was it?

By stating that under oath, Marcoleta may have solved one legal problem only to create another. Prosecutors now argue that his own sworn statement supports allegations of indirect bribery and plunder, which requires at least P50 million in ill-gotten wealth received by a public officer. 

The operative word is “gift,” which, by definition, cannot come directly from public funds.

What is amusing here is that the most damaging information against him came not from a whistleblower or a witness. It came from Marcoleta himself.

He may now find it difficult to reverse course after persuading Comelec under oath that the money was not what it appeared to be. He cannot simply walk into a courtroom and change his story. Courts generally expect individuals to stand by what they have sworn under oath.

Most lawyers spend their careers trying to stop prosecutors from finding evidence against their clients. Marcoleta appears to have handed them enough evidence against himself.

He has never been shy about reminding everyone that he is a lawyer, often with a noticeable air of superiority over those who are not. You would think this would be the moment to demonstrate that legal prowess.

Instead, he seems reluctant to do exactly that. Rather than letting his legal arguments speak for themselves, Marcoleta has chosen to shelter behind the skirt of his church — the Iglesia Ni Cristo — as though its institutional influence were a substitute for legal reasoning.

That speaks volumes.

Troubling feature

For years, the Iglesia’s bloc-voting practice — built on strict obedience rather than individual conscience or critical thought — has helped propel thoroughly undeserving politicians into public office.

One of religion’s more troubling features is its capacity to manufacture guilt where none is warranted. When guilt arises not from evidence of harm but from religious pressure, it becomes a tool of control, compelling people to obey directives that lack any clear moral basis. Such guilt is evidence of successful indoctrination. (The INC, let me be clear, has no monopoly on that.)

That is precisely what makes bloc voting — and now, the not-so-voluntary attendance at protest rallies — so effective. Members are conditioned to follow the political line and regard obedience to their faith leaders as a virtue and dissent as a moral failing. Once guilt is attached to independent judgment, critical thinking gives way to submission, and political choices, in the case of Iglesia members, cease to be matters of individual conscience.

This is the very INC mechanism that helped elevate Bongbong Marcos, the son of a plundering dictator, to the presidency, and Sara Duterte — the daughter of the worst post-EDSA president — to the vice presidency in 2022.

That alone is a devastating indictment of a practice that does not merely contribute to this nation’s electoral dysfunction but actively helps perpetuate it.

There is no way this practice was decreed or inspired by an intelligent, just, and righteous deity. No such all-knowing and morally upright being would demand blind obedience only to produce such ugly political outcomes. That is neither divine inspiration nor divine guidance as religious people know it.

Marcoleta now seems more comfortable relying on his religion’s institutional muscle than on the strength of his own arguments. For someone so eager to remind everyone that he is a lawyer, he is remarkably hesitant to argue like one.

If this is how he defends himself, one has to wonder how he would defend anyone else. A lawyer who boxes himself into a corner with his own sworn statement is not someone you would trust to represent you in court.

He was undone by his own blade. Naunay sa kaugalingong tari.

As for the Iglesia, its cry of “selective justice” collapses the moment one asks the obvious questions.

What exactly does “selective justice” mean here? 

Does it mean Marcoleta should be immune from investigation simply because he opposes the Marcos administration?

Really?

Or, does it mean that any legal action against Marcoleta must be suspended until every corrupt politician in the Philippines has first been hauled into court?

If so, then Marcoleta and his Iglesia have just devised the perfect manual for impunity: every official linked to corruption need only reinvent himself as an opposition figure, and then join and seek the blessing of the INC to magically turn the demand for accountability into persecution.

That is the tribalization of justice, where guilt and innocence are determined by political and religious affiliation rather than by evidence or law. And once justice becomes conditional upon whose side you happen to be on, it ceases to be justice at all. It becomes nothing more than organized hypocrisy pretending to be moral outrage.

If I were an INC member, I would demand to be excommunicated on the spot, pronto, and walk out while giving its leadership the middle finger, because manipulation draped in the language of faith deserves neither respect nor obedience.

But I am not an INC member. So I can only say this: Repent.

As for the P75 million – that is not the kind of money anyone can simply wish away. Who gives a sitting congressman P75 million and expects the public to believe it came with no expectations attached? Pastilan. – Rappler.com