He died of a heart attack at age 69. Since the years when Duterte was mayor of the capital of Mindanao he had fought against his death squads dedicated to the “fight against drugs.” A Redemptorist missionary, he made a great contribution to grassroots ecclesial communities.
Manila () – The Church and Philippine society are mourning the death of Father Amado Picardal, Redemptorist priest, an important voice in the movements for peace and justice in Mindanao, who in recent years had harshly criticized the former President Rodrigo Duterte for his extrajudicial killings in the war on drugs. Father Picardal died on May 29 at the age of 69 from a heart attack. «Fr. Edilberto Cepe, provincial superior of the Redemptorists, remembers him like this: »Fr. Picardal was a brilliant and courageous missionary, a passionate defender of peace and social justice, and a theologian who touched and transformed the lives of many. May the light and joy that he left to this world continue to radiate through us, making us beacons of truth and social transformation.
P. Picardal was born in Iligan City in 1954. Already in the early 1970s, as a philosophy student at the University of San Carlos in Cebu, he participated in student activism that – under Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law – led him to spend seven months in prison, where he was also tortured. After completing his university studies, he spent six months among the poor in a Cebu slum, where he received training as a community organizer. He joined the Redemptorists and was ordained a priest in 1981. In his ministry, he helped form and strengthen grassroots ecclesial communities in several parishes and dioceses of Mindanao, the southern region of the Philippines ravaged by deep conflicts that claimed thousands. of lives. At the San Fernando mission in Bukidnon in the late 1980s, he helped organize and mobilize communities against logging companies, getting the government to end these exploitative activities.
After deepening his theological studies at Berkeley and the Pontifical Gregorian University, he was a professor and dean of academic studies at the Teologado San Alfonso, the Redemptorist theological school in Davao, from May 1995 to March 2011. Along with teaching, he has always continued with his pastoral activities. The face of Pax Christi in the Philippines, he has been deeply involved in Christian-Muslim dialogue and peace advocacy, and was a member of the leadership council of the Coalition Against Summary Executions, where he oversaw and spoke out against Pax Christi squads. death of Davao, which many believed inspired and supported by then-mayor Rodrigo Duterte.
Many knew him as the cycling priest of the Philippines: in 2000, he crossed the country by bicycle from Davao to Ilocos Norte for peace, covering 2,083 kilometers. It was just the first of many such initiatives: every year, he organized a community bike ride in Davao during Mindanao Peace Week. In the summer of 2006, he cycled through Mindanao for life and peace for three weeks, accompanied part of the way by some priests and a bishop. And again in 2008, he completed an even larger tour of the Philippines by bicycle, covering more than 5,000 kilometers in 56 days. He wrote poetry, but he also liked music: he composed some songs for the liturgy and for evangelization seminars. He had climbed Mount Apo seven times. He also went scuba diving from time to time.
I wanted to propose a theology from below, enculturated and contextual, not only discursive but also narrative and poetic. From June 2011 to December 2017, he had worked full-time as Executive Secretary of the Base Ecclesial Communities Episcopal Committee (BEC) of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP). He will be remembered for his contribution to society as a peacemaker, social activist and missionary.
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