Fr Shay Cullen has taken on death squads, the US military, murderously crooked politicians and sex traffickers – but he almost walked away from that mission, writes DAVID McNEILL
FROM THE foundation he runs near the city of Olongapo, Fr Shay Cullen can look down on the scene of perhaps his greatest triumph. Wrapped in the lush tropical green of the Filipino countryside, the city below rolls gently toward Subic Bay, once home to the mightiest US navy base in the Pacific.
At its peak, ships from the US Seventh Fleet disgorged more than three million military personnel a year, fuelling the city’s only major industry: sex. The casualties – pregnant teenagers, HIV-infected children and the abandoned offspring of American sailors – washed up at the doors of Preda, the foundation Fr Cullen co-founded in 1974. Local newspapers dubbed Olongapo the Sodom and Gomorrah of south-east Asia.
“The base had to go,” he says today, recalling the horrors he witnessed when he came here first from his home in Glasthule, Co Dublin, in the late 1960s. There was poverty on an epic scale, which tossed thousands of children literally on to rubbish tips or into the arms of paedophiles and traffickers.
“There were four-year-olds pimped out to prostitution rings,” he recalls. “Abuse of every kind.” The shock and anger he felt at this human neglect and degradation “changed my life”.
Today, the Subic Bay base and most other US military installations in the Philippines are gone, thanks to a remarkable political campaign by Cullen and his colleagues. In the sunshine years following the fall of dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, they demanded that the once meek political establishment do the unthinkable: evict their American paymasters. Incredibly, they did.
In his book, Passion and Power, Cullen recalls the laughter at his “audacity and wild idealism” for even proposing such a thing. The US military had been dug into the Philippines for a century, bringing $100 million (€72 million) every year to the country and, by Cullen’s estimate, $32 million (€23 million) to Olongapo’s local economy.
Challenging this Goliath-like opponent was dangerous and, for some, fatal. Cullen was stoned, threatened with deportation and dubbed a “communist” after taking the fight to the city’s corrupt mayor; other activists were tortured and murdered.
But Cullen and his supporters successfully argued that the military installations were rotting the heart of their host Filipino cities, and proposed a business plan to convert them to productive use. Fierce lobbying secured the support of the Philippine senate, which refused to extend the lease on the US bases.
The US flag was lowered in Subic Bay in 1992, and a new industrial park now occupies its place, a couple of kilometres below the Preda Foundation.
“We were lucky,” Cullen says. “Our timing was good and we got lucky.”
Not that he has time to gloat. The malignant influence of the bases lingers on in the vast sex industry they spawned, and the estimated 60,000 Filipino children it employs. Shocking poverty adds to the human misery. Preda is home to about 100 children, rescued from jails, abusive families or commercial exploitation, many of them so damaged that they need years of counselling. Visitors to the centre are sometimes shown to a soundproof room on the top floor where kids scream, kick and punch holes in the wall.
“We try to develop their self-confidence and dignity,” explains Cullen, dressed casually in Khakis in his Preda office. “We’re about empowerment, making them strong, getting rid of that deferential attitude, especially toward the foreigner.”
But he admits that the foundation only deals with the tip of the iceberg. “Every day you see something awful. I feel so frustrated and angry. What keeps me going is challenging the system.”
CULLEN’S CHALLENGES are the stuff of legend and have given him a reputation as a sort of clerical Ricky Balboa, always ready to step into the metaphorical ring for a scrap with a stronger opponent. Preda has filed class-action suits against the US military for abandoning 10,000 children, repeatedly fought the Philippine government over its incarceration of minors in rancid prisons, and, perhaps most famously, rescued hundreds of kids from sex bars and traffickers, earning him death threats and the tabloid moniker “paedophile-buster”.
He is now embroiled in a battle with the right-wing mayor of the southern city of Davao, home to death squads who have murdered dozens of street children over the last decade.
Cullen’s in-your-face approach caused “great tension” with the Catholic Church in the years after he arrived as a rebellious young Columban missionary.
“The church said I should live in the rectory and say my Mass every day, not go on to the streets and into sex bars. ‘Then you can go and bless the addicts,’ they said.” He found himself unable to comply. “I mean, when I came here we had martial law, death squads, rampant abuse of women and children. And the church was silent about it. And silence is consent.”
The result, after nearly four decades of battle, is a cast of bitter, sometimes ruthless, enemies who falsely accuse him of sexually abusing a child.
“They set me up, using a little six-year-old girl we had rescued,” Cullen says. “They forced her to sign a paper saying that I had raped her.”
He and Preda were later exonerated, but his accusers are still using the internet to smear him.
“I felt terrible, of course, but also angry that they abused this little child again,” he says. “She’d be dragged again into court. They had no compassion because they’re just trying to protect themselves.”
He says the ordeal has taught him a valuable lesson. “I understand false accusations , so all the cases that are reported to us we really carefully check everything, to protect the innocent from false accusation.”
Such work has earned him growing recognition. On St Patrick’s Day he received the humanitarian prize at the Meteor Ireland Music Awards, along with a donation of €100,000. He has been nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and many people think it is only a matter of time before he wins it. Documentaries about his work, and his own syndicated columns, have made him a minor celebrity in parts of the world, especially Germany, from where he has just returned. The recognition is gratifying, but he says he has no illusions that it truly improves the chaotic world around him.
“The struggle for justice is part of a long process of influencing public policy and changing public attitudes,” he says. “That’s where change comes.”
Christianity plays a part in the Preda world – each day begins with a Bible reading – but the core of what the organisation does is direct action, not soul-saving.
“We’re more into Christianity here than Catholicism,” he says. “We try to point out something that Catholicism has forgotten, that in every church you’re looking at a condemned criminal who got the death penalty for defending human rights and the rights of children. When we talk about Christianity, it’s about following the works of Jesus, not just following what he said.
“‘Blessed are the poor for they should be given the land. Blessed are those who seek justice, for they shall hunger and thirst for it.’ If we look on Jesus as a progressive role model for the poor, the sick and the underprivileged, it is revolutionary. And we live every day, like Jesus, without compromise, because the one thing that guy never did was compromise.”
Inevitably, perhaps, Cullen’s views still bring conflict with his superiors, particularly over contraception, though he is quick to point out that his war is “not with the church”.
“If the church says this is wrong, then we choose the lesser evil, always. Many bishops are saying that when it comes to controlling HIV and saving lives, our prime duty is to save lives. The Bishop of the Netherlands has taken this choice and said we are bound by moral choice to choose the lesser evil. Well, I would follow the bishop in that choice.”
BEFORE HE JOINED the order, Cullen played in a rock group around Dublin, but jokes that he was no good. In his 40s, he fell in love with a Jamaican woman who worked for the UN in New York, a “Michelle Obama type”. But despite calling church rules on celibacy “a whole system of control”, he let her go.
“I had to abandon my romantic temptations,” he says, laughing. “I wanted to abandon my job and follow my heart, but then I counted the cost. Everything was set up here with me as the centre of a commitment to the welfare of the children. I would have had to abandon that commitment for what would be seen as a selfish act for my own pleasure. I would have had to leave the order, the priesthood, and there would have been a scandal. I couldn’t do it.”
The recent scandals in Ireland involving the church have “depressed” him, he says. “It’s shocking, disgusting, that people who are trained to lead lives of virtue could do such things. The whole of the Catholic Church today is compromised with cover-up and denial. Jesus never asked for the church to be institutionalised – that came later, and you had all the scandals that an institution can do.
“I think the brotherhood is in, shall we say, a phase-out period. There were no social services in Ireland, and thousands did amazing work. However, power corrupts. The State and the church gave immense power over the lives of these poor and defenceless people, and the structure they created of institutionalised social workers – whose lives themselves were, c’mon, controlled by the vows of poverty – meant total and utter surrender of all their human rights.
“Many of these people are in many ways trapped in that old system, whereby there was no true freedom and you were trapped in a completely authoritarian system – a dictatorship, you might say.
“For what? To live a life of virtue? Does that mean a person cannot live a life of virtue unless they’re in an order? Of course they can. It’s no harm if these religious orders are disbanded. Absolutely. Life is too short and precious. A life of love and companionship and teamwork – my idea is that we’re bound together no matter what our religious background, if we can share a love of human rights and dignity, and a basic compassion for the poor and the sick. We can cross all barriers.
“I’m an unpaid volunteer. I like to tell my superiors: ‘You don’t own me.’”
