The Catholic Church will no longer speak about incidents between the Philippines and China in the West Philippine Sea, and the entire conflict there, including about the arbitral ruling, to avoid using the pulpit to increase tension in the sea.

“Silence rather than rhetoric” will be the official stance of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) in relation to the matter. Instead of taking a stand, the church will issue an Oratio Imperata for peace that will be recited in all churches from July until World Peace Day in January 2025.

“We are not political leaders. We are spiritual and moral leaders and we know that our compatriots, the people of the country, are becoming tense,” Bishop Pablo Virgilio David, president of the CBCP, said in the press conference held at the Cagayan de Oro City church on July 7. “We don’t want to fan the tension.”

The Catholic church formed the stance after the 3-day plenary of the Filipino bishops at the Transfiguration Abbey in Malaybalay City. The Vatican’s minister of external relations, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, was the chief guest of this plenary. Before the plenary, Gallagher met with the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Philippines.

“No one likes war. Our parents are part of the generation that suffered war and was traumatized by the Second World War,” he said. The church does not want the current generation to go through the same experience.

This stance differs from the previous pronouncements from some Catholic bishops who have given different opinions—from calls in resolving the conflict through peaceful means and that all involved forces respect international law to calls to fight “atheist” China.