Don't fall for this. If there's any strange politics going on, it's on the part of the Catholic Bishops of the Philippines. For some time now in international media they have been trying to portray the Philippines Church as suffering persecution under Philippines President Duterte. The fact is that the overwhelming majority of Filipinos are Catholic and no one is going to touch them because of that, except perhaps for Islamic extremists from the southern island of Mindanao. It's also a fact that the vast majority of Filipinos approve of President Duterte. It's also a fact that the Bishops campaigned against candidate Duterte during the presidential election. It's also a fact that among the Filipino poor, the Bishops lost the support of their flock because of that. The only "persecution" being experienced is the wildly humorous online trolling to which the Bishops' public statements are subjected to by their disgruntled flock on Facebook, which has become the mass medium of the poor.