1974 Sacred Heart Novitiate raid

The August 24, 1974 military raid on the Sacred Heart Novitiate in the Novaliches district of Quezon City in the Philippines[1][2] is considered an important turning point in the Philippine Catholic church's resistance to the Marcos dictatorship.[3]

A Jesuit seminary, the Novitiate had become the subject of the raid because the regime's forces had mistakenly thought that a communist leader was holding a meeting there. When the 150 soldiers who conducted the raid found that the communist leader they were looking for was not at the seminary, they arrested a priest, Rev. Jose Blanco, S.J., and accused him of being the "secretary general of an allegedly anti-government organization."[4] They also arrested the head of the Jesuit order in the Philippines at the time, Fr. Benigno "Benny" Mayo, S.J., and 21 leaders of a youth group called Student Catholic Action (SCA), who were at the seminary to attend a workshop.[4][5]

The raid took place mere months after the appointment of Jaime Cardinal Sin as the new Archbishop of Manila, and it resulted in Cardinal Sin's first act of dissent against the Marcos dictatorship - issuing a pastoral letter which would be read aloud in all the churches of the Archdiocese of Manila, which covered the whole of the Philippine's capital region. Various leaders of the Roman Catholic church in the Philippines would continue to criticise and sometimes actively resist Ferdinand Marcos' dictatorship for the next fourteen years, culminating with Cardinal Sin calling on Filipinos to rally in the streets in late February, 1986 - the beginning of the People Power Revolution which finally ousted Marcos.[4]