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The absoluteness of that belief gives Aquino a firmness that can turn into stubbornness. Indeed, her very real sense that she is an instrument of God's will prompts friends and relatives to refer to her career, again and again, as a "mission." Says her mother-in-law and confidante, Dona Aurora Aquino: "I think this is a mission for her, to put her country in shape. Then she can retire. Ninoy's assassination was his fate. The presidency is hers." Cory often says the same thing.
Faith is also the basis of her fatalism. "If someone wishes to use a bazooka on me," she once said, "it's goodbye. If it's my time to die, I'll go." In the meantime, she exasperates her security men by acting as if she were protected by some invisible shield. Her sense of religion accounts too for Aquino's uncanny patience, her willingness, while awaiting what she regards as the appointed moment, to hold onto a burning match until it singes her fingers.
Yet her piety is very far from passivity. In 1984, returning to Mount St. Vincent College to collect an honorary degree, the mild, once bookish college girl surprised her former classmates with a forceful address. "Faith," she told them, "is not simply a patience which passively suffers until the storm is past. Rather, it is a spirit which bears things -- with resignation, yes, but above all, with blazing serene hope."
That is the same quality noticed by Richard Kessler, a senior associate for U.S.-Philippines relations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "She's a very biblical type of person," he observes. "But it's not from a Hallmark card. It's saintliness as in the Old Testament. On the one hand, you pardon your enemies; on the other, it's an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
If Aquino's blaze of righteousness is partly responsible for her luminous, even numinous, magnetism, it also explains her unbending ruthlessness in applying an eye for an eye. "In some ways," says a close confidant, "she's an unforgiving person. She never forgets." When a former supporter, Homobono Adaza, went over to Enrile's camp, she not only stripped him of his $50,000-a-year position on the board of the San Miguel Corporation, a large state-controlled conglomerate, but replaced him with his archenemy Aquilino Pimentel. The flip side of her fidelity is inflexibility. "I have a long memory for people who have helped me," the President recently warned a group of subordinates, "but I have a longer memory for people who have stood in my way."
That air of discriminating toughness was hardened during her marriage, which was, as much as anything, a rhyming of opposites, a marriage of public and private. "She was a very supportive wife," recalls her mother-in-law Dona Aurora. "She was content to remain in the background. She did not meddle, she stayed at home." As it happened, she had little choice. "Let's face it," the President likes to say with a wry mixture of affection and realism, "my husband was the original male chauvinist."