Archbishop Jesus Dosado of Ozamiz has an interesting proposition: Priests should refuse to give Communion to “anti-life politicians.” He made this known through a pastoral letter, recommending it against the congressmen who had endorsed Rep. Edcel Lagman’s reproductive health and population management bill. This was not, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) website quoted Dosado as saying, a sanction against the pro-abortion lawmakers, or a judgment on their subjective guilt. It was merely a reaction to a person’s public unworthiness to receive Holy Communion because of “an objective situation of sin.”

Trust a cleric to put an argument in ways any Jesuit would love. It’s not a penalty or sanction for a priest to ignore someone who is kneeling down in front of him tongue sticking out to receive the holy wafer while the entire congregation watches?

But I leave them to their mental contortions. My beef with it is this:

I may not like Lagman, especially after he acted epically, along with Joe de V, Louie V and the two Prosperos, Nograles and Pichay, to thwart the impeachment bids against Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, but he has a point when he says the threat is “a grave penalty for a phantom act.” His bill does not abet abortion, permissive or not, it frowns on it. Indeed, it bans it as illegal. What it does is require people to undergo reproductive health and sexuality education. Given our particularly dire times and the even direr times we face in the immediate future, it is not only commendable, it is necessary. There’s nothing pro-life in the rapidly growing tribe of kids roaming the streets sniffing rugby and badgering people for alms.

I leave the abortionists to their devices, but I draw the line at the Church threatening hellfire or its equivalent in this life upon those who argue for contraceptives. The Church’s ferocious activism on that score, based on the completely literal interpretation of God’s command to go and multiply and the proposition that God invented sex so that his creations might suffer it to procreate, has got to be one of the most anti-life, if not the battiest, idea to crawl out of the Rock. Well, that and its former insistence, to Galileo’s consternation and incarceration, that the sun revolved around the earth.

I remember in this respect the complaints of Gawad Kalinga’s detractors that the group was soliciting contributions from pharmaceuticals that were manufacturing contraceptives to house the poor. So what? I did say in a column that it’s not as if GK was soliciting contributions from cigarette or liquor companies, or, heaven forbid, gambling joints and firearms factories. Which in fact the Church itself is doing, many bishops getting their share from Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. that has caused them to be stricken blind about this regime’s corruption. Surely those detractors do not lack for real abortionists to revile, not least those who caused justice in the form of the impeachment bids against Arroyo to be stillborn, or those who caused the will of the people in the form of their votes to be excised and the fetus thrown away.

That brings me to my other beef with Dosado’s proposition. The Church does not lack for awesome weapons to use against the wicked and ungodly, the threat of excommunication, partial or total, being chief of them. The phrase “on pain of excommunication” remains a real pain for most Filipinos. Surely the Church could employ those weapons to better purpose by having better definitions for anti-life or indeed having better ascriptions for those practicing it.

Can there be anything more anti-life than the wholesale murder of journalists and political activists? Even as I speak, the UNESCO has just protested vigorously the killing of yet another Filipino newsman, Robert Sison, a radio commentator and newspaper columnist in Sariaya, Quezon, calling it an “intolerable violation of a basic human right.” Surely the patent crime of snuffing of the life of a full-grown person (and one who happens to be doing a public service) more deserves the refusal of Communion than the arguable one of wrapping the male organ in plastic while its possessor arduously takes pains to get pleasure without having to procreate?

Just as well, can there be anything more anti-life than wholesale theft and pillage, which takes away the means of life of the citizens? Or since that is putting it too nicely, which plucks away the clump of rice that’s about to disappear into the mouth of a hungry child? Surely the World Bank’s rating of the Philippines as the most corrupt country in East Asia qualifies as an “objective situation of sin”? Surely the stunting, if not abortion, of an entire people, physically, mentally, politically, morally, economically, spiritually, more deserves the denial of the sacraments than a pilgrimage to the stalls in front of Quiapo Church to buy herbs and potions marked “pamparegla” [menstruation inducer]?

The Church may like to turn its ire on those who like other people to be as stunted as they are. I won’t particularly mind, and indeed will applaud, a priest refusing to give Communion to now-retired military general Jovito Palparan, his chief, Hermogenes Esperon, and his commander in chief, Arroyo, for having cost the lives of some of this country’s best and brightest, apart from youngest and most idealistic. I won’t particularly mind, and indeed will applaud, a priest denying former election commission chairman Benjamin Abalos Penance (he never offered any) and the First Gentleman the Anointment of the Sick, and revoking from the Cabinet secretaries Baptism on the ground that like Michael Corleone they were lying when they said “yes” to the question, “Do you renounce Satan and all his works?” And I won’t mind, indeed will applaud, a bishop banishing former economic planning secretary Romulo Neri to the specific circle of hell Dante reserved for wimps.

They can always tell them it’s not really a penalty or sanction.