MANILA, Philippines?He would have called her his Lolita if he was in school long enough to know who Lolita was, but he was not, and it was doubtful he would ever know, sitting on a narrow blanket inside the four-by-four-foot room in a warren crowded with many four-by-four-foot rooms of plywood and tin and karaoke shrieks, where he lived with his father and brothers and sisters and the small girl he called his wife. Roxanne was her name, Roxanne of the bare brown legs, the round hips in tight denim shorts, and the small lips that pursed when she said her name.

Twice-pregnant at 14, now with one miscarriage under her belt and a pair of twins suckling at her 15-year-old breasts, she sits on the floor with the lover she cannot yet marry?the tattooed, shaggy-haired older man, again jobless after missing days at a construction site.

?Sometimes, you just get too lazy to go work.?

Her name is Roxanne and she is not a virgin, in spite of how the Catholic Church would like to view 15-year-old Catholics. The Catholic Bishops? Conference of the Philippines has expressed shock and dismay at the proposed teaching of sex education to younger students.

There is a proper time and a proper age, says CBCP spokesperson Pedro Quitorio III. Fr. Conegundo Garganta, of the CBCP Episcopal Commission on Youth, puts the proper age at 17.

?That is the time we should say children are more equipped to handle such topics.?

That some of these children are already equipped with their own children at 17 years old does not seem to matter to the sons of Holy Mother Church. The homily of Quitorio includes a touching faith in the sense of parental responsibility of a population scrambling for a meal a day. All teachings in reference to sex, he says, ?should be left to parents, especially when children are underage.?

Irrelevant of the odd notion that only 17-year-olds have the capacity to ?handle? sex as an idea, the idea is there whether the child is 9 or 19, whether the child can handle it or not, and it?s the rare child who will not wonder about slot B when tab A wakes up in the night. There will always be the question, and the impulse behind the question?whether a result of basic puberty or MTV or the whole wide universe of tits and asses and the kid next door who saw Pa making love to Ma. The Department of Education proposal includes sex education of younger students, one that begins not with a Kama Sutra menu of sexual acts, but an understanding of the human body.

It is delineation that Department of Health?s Esperanza Cabral takes pains to define. ?Teachers and parents should be ready to answer correctly when asked by children why they are different from their sisters or brothers, what makes them female, what makes them male, and where their siblings came from.? She added, in an ABS-CBN interview, that children, especially girls, should also learn that any other person should not touch their private parts. It was the Church?s own Bishop Oscar Cruz who agreed with Cabral in this respect.

Yet spokesman Quitorio still stands by his argument. What is needed, he says, is ?the proper sex education, not sexuality that focuses on the physical aspect of sexuality, but as a sacred gift from God.?

It must be remembered that many of the Church?s own priests have been found in recent years to have offered that sacred gift to a legion of wide-eyed Catholic boys and girls?a disgrace that the Pope has been attempting to address with personal visits and letters of commiseration. In the past year, scandal after scandal has ripped across the Church hierarchy, not only of generations of priests abusing altar boys in the vestry, but also of a conspiracy among Church heads that had families signing vows of silence to protect the institution. From Malta to Ireland to Germany to congregations in Boston, Los Angeles and Verona, the stories of pedophilia and payoffs have spilled from the Catholic cup. The same stories of abuse in Filipino parishes circulate today, but they rarely come to light in official reports?not a surprise in a country with a tradition of bowing to the man in the white robe.

I say this not to embarrass an institution that has time and again stood for the Filipino people, I say this because even institutions fail when the men and women fail within them. The same is true for the state and for the family, and it is why education is vital, whether from family or church or state. This is the truth: that fathers touch daughters where fathers never should, that there are young girls who do not know a period means the possibility of pregnancy, and that even congregations need protection from the men to whom they confess their sins. There is nothing to stop churches from emphasizing the value of abstinence and sex as a sacred gift, but there is also a responsibility that rests on the state to protect its citizens, no matter how small they may be.

Abuse knows no age, neither do sexual impulses begin at the proper age of 17, or 21, or when the marriage contract is signed. Teachers need training, schools need resources, but the principle stands, whether it means teaching a 7-year-old it?s bad to let someone diddle with her genital organ, or to explain to a college boy that safe sex doesn?t mean only having sex with Christian girls, the whole spectrum of sex education in schools is not a matter of personal morality?it is simply a function of practical necessity.

The CBCP worries that the government lectures on anatomy, diseases and safe sex will create a generation of promiscuous nymphomaniacs without fear or conscience. The Church makes one caveat?it will permit sex education on college levels. Perhaps they are aware that the Roxannes of this country do not go to college, and rarely make it past freshman year in high school.

CBCP Youth?s Garganta says that due to the popularity of the Internet, ?promiscuity will continue to happen? in students whether or not sex education is taught in college-level learning institutions. This is an important admission: it is not the lectures responsible for the sexual impulse, it is the environment, though it is doubtful it is only that.

In late 2008, asked by Akbayan Party-List Rep. Risa Hontiveros to attend talks on sex education, Quitorio refused the invitation saying sex education is nothing new to the Church. ?The Catholic Church has more information and documents on human sexuality than the legislature.?

It is interesting that they missed the part that says 14-year-old girls, sometimes named Roxanne, are equipped by God to be human and sexual.

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Email at pat.evangelista@gmail.com. Title from a novel by Carol Shields.