To mobilize the opposition to the controversial reproductive health (RH) bill on the eve of two more crucial votes in Congress, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) issued a strongly worded pastoral letter on Saturday. Sadly, the statement—written by Archbishop Socrates Villegas, and read in churches on Sunday—was based on a lie.
On Aug. 31, 2012, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines published an advertisement in this newspaper arguing the CBCP’s stance against the Reproductive Health bill. Signed by the Most Reverend Gabriel V. Reyes, DD, Bishop of Antipolo, the “Defense of the Stand of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines on the House Bill 4244,” referred to an unnamed “columnist in one of our newspapers” who wrote that “the state should not prevent people from practicing responsible parenthood according to their beliefs nor may churchmen compel President Aquino, by whatever means, to prevent people from acting according to their religious belief.”
The administration-backed reproductive health (RH) bill is caught in a gridlock of filibustering privilege speeches in the House of Representatives, casting doubts on its passage in the current session of the 15th Congress. President Aquino’s allies in the House majority voted viva voce on Aug. 6 to end interpellation on the measure, cutting short the [...]
We are told we are on the verge of open war. The generals are mounting their cavalry; the defenders of the faith are mustering their troops. This war did not spring from the deaths of the 11 members of the New People’s Army killed in a June encounter with the Army’s 85th Infantry Battalion. Neither was it a result of the hostilities in Basilan, whose terrorists shattered the bodies of the 10 soldiers whose coffins arrived yesterday at the Villamor Air Base. The war does not involve the Chinese garrison at Scarborough, or the families of the victims of the 2009 Maguindanao massacre, or even the millions whose lives we are told are at stake at the center of Edwin Lacierda’s metaphorical war against poverty. The battle of 2012, we are told, was declared on July 23.
Next to the unhappy wives of the Republic of Malta, population 410,000, only one other country can claim to be affected by the results of last month’s non-binding referendum on divorce. Malta’s contentious approval of the legalization of divorce leaves Catholic Philippines the only nation in the world without the right to freely divorce – [...]
