In a pastoral letter read Sunday in the churches of the archdiocese of Lingayen-Dagupan, Archbishop Socrates Villegas made a forceful argument for a conscience vote in the May 13 elections. Unlike his pastoral letter last December equating contraception with corruption, Sunday’s epistle used premises and reached conclusions which we could agree with almost entirely. There was only one, but significant, exception.
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.
“You heard,” says Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas, “when candidate, now President Noynoy Aquino, said during his campaign, ‘Kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap.’ Contraception is corruption. The use of government money, taxpayers’ money to give out contraceptive pills is corruption. Contraceptive pills teach us it is all right to have sex with someone provided you are safe from babies. Babies are a nuisance….”
