Antilife

The bishops and their allies in Congress have just supplied the best arguments—not for rejecting the Reproductive Health bill but for approving it posthaste.

First by mounting an anti-RH rally consisting in the main of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s bishops and her herself. Yes, her bishops. The same ones who got SUVs from her, or indeed solicited them from her on the occasion of their birthdays. The same ones who found nothing wrong with “Hello Garci” and applauded the congressmen for killing the impeachment bids against her. The same ones who wondered what was so wrong with cheating in elections, “everybody cheats anyway.” The same ones who claimed God spoke through them while they screwed the country, quite apart from those they added to the population by.

Danilo Suarez, House minority leader, justified the bishops’ welcoming Arroyo with open arms thus: “This is an issue that she feels strongly about as a devout Catholic, although she never used her term in the presidency to push things her way.” He justified as well his, and six of his fellow Arroyo loyalists’ defection from the RH bill thus: “Changing your mind is no joke, it is a matter of conscience.”

You don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the cheekiness of these statements. Arroyo is a devout Catholic? Then that is a reason to become Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, or atheist. Arroyo never pushed things her way when she was president? What about pushing her way as president to begin with, after she was made so not by God, vox populi, vox Dei, but by Garci, vox Garci, vox karaoke? Changing your mind is no joke, it is a matter of conscience? Really? You’ve got a conscience? Hell, you’ve got a mind to change?

It reminds us, in case we’ve forgotten already, although we’re assailed by it every time, that the Catholic Church remains primarily, and resolutely, a temporal power, and only secondarily—and cynically—a spiritual one. There are luminous exceptions, like Archbishops Antonio Fortich, Francisco Claver, Julio Labayen who fought oppression and benightedness in the past, and Archbishop Luis Antonio Tagle who fights oppression and benightedness today. Tagle, quite incidentally, has himself called for Catholics to join the rally and find discernment in it. He is at least one prince of the Church who acts, and thinks, like a prince. You know that by the fact that he abhors princely trappings and prefers beggarly ones. Unlike his fellows who like to garb themselves in finery to advertise their spurious grandness. Tagle at least I will continue to hold in the highest regard whatever his position on the RH bill.

But they are the exception. They are the rarity. To this day, the Church thrives in circumstances not unlike those Jose Rizal decried, locked in mortal combat with the state for earthly power. Its advantage then (as now) lay in the friars holding on to their positions for life while governor-generals came and went. Woe to a governor-general like Carlos Maria de la Torre who was liberal-minded and wanted to do things such as secularize the parishes held by the friars. Woe to a president like P-Noy who, unlike Arroyo, wants to make the lives of Filipinos better. They are the natural enemies of the prayle, they are the natural enemies of the bishopric.

Second, by the most absurd justifications they cite for their opposition to the RH bill. Suarez explains his turnaround in this way: He saw how other countries were having tremendous problems because of a lack of a labor force. “Our component is the people—they’re our asset. Yet we will control our population? That’s the reason I had second thoughts and withdrew my support for the bill.” And Bishop Ramon Arguelles aired his protest in this way: “Consider the future of your children and grandchildren… look at what’s happening to many countries in the West, they are becoming weak. So I appeal to the congressmen for them to see the reality.”

Can anything be more idiotic? Can anything be more pestilential? What are they saying: The more we breed like rabbits, the more we will become prosperous? The more we teem with street children, child prostitutes, child laborers, for sheer lack of ability even of the most egalitarian government to prevent, the stronger we get?

The bishops’ argument of course is that we should all populate the earth like breeders but leave it to government to feed, clothe and put the light of learning in the bred. How, they do not say. I’ll tell them how. I’ll convert to their view if they agree to give up their princely robes, quite apart from their princely lands and princely cathedrals and princely SUVs and live the way the apostles did, the way Christ bid them do (his kingdom is not of this earth), with only the clothes on their backs and faith in their hearts, to do what they want government to do. I’ll convert to their view if they agree to give up the alms they collect every Sunday to feed, clothe and educate the issue of every unwanted pregnancy, the better to add to society’s desperate efforts to battle homelessness, child prostitution and widespread misery of an order you are hard put to associate with the image and likeness of God.

In the end, that’s what makes the bishops’ opposition to the RH bill cynical and hypocritical. That they should call themselves prolife while seeing only hypothetical life and not real life, while bleeding only for the lot of those who have not been born and indifferent to the plight of those who have, while devoting all their time and energy and passion to something that was not, is not, and never will be to those who are here, who are flesh-and-blood, and who will ever remain in ignorance and hopelessness if their numbers keep multiplying.

That is being for life? That is being on the side of life?

That is prolife?