For Salve, here’s Catholic advice

Raul Pangalangan, in his May 27 column, asked: “So what’s the Catholic advice to Salve?”
There is only one: love.
Of the many lessons that we, Catholics, can learn from the RH debate, one is the greater demand for love. The Catholic Church, with or against other institutions, takes the burden of the Cross.
Many Catholics claim that no other single institution has done more than what the Church has done in alleviating poverty all over the country. Whether the claim is true or not is beside the point. Love has no limit. This we discover. Society demands more.

I hope that this RH debate, even before it is over, will give birth to compassionate practices among Catholics toward our neighbors. The likes of Salve should not go amiss with our love – from Pangalangan’s love, not the least, I hope.
In the meantime, I strongly urge Pangalangan to avoid using such arguments in his columns. Philosophically, it is easy to shoot down such arguments by invoking the fallacy of ad misericordiam, or appeal to pity. But it is really unfair to treat the problem as a philosophical one. Nevertheless, I ask him to not use such arguments because they ignore other aspects of reality. In a bid to befuddle the opponent, Pangalangan seems to be willing to set aside values other than economic well-being. And such methods can and have been used to pursue more horrific conclusions. That kind of reasoning, I am very sorry to say, is the very same reasoning which spurs one to justify abortion.
I hope Pangalangan’s future columns will engage less with rhetoric and more with law, of which I know him to be an expert.
—MARK ROBERT B. BALDO,
4th year BA Political Science,
UP Diliman, [email protected]