What is really going on

Even as the dusts of the last electoral battle have not yet fully settled down, the advocates of the RH bill are already making lots of noises. They are beating their breasts and bragging that most of the politicians who are staunch supporters of the bill were reelected thereby showing that the Church campaign against them and against the RH bill was a failure. This is however misleading and not entirely correct.

These politicians mainly won not because of their favorable stand on the RH bill. To be sure they may not have even explained to their constituents what the RH bill is all about or successfully convinced them of the bill’s merits. It is highly improbable that those who voted for them were fully apprised of the pros and cons of the bill. Actually these politicians won mainly because of thousands and even millions of other reasons or “considerations” that are usually the main ingredients of winning elections in this country where politics are no longer based on principles but on money, machinery, and dynasty.

Apparently the bill’s advocates and supporters are once more engaging in some form of deception and misinformation which characterizes their advocacy of the RH bill. They are even putting a twist and other meaning to incoming President Noynoy Aquino’s stand on the bill to the extent of engaging in double hearsay by quoting from a source who allegedly told them what Aquino told him.

To be sure Aquino’s core concern is the eradication of poverty which is very laudable. So his apparent support for the bill stems from a belief that controlling population can eradicate poverty; that reducing our population, which is euphemistically called by its authors as “population management” and “responsible parenthood, will spur economic growth. But when Noynoy adopted that ringing campaign pitch in the last election “kung walang corrupt walang mahirap”, he obviously saw that corruption, not overpopulation, is the main cause of poverty in this land; that well known economists and demographers have long discredited the Malthusian myth about population growth as stunting the economy. He must have seen (or should see) from official government data “that since a population control program was put in place here in the 1970s — with billions of public money spent to fund it — our population growth has been declining and continues to do so today, yet poverty has not been reduced”.

With his family and educational background, Noynoy Aquino would certainly not endorse a bill on population control to eradicate poverty because this is also like saying that we must reduce our human resource especially the poor to eliminate it. He would not support a bill on “reproductive health” that considers pregnancy as a disease which should be prevented by “teaching women—married or single—all methods and techniques to prevent it including abortion or the killing of an innocent and defenseless human being in the mother’s womb as confirmed by the authors themselves during committee deliberations when they denied the beginning of human life at fertilization.

The Pink Sisters who have been praying for Aquino would certainly not wish: that he supports a bill giving sexual rights to young people and requiring mandatory child sex education; that he promotes a measure imposing fine and imprisonment on parents, spouses and health workers who impede sexual and reproductive rights; that he endorses a bill creating a program for fertility control by encouraging the limitation of family size to two children and giving incentives to two child families.

The recent noises and blusters of the RH bill sponsors and advocates undoubtedly confirm that there is a war going on between secularism and Christianity. In an article published on March 19, 2010, in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, President of the Italian Senate from 2001 to 2006, Marcello Pera, described this secularism as aimed at the “destruction of religion” which “will not be the triumph of secular reason but the introduction of a new barbarism” that on the ethical plane is the barbarism of those: who kill the foetus because its life will be detrimental to the mental health (reproductive health) of the mother; who say that an embryo is a blob of cells suitable for experiments; who kill an old person because he no longer has a family to take care of him; and who hasten the death of a child because it is no longer conscious and is incurable”.

In said article entitled “Paedophile priests and the Pope”, Mr. Pera wrote that “secularists know that if mud were splashed in the white robe, it would stain the church, and if the church is stained, so would the Christian religion” Hence, several papers in the U.S.A. have recently come out with stories of sexual abuse of minors by priests which were blown out of proportion and used to attack the “three pillars of the Catholic system: its moral authority, the priests and the Pope”.

The papers in the US particularly the New York Times has not been so honest in presenting the case. “Accusations are gathered since 1940 to come up with a figure of 4,000 paedophile priests in the U.S… In that country of 300 million people, over 2.5 million students and 763,000 university students in Catholic centers and 20,000 parishes, that is only a little less than 8 reported cases per year (and fewer each time) of paedophile priests reported over half a century (Josep Ardevol, La Vanguardia).

Three horrible cases in the US involving a priest in Wisconsin, two priests in Arizona and one priest in California which all happened in the 1970s where the police were informed and acted, the priests suspended by their bishops and later on defrocked, were revived in an effort to implicate Pope Benedict XVI or Cardinal Ratzinger whose only involvement was when a request for defrocking landed on his desk. He was accused of cover-up or collusion because in a 2001 letter, he asked the parties to observe secrecy and confidentiality during the trial so that the victims could give their evidence freely and the accused protected until proven guilty. Obviously the letter was not a cover-up or collusion as misreported.

These are pointed out here so that as Catholic lay people we know what is really going on and be ready to defend the truth against those who engage in deception and distortion of facts. –Jose C. Sison (The Philippine Star)

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