Threats

This debate is quickly turning into a farce.

The president of the CBCP began talking about some contraceptives causing abortion, and therefore subject to the penalty of excommunication. Some media reports promptly took that as a veiled threat of excommunication against the President of the Republic.

The spin conjured up images of a great war between church and state, of hordes of the faithful laying siege on the center of temporal power, of angry cries for the nation’s leaders to be burned at the stake. Those are images from the Middle Ages, when cardinals could have barons quartered by four horses pulling the limbs in different directions or heretics could be put to the wheel where every bone will be broken one by one, death by a most painful and prolonged process.

But the bishops were quick to abort this unhealthy spin — and tame the wildest imagining of what might come after President Aquino declared his support for making contraceptives available to the public on the basis of informed choice. Spokesmen for the CBCP clarified there was no move at all to have President Aquino excommunicated.

This was followed by a rather edifying public discussion about the penalty of excommunication. We now know that rape, murder and plunder are not crimes that might be penalized with excommunication. One might commit these crimes and remain a Catholic in good standing.

Abortion is a different matter. Whether done at full term or at the instant of conception, this is a deed punishable by excommunication.

The clarification, in turn, has invited some technical hair-splitting about which methods or medication might result in abortion — that most grievous sin in the eyes of the bishops. Contraceptives, etymologically, are means to prevent conception. Therefore, they help avert the need for abortion. Therefore, that veiled threat of excommunication for those propagating contraceptives was unnecessary in the first place.

In the course of discussing excommunication, the laity now knows it is not such a horrible penalty after all. An excommunicated Catholic, it turns out, remains in the fold but will be denied the sacraments.

That strikes me as a penalty difficult to enforce in this day and age, unless the Church improves its communications infrastructure so that no excommunicated individual can anonymously slip into a church and receive communion. In the manorial societies of medieval Europe, when people were not mobile and everybody knew everybody else in church, excommunication might have been a dreadful punishment. Not so these days.

At any rate, clarification of doctrine might not be the objective of all the noise emanating from the CBCP lately.

The bishops have seized on the President’s statements to fortify their doctrinal position for the real battle: the possible passage by Congress of the reproductive health bill. They are digging their trenches here and now: signaling proponents of the reproductive health bill that the Catholic hierarchy is not about to take the matter sitting down.

There are other battles down the road. After the reproductive health bill, there is another one restoring the remedy of divorce for marriages that do not work out.

Divorce used to be an available option in our civil law decades ago. In the early fifties, however, Catholic influence caused divorce to be outlawed. Had that not happened, Kris Aquino might have had an easier time sorting out her post-marital affairs.

The Catholic hierarchy has opposed divorce on doctrinal grounds. On this issue, they might have an even weaker position than they have on the issue of artificial contraception.

There are risks in every strategy. Here, the Catholic hierarchy might have initiated hostilities too early. They have seized on the President’s declaration of support for “informed choice”, talked about excommunication and even threatened a civil disobedience campaign. All their big guns are out.

The bishops need President Aquino to back down now if they are to win leverage against the pieces of legislation they want to block. It might have appeared to the bishops that it is easier to force the Chief Executive to back down than a whole House of politicians whose political fates depend more on jueteng than on the approval of priests.

If President Aquino does not back down, as it now appears, then the gamble is lost.

If the bishops lose the initial skirmish, their clout will appear much weaker than the clergymen might imagine. The fortifications they have built around what they hold to be core doctrinal positions suddenly appear more vulnerable.

After the bishops reacted strongly to the President’s pronouncement, the public reacted to the bishops just as strongly. It is evident that the majority of public opinion stands on the side of “informed choice” — that vague phrase that couches government population policy as it plays cat-and-mouse with the church.

With the clearer delineation of the majority opinion on this issue, the President has much more to gain politically by sticking to his guns. By insisting on his vastly more enlightened policy position, he will be able to claw back political points lost the past few weeks to controversies over the hostage incident and charges relating to gambling payoffs.

Aquino has much more to lose by backing down. If he does, he will merely reinforce perception of a weak and indecisive presidency.

That will cause him to lose even more points and set his presidency on the wrong foot for the rest of his term. –Alex Magno (The Philippine Star)