In the defense of the Catholic Church for their stand against RH Bill.

I wrote my third comment  on the article of Jim Paredes' website Writing on Air on his topic "The Separation of the Church and faith". This is in defense of the Church stand against the RH Bill.

Merry Christmas and a blessed New Year! With your permission, I would like to comment on your opinion that sex is not exclusively for pro-creation. You are right, if you read my blog, it is written there that the 2 purposes of sex are for pro-creation and intimacy of spouses. And in my second response to your website, I mentioned that one can use natural family planning(NFP) method to prevent pregnancy if there is a serious reason for it. That means whether the sexual act is temporarily or permanently infertile by nature, the act is moral even if it does not attain the purpose of pro-creation. The point here is that we cannot violate the will of God. If couples cannot have children by nature, then that is the will of God for them and God does not forbid them to get married. NFP is the window provided by God for us to prevent pregnancy if there is grave reason for it and not artificial contraception as was clearly explained in my previous response. This teaching is not just based on Catholic beliefs but based on natural law just like murder, stealing, rape, etc. This teaching therefore is not only for Catholics alone but for all humanity. The problem is the evil of artificial contraception is not as obvious as murder, stealing, etc. to many people. They are not even aware of the devastating effects of contraception to the morality of society which to some people means nothing compared to the miseries our people are suffering today that is because these people embrace the philosophy of moral relativism which I would later clarify. Most Catholics are obviously not well versed in the science of moral philosophy. Many forget their common sense that to determine the moral issue of certain matters, one need the expertise of the people on the know, in the same manner that you consult a doctor if you get sick and not argue with the doctor if he tells that this medicine will do good for you or advise you to stop certain habits because it will harm your health. Your common sense tells you to follow them and not your uneducated intuition. Many think that this moral issue is common sense. Many even believe that the Church is naïve, old-fashioned or in the dark, that they are not aware or worst uncaring of what is happening to the poor pregnant women. I would say that the media has a lot to do with this impression because the Church has been a great enemy of the US propaganda on population control since the 1970's. The US knows how to orchestrate things to achieve their objectives. Well, all these impressions about the Church are not true. Our bishops are no morons but are highly intellectuals and they are not naïve. Modernity is not a new facet of life. The fast changing world has been there since the 19^th century and these intellectuals in the Church have learned their lessons from the problems brought about by these changes.

Some people embrace moral relativism, which means morality are relative and not objective. Relativistic morality has its limitations and is not absolute. Though it is true that one is obliged to follow one's conscience, one also has the obligation to properly educate or inform one's conscience of the objective truths of morality because conscience can be objectively wrong. Moral relativists are accused of inconsistently claiming that there are no universal moral norms while appealing to a principle of tolerance as a universal norm. The reason behind this is that they believe that there is no objective truths to morality and therefore one ought not to interfere with the conscience of other people and should exercise tolerance. If there is no objective truths in morality, we should not actually blame Osama Bin Laden for being a terrorist because he sincerely believes that it is right to annihilate the American culture of immorality, so for him it is justifiable to kill the Americans. I was surprised to discover that one of the pilots of the airplane which crushed on one of the Twin Towers was a decent well behaved intellectual who was studying in the US university. I am reminded of so many young UP students who were recruited to become communist. Just like many young idealistic UP students, this young student was full of idealism to offer his life for that cause. I soon realized that the kind of person who would do such suicidal terrorist attack are not the mentally deranged persons or the unscrupulous mass murderers but people moved by idealism. Unfortunately, this young terrorist had fallen to a wrong doctrine or philosophy. The point here is that there are obviously objective moral norms because there objective truth in morality which ought to be followed and if they are rejected by some, they need to be informed and properly educated and not be tolerated. Though, however, there are cultural factors that come into play which makes it proper to exercise tolerance like the practice of polygamy of the Muslims. This is another complicated topic to discuss but which I don't intend to expound.

On the topic of power issue, I don't think the Church is interested in power. If she is, then the way to do it is to allow RH bill in order to please the popular majority which you said was 83%. That would make the Church more popular and have more following. But if what you mean by power, is the power to dictate the conscience of others, I don't get it. Are you referring to the arrogance of being able to dictate or sway the conscience of people. What kind of people are they who enter priesthood? These are young people who are moved by idealism to serve God by serving the people. And I would prefer to think that they are really interested in morality than in promoting the cheap arrogance of having the power to dictate the conscience of other people. If you think that this a power issue, perhaps you are overwhelmed by your passionate concern for the poor that you get annoyed by the Church vehement stand against RH bill which you strongly believe is the answer to the problem of the poor. But then it is only you who exactly know your motive.

There are many issues you raised against the Church. You have mentioned that the Church did change their stand on some moral issues. This is a very complicated topic to discuss. But let me give you a backgrounder. During the time of Abraham God permitted the people to kill, “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth”. After a thousand years, at the time of Moses, God gave them a new edict “The Ten Commandments” which forbids them to kill. By the time of Jesus Christ, it is not just wrong to kill your enemy, Christ commands to even love your enemy. What do these events tell you? God is teaching us as children who need to slowly progress in morality. You don't teach grade 1 student algebra, he won't understand anything. Christ did not condemn slavery at that time because we are not mature yet to comprehend it and other reasons which we may not know in this world but in the next. He left us the Church to guide us and let the process of development run its course so we can better know our human nature and arrive at the right decision in our life with the guidance of His Church. You also mentioned why the Church is so vociferous about RH bill? Because of its devastating effects on the morality of society which for you may not be so important. You might be overwhelmed by the problem of poverty which inflicts evil to the physical well being of our people, but the Church sees far more evil on the effects of RH bill in the spiritual well being of our people. The soul is more important than the physical body. Another obvious reason for the great outcry of the Church over this issue is because people are confused and really swayed to embrace contraception not unlike the other issues where there was no problem of confusion. The majority knows that the Marcos administration was an evil dictatorship and the Church need not make a loud public outcry of her condemnation to make people aware of it. The problem was people did not have the courage to overthrow the Marcos' rule. It is easy to judge from our own perspective, but we can be very subjective about our opinion and affected by our passions. During the second reading of the bill, there was just a 9 vote difference. In the third reading, many changed to give their consent to the bill and it won with an overwhelming majority. We cannot judge their motive for doing so. What we know is the action they did. But we don't know their motive. We know what they did, but we don't know their reasons. Congressman Golez was a staunch prosecutor of the RH bill but he abstained twice. Some said that their pork barrel would be disapproved so they consented. There could be many underlying considerations why they acted so and we should not judge them because we are not in their position.

I quoted the bible because the vast majority of our people are Catholics and therefore they need to be enlightened by their faith to decide on this issue of the RH bill . If most of us are mathematicians, and someone is proposing a solution using wrong mathematics, one has to speak up to correct the error because these people care about mathematics to arrive with the right solution. For those who are not interested in mathematics in finding the solution but use other ways to find the answer, let them be. Your website is accessible for public viewing. I just want to inform the vast majority of Catholics the mind of the Church on this issue in your website. I hope you will publish this.

May the Catholics be more enlightened in their faith in this Year of Faith! God bless!