SOMETIMES, THE CATHOLIC CHURCH FALTERS BADLY

    Published on 10 August 2012
    Manila Times
    Written by MA. ISABEL ONGPIN

I am a Catholic and went to Catholic schools. I have lived with the Catholic hierarchy of this country as a student and now as an adult. I am still a Catholic and I have remarks to make in the light of the controversy or debate fuelled mostly by the Catholic Church regarding the RH Bill now about to be voted on.

One is that the Catholic hierarchy here has to educate itself much more than its present state of opinions exhibits. If it has to make rules and take stands on whatever issues, these should be thoroughly studied in the light of truth and fairness, freedom of thought and expression, accepted facts and scientific data even within the perspective of church teachings about right and wrong. Thus, they should know the facts about mining, what are and what are not abortifacients, how elephants should be managed, what is the line that must not be crossed into political transactions. In all these issues someone or the official stand of the hierarchy has expressed opinions, many of them extreme if not ludicrous and untenable. In matters like the RH bill, the environmental problems, even the elephant in the Manila Zoo, we hear churchmen using the most egregious reasons to make a stand which is so out of synch that undermines what they say from the beginning. Illogical, half-baked and simply automatically biased stands wears out their credibility to the audience addressed, except their unthinking followers.

It is happening over and over again and there seems no improvement from past mistakes of extremism and ignorance. And that may be the kindest thing to say.

Leaving the present controversy, I have experienced the irrational behavior of the Catholic hierarchy in the following ways which by now should be obsolete but seemingly are not:

Sometime in the 1950’s they blindly obeyed the unreasonable bias against the art of ballet dancing by the then papal nuncio. Without a dissenting voice or a plea for reason, upon his say-so, all Catholics were forbidden to have anything to do with ballet. All Catholic schools were conscripted to threaten their students with expulsion if they continued ballet studies. Ballet was demonized. Ballet performances were abolished. Ballet schools withered on the vine, ballet teachers were stripped of their livelihoods. My two sisters, my friends and classmates who were taking ballet had to stop or they would be expelled from their schools. Yet universally ballet was a revered art and accepted by civilization including by the Church everywhere else. But in the Philippines on the whim of the Catholic hierarchy with no papal bull, no theological argument, no dogmatic teaching, ballet was banned. The decree was sweeping, effectively killing ballet here for decades. Eventually that papal nuncio left, the animus against ballet was forgotten and it came back. Well and good, but wasn’t the war against it condemnable?

When I was about to graduate from high school in a small class of 13 students in Baguio, we were on the receiving end of warnings and threats about going to the University of the Philippines, the “godless” school that would ruin our souls. It was the usual prattle that would emanate in all Catholic schools just before graduation, perhaps based on some regulation from higher Church authorities. Finally, the bishop himself paid us a visit and ringingly brought down to us the dangers of going to UP. I had a scholarship to a Catholic school so while it did not affect my plans, I was somewhat perplexed by the high decibels. It certainly unnerved my classmates who were UP-bound. Some went anyway and their lives did not deteriorate to “godlessness.” And now UP is no longer reviled in Catholic schools, thank goodness and reason. This little episode of mind control, heavy-handed strictures and little logic rankled. It should not have happened.

Finally, when in college the bill on the mandatory reading of Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo came up, there was a hue and cry from the Catholic hierarchy opposing it for its criticism of the colonial friars, We were catechized that reading these novels would bring hellfire on us. That these books were the devil’s work and a direct attack on the church.. Our erstwhile admirable teachers were called upon to testify against the novels even if they themselves had never read them. An official opinion had already come down and they were merely to echo it at the Senate. When they lost that battle, they continued the war by trying to have Catholic schools exempted. This was beyond logic. And today anyone can read these novels, go through Rizal’s portrayal of the good and the bad friars and not lose one’s faith.

This was another ill-thought, ill-advised and totally unnecessary war instigated by the Catholic hierarchy.

In the light of these past instances for which no official apology or exculpating explanation has ever been given by our Catholic hierarchy, their present rabid and irrational take on the RH bill becomes suspect for its tactics that eschew truth and fairness.

For example, there is no provision or mention of abortion in the RH bill but time and again it is invoked as part and parcel of the bill. This is at the very least misleading and perhaps closer to the truth, deliberate falsehood. Very few contraceptives are abortifacients as they have been sweepingly labeled. Yet time and again they are indiscriminately defined as such. Where in the bill is it said that families must be limited to two children? Yet we have heard ravings against that phantom provision. As an institution that claims moral ascendancy and as the shepherd of the majority of this country, it is to be expected that the debating givens it uses should be true and accepted by the other side. That and the other misrepresentations of a foreign conspiracy (as compared to advocacy) and an indifference to unacceptably high maternal deaths and the surveys showing an unmet demand to limit families particularly by poor women, is disappointing and infuriating. Why can’t Catholics in this country be treated as adults with consciences? Why can’t poor women be listened to? After numerous catechism lessons regarding conscience and how it is the highest feature of a decision-making process for Catholics, why is it suddenly cast aside and denigrated when it comes to deciding on the RH bill?

What seems to be the driving force in the dynamics of the Cahtolic Church and the Philippine State is power, for which all appeals to reason and fairness fall on deaf ears. Power has to be exercised at all costs even at the cost of truth and fairness. It is the institution as a power base that matters now, not why it was created in the first place. It can even consider allying with morally dubious elements for its ends. It is to be conceded that the Church has to give its opinion and underline its mandate but it is to be expected that it does so within the values that it has long preached -– truth, fairness, charity, compassion. And with an acceptance that whoever is addressed is an adult who will make up his or her mind according to conscience. As it is, we are in the “Do what I say not what I do” stage which indeed validates Rizal’s criticism of some religious in his novels, whose primary preoccupation is the need to control and dictate to their parishioners on the presumption that they are non-adults, do not have a conscience to make judgments.

I am treating this situation as one more of those extreme and biased incidents of which we are all too familiar with.

miongpin@yahoo.com


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MINA TENORIO
mina@likhaan.org

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