Church vs. state
July 15, 2011
In the past few years the Catholic Church has been involved in scandals, trials, and incriminating exposes around the world. Now a scandal is making headlines in the Philippines. Philippine Roman Catholic Church leaders apologized on Monday for a massive scandal involving donations of sport utility vehicles to bishops. Last week, the Philippine Senate Blue Ribbon Committee, which is responsible for investigating the accountability of public officers, began looking into allegations that the donated vehicles had been purchased with money from the state lottery, the Philippines Charity Sweepstakes Office (PSCO), and donated to the bishops by the Arroyo administration to curry their support. The bishops had insisted that the donations were going to be used to help poor people in isolated communities.
The Catholic Church plays an important role in the Philippines and it has an important influence on politics too. Divorce is still illegal in the country of 92 million people, as are abortion, premarital sex and pornography. The use of contraception is not illegal but greatly frowned upon.
An opening for a new bill
Filipinos are now hoping that the damage this major public scandal has caused to the church’s image could help pave the way for more liberal politics. Legislators have been fighting to pass the controversial Reproductive Health Bill, proposed in 1998, which would give more rights to couples who wish to use family planning by making contraceptive devices and educational programs available.
Many Filipinos now see a good chance for the bill to be passed, though the church stands firmly against it. At one point, the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) threatened to excommunicate President Benigno Aquino III, if he supported it.
Representative Edcel C. Lagman, a member of the Lakas Kampi CMD party and a major proponent of the legislation, told Deutsche Welle that although there was no initial relation between this scandal and the bill, the scandal is likely to "have a favorable effect" on getting it passed in September when it goes through congress.
Long road
For almost 15 years, activists have tried to legalize family planning options for Filipinos. Although more than 80 percent of Filipinos are Catholic, a survey conducted in 2007 revealed that the vast majority of the country’s population believe that it is important to manage fertility and plan their family. Close to 90 percent believe that the government should provide budgetary support for modern artificial methods of family planning, including the contraceptive pill, intra-uterine devices (IUDs), condoms, ligation, and vasectomy.
The majority of Filipinos are for the bill, according to Red Tani, President of the atheist organization Filipino Freethinkers, with only seven percent – "a noisy minority" – against it. "It might seem that there is actual controversy, but this issue has been decided on a national level for quite awhile now," says Tani.
The widespread support for the bill shows there is no such thing as a Catholic block vote, but the perception of one scares legislators away from voting in favor of it. "Congressmen are also harassed by bishops who warn that that they will not support them or their move for re-election if they vote on the bill." Tani says that the CBCP wants to demonize the bill by saying it allows abortion. But according to the facts, abortion will remain illegal and the bill could help reduce the number of abortions.
Despite over three decades of efforts to reduce population growth in the Philippines, the United Nations Population Fund has found that fertility levels remain high, especially in poor families. They UN says this reflects the unmet demand for family planning among Philippine citizens. At the moment the availability of not only contraceptives, but also educational programs is vary scarce due to an executive order in Manila.
Loss of Moral Leadership
A further aspect weighing heavy on the church’s shoulders is that it has accepted donations from the state lottery which is funded through legalized gambling while at the same time being openly opposed to gambling. Lagman believes the church is being hypocritical and that it has now become a question of double standards and morals. "People will think twice before following the position of the church because they are losing their moral ascendancy."
Tani believes that the Philippine Catholic Church has become its own downfall. "They have no right to legislate their morality on the entire country when they themselves have elements of corruption and deception," says Tani. "The people have lost trust in them…They are proposing as a solution to poverty fixing corruption or removing corruption from the government, which is very hypocritical because as the recent scandal shows, they themselves have corruption in their own backyard."
Other recent scandals in the country's Catholic Church have exposed that the church is one of the richest organizations in the Philippines, with 18 billion pesos (almost 300 million euros) in stocks in public companies. Tani accuses the church of supposedly being for the poor but doing as little as possible to help them.
All of this, combined with a perceived violation of church and state and uninvestigated child abuse scandals leads to what Lagman calls a decline of "moral leadership" of the church.
Author: Shivani Mathur
Editor: Sarah Berning