The Prayer of Senator Miriam Santiago and the RH Bill

I like the prayer of Senator Miriam Santiago to the newly canonized Filipino saint, Pedro Calungsod.  She is petitioning the saint’s intercession to have both sin tax reform and reproductive health bills passed by Congress. In her words, “Dahil may bagong santo, mas malamang na magbibigay siya ng idadasal natin, 'yan ang idadasal nating mga Pilipino”. I don’t know whether her prayers will be answered or not.  But I’ll be happy to hear any good news and partake a piece of the “pie in the sky,” so to speak.  I am even willing to settle for just one bill to pass---The RH Bill! Unfortunately, the odds are stacked against her. There is this brawling hierarchy of celibate patriarchs in cassocks called Catholic Bishop Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), with supposedly greater spiritual mojo than the senator, also petitioning for divine intervention.   And they’re not just fervently interceding to defeat the bill, but also, consigning the bill’s framers and supporters to a hellish oblivion.  And this time, I suspect they’re directly communicating to their “boss upstairs” rather than going via Saint Pedro Calungsod.  If it is true, that’s very considerate of them.  I suppose they don’t want the good saint to be rattled by the onslaught of disparate and conflicting petitions. The current CBCP just doesn’t get it.  It keeps scaring its flock with the fire and brimstone fairy tale again and again.  Its organization and minions are trying hard to discredit the RH Bill as pro abortion and sexual immorality legislation rather than a bill that seeks to support appropriate reproductive and sexual health care education and services, family planning, and women’s rights and well-being. How can Senator Santiago beat that? I am afraid it’ll be quite difficult.  For what she is dealing here are balky religious characters who carry in their brains the dead weight of ultra-conservative ideology posing as an immutable church teaching. Precisely, it is from this very fiber of fundamentalism that the church oftentimes turns into an institutional bastion of reactionary politics---opposing women’s rights, gay rights, secular education, scientific progress, or even embracing some of the worst regimes (i.e. Nazism and Fascism) in the history of human civilization. Overconfident and unbending, they have arrogantly challenged pro RH Bill Catholics with the worn-out fallacy of “love it or leave it” argument because for them, despite the over 2000 years of ridicule, the church has withstood criticism and has not changed any of its fundamental teachings. However, there is one problem with this argument.  Its church survived not because it did not change but because it did! No Catholic fundamentalists like to admit the sociological reality that just like other social institutions, its church and hierarchy is above all a pragmatic organization that will not hesitate to take several steps back from its most cherished principles of “the way things were” and rework its theological interpretation to remain responsive and relevant to the needs of the times. Just imagine how horrific it’d be if the church had not changed at all. What about being stuck to an era when it legitimized monarchs and despots with the divine right of kings?  Or when it attributed epileptic seizures and convulsions to a possession by the devil?  Or when it excommunicated scientists like Galileo Galilei because their scientific findings contradicted its teachings?  Just to name a few. By the way, as far as Galileo Galilei is concerned, it took more than 350 years for the Roman Catholic hierarchy to issue an apology and to lift the edict of Inquisition against him for promoting the heliocentric view of the solar system. That is why I am not surprised if the ultra conservative CBCP refuses to learn the lesson and insists on trying to hold back the tide of social change with a broomstick.   More so, accept the RH Bill’s inevitability based on emerging sociological, medical, and clinical findings on reproductive and sexual health issues. For example, the UN Population Fund reports: •       An estimated 1,600 women die every day from complications caused by pregnancy and childbirth, 99% in developing countries. •       Each year, approximately 2 million girls are at risk of female genital mutilation. •       About 70,000 women die every year from unsafe abortions, and many more suffer infections and other consequences. •       Women are more likely than men to contract HIV through sexual encounters and about 42 per cent of all persons infected with HIV are women. •       Fifty-one percent of all pregnant women suffer from iron-deficiency anemia. •       In many countries of South Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, one-third to one-half of women become mothers before the age of 20. •       Cancer of the cervix, the most common form of cancer in developing countries, is often linked to the sexually transmitted human papilloma virus. •       Domestic violence, rape and sexual abuse are a significant cause of disability among women. What else can Senator Santiago do besides petitioning for a saint’s intercession when it is oxymoronic to talk about religious conservatism and social change? Unavoidably, she has to politically engage these religious dinosaurs whose ideology is an evolutionary dead-end to its institution for the sake of moving our society forward. Hopefully, they'd learn a thing or two from the late Italian Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini who gave a scathing remark of his church conservatism that has reduced itself into a pompous bureaucratic organization--200 years out of date and failing to move with the times—but urged the same to admit its mistakes and to begin the “journey of transformation”.