CBCP: With Pinoys favoring RH bill, Church should beef up catechism teaching

MANILA, Philippines – The support of most Filipinos for the Reproductive Health Bill, as revealed by a recent survey, should be a challenge to the Catholic Church to beef up its teaching of catechism, according to the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP). "The survey should serve as a lesson for Church leaders that many people are still not aware of the Catholic teaching on contraception and natural family planning," Monsignor Pedro Quitorio, CBCP spokesman, said in an article posted in the CBCP website on Monday night. "There are really many people who are not aware of the reasons why the Church is against the artificial means of family planning." The CBCP issued the statement in the wake of a recent Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey showing that 68 percent of respondents favor the use of contraceptives. The survey also showed that 71 percent of respondents favor the pending Reproductive Health Bill, while 76 percent support the bill's provision requiring public schools to teach family planning education. Quitorio said the Church must propagate its "pro-family" and "pro-life" stand and must teach catechism in and out of season by using non-traditional means of conveying information. Still the CBCP said on Monday that opposition continued to mount against the bill among Filipinos living abroad, some of them members of Couples for Christ Foundation for Family and Life (CFC-FFL) in Canada. According to the CBCP, the group stands behind the Church's stand in promoting only natural family planning methods. Addressing the bill's proponents, the CBCP statement said: "While you (RH bill proponents) deem that this bill is intended to improve the lives of women, children, and the poor and address the Filipino's need to manage fertility, pregnancy and childbirth, there is no known evidence to support it." CFC-FFL Canada added that other countries that have enacted a law similar to the RH bill "have failed miserably" to attain such objectives. The group added: "We can be guaranteed that we are headed for a culture of promiscuity. There will be more and more broken families in our society and this will make the women, children, and the poor among us the outright victims." "We strongly urge you that, as lawmakers of our country, to leave us a legacy of a government and a constitution that will promote, protect and respect each and every Filipino's right to live a dignified life based on our faith in God," it added. The CFC-FFL Europe said it was very "distressed" about the contents of the bill currently being discussed in the Congress. "We in CFC-FFL Europe want to express our conviction that the RH bill is bad for the Philippines and for the Filipinos," the group said. Many of the provisions mentioned in the bill may sound harmless or even praiseworthy on the surface, but the group is not all that convinced, saying: "We know (based on the experience of formerly pro-life countries in Europe) that these same points of law will be the wedge used by anti-life forces to drive a crack, and eventually an irreparable breach, in the rights which are currently enshrined in the Constitution of the Philippines... "We see how the culture of death is running rampant in the cultures of Europe. They have exchanged secularity for secularism. There is little respect for life, for the Church, for family, for sexuality... "Europe is now at risk of eventual annihilation because of low birth rates, an aging population, aggressive contraception, and legal abortion." - GMANews.TV