Bishops divided on giving funeral blessing to Mariannet

Don’t lose hope and don’t commit suicide. That was the admonition Saturday of a member of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines as the nation tries to recover from the nightmare of the recent suicide of 12-year-old Mariannet Amper of Davao City due to poverty and hunger. “They said the reason why a person commits suicide is because the person lost hope. A Christian should never lose hope even if he is being surrounded by so many difficulties in life," said Bishop Leonardo Medroso, head of the CBCP’s Episcopal Commission on Canon Law. “A Christian has always something to look up to and that is God," Medroso added. He said the Church views suicide as not a good deed and those who commit such act are considered sinners and cannot be given funeral rites. “The presumption would be that the one who committed the crime or the bad deed has to be punished accordingly, but that is just a presumption," Medroso said. “When it comes to individual cases, for example the case in Davao, the one concern, the bishop or the parish priest in that place, has to hear [why] she committed suicide. So from the narration of some relatives perhaps, then we would make a decision whether to give a funeral rites or not," said Medroso. However, Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Oscar Cruz said the Catholic Church reverse its discipline on suicide victims due to the advancement of behavioral sciences. “After years of the advancement of behavioral sciences the Church is convinced that those who commit suicide are not themselves and consequently the presumption is that they lack the necessary deliberation to commit a mortal offense against the giver of life and therefore there is now a relaxation of the law of funeral blessing and burial for those who commit suicide," Cruz, a Canon law expert, told reporters. “If formerly they were denied of the funeral rites and even the burial in a Catholic cemetery, now those practices no longer hold true. I think all experts of psychology and psychiatry are one in saying that all those who killed themselves are not in their right mind," he added. Amper committed suicide last Nov. 2 by hanging herself after losing hope over her family’s miserable condition. - GMANews.TV