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TechnoratiThe Filipino front in the culture wars
The heavyweights of the global reproductive health agenda are making an all-out bid to displace the church as the conscience of the Philippines.
An outsider who tuned into the debate that is raging in the Philippines over what’s politely known as reproductive health could be forgiven for thinking that contraception is banned this largely Catholic nation and that the legions of light are engaged in a fight against the forces of religious repression for the freedom to take a pill or use a condom.
This is so far from the truth it is laughable. Access to contraceptives is already unrestricted in the Philippines. The government family planning service, which has been in place since the 1970s, has an infrastructure of workers all the way down to the grassroots. The private sector is equally active; the International Planned Parenthood Federation supports two federations of NGOs providing various types of family planning services: Family Planning Organizations of the Philippines, and PNGOC (Philippine NGO Council), the latter with 97 member groups. Sex education is also an integral part of the high school curriculum.
So what is the purpose of House Bill 5043, which is entitled “An Act Providing for a National Policy on Reproductive Health, Responsible Parenthood and Population Development”? Raul del Mar, Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, has described it as pushing an open door. If so, what makes it so objectionable to the church and those legislators and members of the public who are pushing from the other side?
The answer is, coercion. The contraceptive-driven fertility decline program of HB 5043 may be the most coercive ever designed outside China. It obliges the government to provide free contraceptive services and products; it establishes an “ideal” family size, setting the stage for a proposed two-child policy; it imposes a national sex education curriculum at fifth grade level. Couples would be denied a civil marriage license unless they present a “certificate of compliance” from a family planning office certifying that they have been adequately instructed in family planning and “responsible parenthood”.
If before, quota-driven programs have led to gross human rights violations, this time around this bill could easily penalize with fines and jail sentences workers who will be unable to meet their quota. Employers who refuse to provide reproductive health care services to their employees will likewise be subject to penalties. Worse, it curtails freedom of speech, since any person who dares to talk against the program will also be subject to jail sentence and fines.
This program turns the Philippines into a veritable police state with the government using police powers to interfere in the personal affairs of its citizens. It will surely drive a wedge between couples since a health worker must provide sterilization services even in the absence of spousal permission -- or incur a penalty; and likewise between parents and children, since the latter can have access to reproductive health services without parental consent. In a generation or two, the six years of value-free sex education the bill mandates for school children will surely create sexually active adolescents.
Railroading and foreign influence
Naturally this legislation, which has a history stretching back more than a decade, has been sold to legislators and the public as something demanded by international human rights codes and a long overdue step for the betterment of families and the nation. But the high-handed tactics of its promoters indicate its true character.
The debate which is raging both in and out of Congress was sparked when two House Committees — Health and Population, and Family Relations — denied church and pro-family groups a chance to submit their position papers during the committee hearings, in contravention of the Constitution. This railroading of the bill’s approval at the comittee level was meant to fast track the submission of the committee report needed so that the bill could be put on the calendar for plenary debate.
In response, church groups organized a big rally celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Catholic “charter” on human life, Humanae Vitae, and launched an educational campaign to encourage civil opposition to the bill.
In the House, Congressman del Mar revealed departures from the established procedure in the handling of HB 5043. There were actually four reproductive health bills referred to two House committees. A first hearing on three bills took place on April 29 this year. By the second hearing on May 21, however, the committee chairman announced they would now consider “the substitute bill” (replacing all four bills) and, in the blink of an eye, the committees approved it. Usually a technical working group is convened to painstakingly put together the substitute bill. The question is, where did the substitute bill come from?
Former Senator Francisco S. Tatad, an incisive commentator, sources HB 5043 to the Philippine Legislative Committee on Population and Development (PLCPD) — an NGO with offices in the same building as the House of Representatives. Although purporting to be an NGO counting many Philippine lawmakers among its membership, PLCPD is essentially a foreign body. A popular columnist, Jose Sison, reports that PLCPD’s 2008 lobbying fund of two billion pesos comes from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, IPPF and UNFPA the latter two both well known for their global agenda to legalize abortion. PLCPD’s website shows the many programs it has implemented over the years in the name of alleviating poverty – sweet deals awarded to legislators who are PLCPD members? The world over is dotted with similar NGOs initiated by UNFPA to pursue its agenda to legalize abortion. Many who are in the know resent the role of PLCPD and are angry over this violation of their national sovereignty.
All over the Philippines local governments are passing their own versions of the Reproductive Health Bill: Quezon City, Aurora Province, Olongapo City, Sorsogon, Antipolo City... To no-one’s surprise, it appears that HB 5043 and these local ordinances are using one single template and in some parts are word for word the same. It leaves one without any doubt that the long arm of PLCPD reaches throughout the country.
Victory is not assured
Co-sponsored by 113 of the 238 members of the House of Representatives, the bill was only eight votes shy of making it past its second reading when urgent Budget hearings forced that debate to be postponed. No less than three billion pesos (US$62.2 million) has been appropriated for reproductive health programs in the government’s 2009 Budget.
However, victory is by no means guaranteed when Congress reconvenes on November 10. The 22 congressmen who have signalled their desire to intervene during the debate cut across partisan groupings; del Mar, the first of them, belongs to the same party as the bill’s principal author, Edsel Lagman. At last count the 238 congressmen appeared evenly spread between the pro, con and neutral positions, making the situation very fluid. The latest impeachment proceedings filed against President Arroyo will very likely cause further delay, and perhaps further dilution of support.
President Arroyo, by the way, has affirmed support for natural family planning methods. However, seven members of cabinet and heads of other government agencies have expressed their full support for this bill. When church leaders conferred with her on the bill she airily responded that the matter is now up to the debate in Congress. Last month she addressed the UN General Assembly meeting on the Millenium Development Goals, a UN program that considers lower population growth as an important development goal.
A culture war, in Asia
Article II, Section 12 of the 1986 Philippine Constitution states: “The State recognizes the sanctity of family life and shall protect and strengthen the family as a basic autonomous social institution. It shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception. The natural and primary right and duty of parents in the rearing of the youth for civic efficiency and the development of moral character shall receive the support of the Government.”
Under this article, and in spite of 80 per cent of the population being Catholic, a pluralism of family plannning practice has prevailed. Although the church continuously condemns artificial contraception and sterilization as evil, it has never coerced anyone into obeying these moral norms nor has it called for the closure of family planning clinics or the banning of modern contraceptives. In fact, everyone feels entitled to criticize the church for its alleged antedeluvian views on contraception. This freedom is also evident in the fact that around half of married women use some form of birth control, with 35 per cent using “modern methods” (the pill, IUD, condom, sterilisation...) and 14 per cent natural family planning and other “traditional” methods.
Congressman del Mar concludes that the real agenda of the Reproductive Health Bill is to push the contraceptive program as a direct attack against a predominantly Catholic nation and, in particular, the Catholic Church’s absolute rejection of abortion. The church is well aware that in UN language the term “reproductive health” includes abortion and lays the ground for its legalization.
In spite of the fact that population growth is now down to 1.81 per cent and fertility is down to 2.8 children per woman, the educated middle class strongly supports the bill on the false premise that Philippine population growth needs to slow further in order to solve the poverty problem. These promises were made forty years ago to a host of countries — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines included. Today, even the much-touted economic miracle in many Asian countries is unable to hide the fact that poverty remains a huge problem.
House Bill 5043 also proclaims that it is championing the cause of women a claim that is discordant for many grassroots women who have been victimized by the bad side effects of modern contraceptives. Behind this lofty proclamation is actually the imposition of the feminist ideology that surfaced during the UN Population Conference in Cairo and later in the International Women’s Conference in Beijing a sexual “freedom” that places women on the same footing as men in sexual matters. However, recent history has shown us how this brand of “gender equality” has played a key role in the secularization of many societies in the West.
Can there be any doubt that there is a culture war waged against the church and that the Philippines is one of the battlefields?
Rosa Linda Valenzona is currently General Manager of the Ayala Multi-purpose Cooperative in Manila. She is a former lecturer in economics at the University of the Philippines and a former Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs, Department of Social Welfare and Development. She is also a consultant to Pontifical Council on the Family.
DJB,
Do you believe in heaven?
or in hell?
I hope in both.
Don’t tell me just because you idolize Rizal then it’s still fine if you get excommunicated. We don’t know where Rizal ended up. Correct me if I’m wrong but from my history classes, Rizal implied in one of his books that if God is really merciful, then He wouldn’t allow so many people to go to hell. Good one, but still, no one knows.
I have been joining these discussions on the internet for more than a month now. I had my own post on this.
http://kaiserfernandez.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/reproductive-health-bill/
I tried to discuss starting with family, relationships and God, but some people didn’t want to argue because some claim that when God enters the equation, you can never win. So I then had to discuss using social consequences, economics, politics etc.
In the end I had my PERSONAL CONCLUSION with the youth nowadays. I got this from observing people in facebook. There are far more people joining the “I SUPPORT RH..” than “I OPPOSE...”
One reason could be as a JUSTIFICATION FOR THEIR ACTS.
Controlling your body is no joke. Everyone has to struggle. When I say everyone, I say everyone. There are people who really think that premarital sex, contraception, abortion etc. is normal and there are those people who know they are wrong but still continues to do/use them because they have become slave to their bodies. The latter has already accepted that there’s no way they can control their tendencies, so the only thing to do is find a way to justify their acts and that is supporting what they deem would be in line with their cause.
Honestly ask yourself if you have become a slave and just finding ways to justify your actions. Don’t tell me the Church is meddling in your affairs. If what the Church demands is easy, simple, fun and requires no sacrifice, (pointing to abstinence, chastity) then VIRTUE would have never been formulated.
Clarification: my organization monitors the UN and to all those who think condoms protect against AIDS...it does not unless used with other measures. All the UN delegates from all the countries know this; they also know that antiretrovirals are key to keeping people infected from dying and from them spreading it further but it is one of the least funded programmes.
The reason the best country in prevention of AIDS and lowering prevalence is Uganda and they did it through a Zero grazing programme not ABC as people call it now but ZERO- GRAZing, Yes people abstinence and fidelity. Indifferent to what your personal opinion is on these two that is what all scientist know works best yet just like antiretrovirals it doesn´t get talked about. WHY?
Because it doesn´t respond to alterior motives funded by principally European cultural reasons fundamented in two documents: the Royal Commission on Population and NSSM 2000, population control agendas with eugenic tendencies promoted by people like Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes whose admiration of Nazi Germany is only known by people with access to classified documents, and perfectly hushed by IPPF whose name was Association for Population Control.
The Philipino bill is coercive not because it promote reproductive health services, which in UN speech means access to abortion, forces sterilization, tubal ligations, etc., but because it makes mandatory under the guise of helping the poor policies that are directed not towards informing the public but towards reducing the amount of people instead of putting in place legislation that would increase jobs and guarantee better salaries which would reduce the amount of poor. At the same time it doesn´t make mandatory measures like increasing amount of hospitals in rural areas and training more medical and nursing personnel which would, as the bill says, help the poor. So this is the supposed pro poor bill.
I am not a lawyer nor in any way a legal expert, but lawyer friends would tell me that RH 5043 would not even be passed for its unconstitutionality. It violates the family code of the constitution. The Supreme Court could freely intervene in the passing of this bill because they are supposed to protect the constitutionality of the laws. Obviously, majority doesn’t always dictate what is constitutional or true. Let’s just hope that our lawmakers stick to the constitution.
Jeff Tan, wonderful “treatise.” :)
[continuation..]
There is not such thing as an over-populated country. Big familes say that this is what the Lord wills them to have. After all, it is not our will that should be done - but His will. We do not have the authority to “choose” how many children we want. What if the couple only wants to have one child but is granted with twins? Who’s choice was that to happen? Yours? I don’t think so. Everything happens for a reason and the Lord knows what should be done because He knows best. Besides, overpopulation (which is a total myth) does not cause poverty. We must all know that someone will always be poor (sad to say that it is true). We cannot totally eliminate the poor. That is why there are more fortunate people to help the less fortunate. It is all in the plan and maze that the Lord has made for us.
A mother who has children, is simply happy for being pro-life since she has the children she has now. A mother who has committed abortion is pro-choice - but the baby aborted has no choice. Now, who is the most affected? The child of course, and his choice was made against his will. Pro-RH is eliminating the future of the children who are yet to live their future in earth. Support life for life in not debatable.
DJB,
Before anything else, I still don’t understand why you support the anti-life group. If my side (the anti-RH Bill side) would be lying, why do you think that we would post comments strongly against it?
You say you are pro-truth. I must say that I am too. But THE truth is the will of God. Now, don’t shun the words from me just yet just because religion is in the topic. I suppose we all know that life here on earth is temporary. The clothes we buy may tear, the hair on our heads may fall and we may age and soon, die. What we do here on earth reflects what will happen in eternal life - whether eternal happiness in Heaven or eternal damnation. I know that God does not want us to kill other people, our brothers and sisters in Christ. And supporting this bill means that we are against the Lord’s will. This bill is as you say, pro-Death. If this bill is passed, other bills will surely be dabated such as pro-abortion.
The Philippines is one out of TWO countries in the entire world wo have not legalized divorce and abortion. I was very proud to be a part of this country since we have held Christian values. But now, what will happen to the Philippines? What will happen to the youth? With this bill passed, the youth will surely be affected. Think not of yourself but of your children and your children’s children. Think of my generation and future generrations to come.
Contraceptives does not even prevent STDs. HPV, the most dangeous STD ever to be spread has killed more girls than AIDS! Now, why aren’t we taught about HPV? Because it defeats the purpose of “safe sex”. Instead, we should have saved sex. Here’s a very well written article to support what I am saying: http://chastity.com/chastity/index.php?id=7&entryid=285
[continued...]
“Incestuous rape is most prevalent in the Philippines, then the US, then Protestant Europe.”
Supporting data please. I do not doubt that you’ve read that someplace, but I’m interested in examining them myself.
I would also suggest one possibility: could it not be that such deviancy as incest, pedophilia and what-not are simply legal and tolerated in those countries, hence not reported as rape or crimes of some sort? In Australia, there is a large percentage of rape that does not get reported.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/11/20/1100838276610.html
They had to *advertize* on TV encouraging girls to report them because they really were raped (cases of date-rape).
“Unnatural religious repression of sex apparently drives the birds and the bees mad with unnatural energy.”
Which falls right into the trap of despair and, ultimately, negative view on the human (free) will. This is why parents in western countries now tend to promote contraception to their adolescent children, the view that they are helpless against their appetites. Which convinces children that they are indeed helpless.
“Perhaps that is why the Church has had to spend a treasure expiating the sins of its clergy for the most despicable and unnatural crimes of child rape abuse.”
Have you even read the John Jay report?
http://www.bishop-accountability.org/reports/2004_02_27_JohnJay/index.html
“But to stick to the topic of this thread. Freely available contraception it is claimed, would lead to a mindset of libertinism and immoral behavior.
But let us look at a particular society, the society of Catholic Church priests and its hierarchy and the episcopate.”
Interesting bait and switch. You say stick to the topic about freely available contraception claimed, and then .. look at the Catholic Church hierarchy?
Isn’t it logical to examine the societies that do have freely available (and vigorously promoted) contraception?
“The Catholic Church and its dioceses have already been penalized to the tune of about a billion dollars for the child sex abuse crimes of which priests, bishops and other “church men” have been found guilty. The Pope’s recent apologies notwithstanding, the Church steadfastly refuses to recognize the reasons for this mysterious prevalence of sin among the supposedly saintly. “
That’s the Church in America, a country whose liberal culture is a far cry from that of the Philippines, no?
And note that the number/percentage of such priests are small (less than 5%)—did you know that the public school sex abuse cases far outnumbers that? Are their secular public school teachers members of a repressed frailocratic hierarchy too?
And once more, you are playing true to your strategem of demonizing the Catholic Church in order to deflect rational debate on the matter at hand. Have you even addressed any particular section of the proposed bill in your posts?? You have certainly cleverly engaged everyone in defending or (with yourself) attacking the Catholic Church.
The bill addressed in this mercatornet post is coercive. It is not even necessary, given the already declined rate of fertility and easy access to contraceptives. It plays right into the same scenario that made Planned Parenthood of America richer by $15 million USD per year (if 2007 was any indication).
Oh, and did anyone notice that funding for this lobby in the Philippines is funded by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (among two others)? The same body operates in Australia as well, but no surprise there. They are also pushing into South America. Do these people take the welfare of our country and our women at heart? Hmm…
“In the U.S. they are at the lowest levels they have ever been since the Pill was invented and approved for public use.”
I do think you’re getting confused here. I did not see anything in that link about a correlation between the use of the Pill and the rate of abortions.
The last table also showed that, as the rate in teenage abortion dropped recently, the rate in older women (25 and up) rose up to replace the slack.
You also forget that, in recent years under the Bush administration, abstinence education became a significant part of education in the US.
Here I wish to pitch for a secular reason to oppose abortion legislation: Women Deserve Better than abortions.
http://www.feministsforlife.org/
A large part of why Filipinas choose abortion is poverty. What governments and concerned people should be looking at is to truly give these women a choice. Make available better support for mothers. Yes, that means welfare and other assistance.
In the US, pregnant teenagers are not given a choice. The automatic response is to offer abortion. When lobbyists wanted to make ultra-sound machines available to these women, there was such a howl of protest. Why is that? Doesn’t such scientific instruments simply increase the data available to women, so that they can choose?
“the prevalence of sexual perversion and obsession seems clearly to be higher in those puritanic, conflicted and sexually repressed societies and frailocratic orders,”
Again, a claim that marginalizes/demonizes the Church .. while offering not a whit of data for support.
On the contrary, the most deviant perversions seem to be coming from such places as Europe, where a political party was established last year on the platform of pedophilia. Or have you ever heard of the North American Man/Boy (homosexual pedophelia) Love Association? And why is it that 25% of teenage girls in New York have STDs? Here in Australia, STD medication is into mainstream ads.
“There is simply no human life before conception.”
No, there isn’t. But the contraceptive mentality devalues the concept of human life. Being contraceptive gives parents the illusion that their offspring are controllable byproducts of their marriage. They are not byproducts: they are fruits. Being contraceptive also causes parents whose contraceptives fail to consider their children as unwanted accidents.
A “Humanae Vitae” parent (for want of a better name for the category) looks at children as gifts from God, as deliberate fruits of marriage, as intentional responsibilities they are taking on. They prayerfully decide, based on their lot in life, how many children they can support and how to space them apart across their fertile years. Then they use NFP, e.g., Billings ovulation method, to make it so. The BOM has a 99% success rate for both delaying as well as effecting pregnancy. That is actually better than the 75%-94% effectiveness of condoms. International standards leave a 0.6% chance of condom breakage (other factors can make it fail, including misuse!).
“The intent of both artificial and natural birth control are indistinguishable, one from the other: preventing a pregnancy.”
The distinction is that natural methods, particularly in the context of Humanae Vitae, are for reasons of managing the family. Condom use (as with other chemical contraceptives) is LARGELY, LARGELY to enjoy sex outside of marriage/family.
That is a sharp distinction. This latter category—promiscuous and adulterous—is where abortions tend to spring from. Even the 0.6% breakage rate of condoms will inflate the actual NUMBER of breakage cases given the greater license to have sex whenever, with whomever.
“[CDC] studies show that NFP methods actually cause more “deaths” via natural abortion”
Yes, but that harms no one. Unlike the chemical abortions of healthy embryos and the cancers women get from chemical contraceptives.
“contraception does not destroy life”
Much of what are sold as contraceptives are also abortificents. That they will (unintentionally) cause chemical abortion even when the conception of an embryo proceeds. Contraceptives aren’t perfect.
The cultural shift also plays a major role. By instilling a contraceptive mentality, human sexuality is necessarily (and incorrectly) split into a dichotomy between sexual pleasure and human reproduction. It is no stretch to then exalt the first and denigrate the second. Human reproduction—and the offspring himself/herself—is cast as an unwanted side effect that gets in the way of sexual pleasure.
Just look at the western countries with the contraceptive mentality. When the Pill became mainstream, abortion (legal) skyrocketed. In the US, more than 1 million legal, reported abortions are performed. What was once known to be their baby is now characterized as “just a bunch of cells” and should not be considered an impediment to what the mother wants to do with “her own body”. Thus is abortion now referred to as a “reproductive right” of women. But what about the rights of the unborn?
It begins with contraception and makes inroads into abortion soon enough. With the latter, it begins with a category for rape or incest where abortion is legalized. Soon it spills over to abortion due to any health-related reason, including psychological. Emotional trauma is easily cast as a psychological “danger”. Pretty soon it doesn’t matter if full term pregnancy is just a day away. Finally, as already occurring in the US and Europe, an infant who is born alive after surviving the abortion is killed or left to die.
Just look at the history. It’s all there. Here in Australia, it is now unfolding. The state of Victoria recently entered the abortion-for-any-health-related-reason stage, with a bonus that doctors are coerced by law to perform or refer abortions. By law.
It all begins with that first contraceptive step.
“Now some of those abortions are due to the uhmm fatherly actions of priests and bishops”
This being a serious venue for exchanging ideas, please cite evidence before making such claims. I do not doubt that clergy can fail their various vows (including celibacy). But I have no data concerning whether or not they are factors in annual induced abortions.
(Injecting such claims in a forum such as this is true to the strategy of typical lobbies: marginalize the Catholic Church because she tends to oppose the agenda.)
“Please quit obfuscating the fact that the Catholic Church would rather people die of AIDS than use a *gasp* condom because it is so “unnatural” and goes against the Pope’s hubristic vanity.”
If you were truly concerned with AIDS then you’d be delighted to learn that both Uganda and the Philippines (in contrast to other African countries and Thailand) found the best approach to defeat AIDS: by abstinence.
In the 90s, Thailand adopted (urged by the UN) a “100% condom use program”. Compared to 112 cases in 1987, they hit 755,000 by 1999. The Philippines repulsed attempts to adopt a similar program, and saw only 1,946 cases, up from 135 cases—without a condom program. In Uganda, around the same period, the AIDS infection rate went down from 21% to 6%. How? Through the ABC program—Abstinence, Being faithful to your spouse, and Condoms in high risk situations. The USAID/Harvard study concluded attribute the improvement to a decrease in multiple partners and networks. Follow the links to empirical data and scientific findings.
http://onebread.blogspot.com/2005/06/pope-john-paul-ii-and-aids-crisis.html
http://onebread.blogspot.com/2005/03/abstinence-war-zone.html
Based on empirical data, a condom culture increases the chances of AIDS. How? Because condoms are not perfect, and the tiny allowable margin for error (0.6%) can easily inflate AIDS cases due to an increase in sexual promiscuity, which is inevitable within a condom culture.
(continued)
As a result, we actually have two parallel evolutions in society, that inspired by God and that not. Although Catholics thinkers have noted the evolution in secular thinking, secular thinkers do not seem to have noticed any change in Catholic thinking since the time of Galileo. More is the pity.
Jesus noted that the meek shall inherit the earth. Meekness requires a recognition that we are not the source of meaning or value. God is. That recognition is impossible for a logical positivist or a secular pragmatist. Indeed, the honest ones, like Nietzsche and Sartre, have given up on the idea of meekness altogether and regard it as a regrettable relic of a bygone era.
Again, more is the pity. It is not my wish to see our vaunted western culture self-destruct, but I see no possibility that it will turn back from its self-imposed extinction. The deification of individual egos, at the expense of family and society, continues unchecked throughout modern and postmodern history. Of all western cultures, and their eastern stepchildren, only Israel continues to reliably perpetuate itself according to figures given by the Population Reference Bureau. I say, good for them, but I fear that they too may fall victim to the siren song of secularism and individualism.
Mr. Rizalist, I note that this thread will soon come to an end, since the comments already run to three web pages, and this blog software doesn’t allow for endless threads. Because of that, and because it’s impossible to treat your charge about organized religion losing its grip on theology with anything like proper justice in the space available, I will let it pass without comment. If you should suggest another venue, for a discussion of this thorny topic I will be happy to participate.
Your comment about the claims of religion to moral stature not being falsifiable is an interesting variation on the usual claims of logical positivism. It may even have some merit in the limited vocabulary and epistemology of logical positivism. I note, too, the justice of your comment that the few bad prelates have done enormous damage to the credibility of the Catholic Church. I regret that damage as much as anyone, and I would certainly agree that the Church needs reform. It always has and it always will. This is actually a basic theological tenet that is a consequence of free will and the damage done by original sin - our predilection, as human beings, to fall prey to temptation to do evil.
Having said all that, however, I believe that our modern and postmodern tendency to relegate religion to the status of relic is itself merely a sign of modern and postmodern naivety. Modern pioneers like Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out that since God is dead (in the cultural sense) everything is allowed. Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn noted that societies that kill God end up by killing themselves. Bertrand Russell noted that pure science and pure philosophy have no transcendental basis, and therefore no basis, for defining the difference between good and bad, right and wrong, justice and injustice. Sartre agreed with all of that, but insisted that it was necessary to accept the emptiness of personal meaning and courageously strike out on our own.
I readily confess the dimness of my wit and the poverty of my expression. As they are all I have, I can only present them as they shabbily are. But if I am not mistaken it was someone else on page 2 of the comments who broached the subject of Adolph Hitler, not I, in the context of “politically correct barbarians” and “totalitarians"--appelations I cannot accept though. But I shan’t pursue this vein, as it seems to be throbbing with extremely sensitive touchiness and was non-sequitur when it was begun, again not by me.
I don’t know how a discussion of legislation in the Philippines turned into criticism of Pius XII. I hate irrelevant diversions of this kind. But citing the letter to Hitler as “damning evidence of Church complicity with Nazism” is utterly absurd.
To put paid to this, I quote Wikipedia (hardly an authority, but at least it shows how easy it is for Rizalist to get a more balanced view)
“Mit brennender Sorge (German for “With burning Concern,") is a Roman Catholic Church encyclical of Pope Pius XI, published on March 10, 1937 (but bearing a date of Passion Sunday, March 14). The encyclical criticized Nazism, listed breaches of an agreement signed with the Church and condemned antisemitism. Drafted by the future Pope Pius XII, who was in Munich at the time of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, it warned Catholics that the growing Nazi ideology, which exalted one race over all others, was incompatible with Christianity. Pius XI himself in more explicit terms had elsewhere condemned anti-semitism.
“The encyclical was written in German and not the usual Latin of official Roman Catholic Church documents. It was addressed to German bishops and was read in all parish churches of Germany. Pope Pius XI credited its creation and writing to the Cardinal Secretary of State, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, who later became Pope Pius XII. There was no pre-announcement of the encyclical, and its distribution was kept secret in an attempt to ensure the unhindered public reading of its contents in all the Catholic Churches of Germany.”
It seems obvious to me that Hitler was well aware of whom he was dealing with when Pius XII was elected. Not one word of the carefully-phrased letter cited by Rizalist suggests agreement with Hitler or Nazi ideology.
Ciao, Dimwit
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