PHNO-HL: PROTESTANTS, IGLESIA SQUARE OFF VS CAHOLICS ON RH BILL


 



PROTESTANTS, IGLESIA SQUARE OFF VS CAHOLICS ON RH BILL

MANILA, APRIL 27, 2011 (MANILA STANDARD) by Rey T. Salita - A PROTESTANT-LED group on Monday criticized the Catholic Church for asking parishioners to double their contributions during masses all over the country to fund its fight against the reproductive health bill.

"There has been too much disinformation and advocates of the reproductive health bill have been demonized and called evil from the pulpit," said Bishop Rodrigo Tano, president of the Philippine Association of Bible and Theological Schools.

Saying he represented an interfaith partnership with the Iglesia Ni Cristo, Muslim communities, Protestant churches, indigenous peoples and dissenting Catholics to promote responsible parenthood, Tano slammed Catholic bishops for not explaining the empirical merits of the family planning bill and for failing to confront overpopulation.

At his briefing, Tano showed an Oct. 12, 2010 letter signed by the Iglesia Ni Cristo's executive minister, Eduardo Manalo, supporting the reproductive health bill.

"We are all well aware of the dire situation of our country caused by overpopulation. Many of society's worsening ills—from homeless families starving in miserable conditions and children not in school but instead begging all day and night in nearly every major street to the rapidly spreading problems with drug abuse and rising crime rate—can be traced to families growing so large that an increasing number of parents cannot provide the most basic human needs to their families," Manalo said in his letter to Biliran Rep. Robelio Espina.

"We are ready to support the bills on reproductive health as long as there would be no immoral elements in them," Manalo said.

The letter said the church believed "that it is a moral imperative for parents to watch over all their children and provide them with food, shelter, and clothing as well as proper education and religious and moral training," and that parents "have a moral obligation to plan the number of their children."

Manalo quoted from the first book of Timothy, saying that "a parent who does not provide for the need of his own household is worse than an unbeliever."

The letter also stated the Iglesia's support for the use of contraception except abortive methods, and asserted its opposition to natural family planning espoused by the Catholic Church.

"Since modern methods of contraception—by preventing married couples from having any unplanned pregnancies—assist in supporting this Christian principle, we support their use as long as these methods are empirically not abortifacient. Abortion and the use of abortifacients involve the taking of life, which God explicitly forbids.

"We do not support the natural family planning method and its variants. These so-called birth control methods depend upon abstinence on the part of the married couple when the woman is fertile but allows marital relations only when she is not. These methods are not only unnatural and ineffective but they are also immoral, since they contradict the commandment that God has given to married couples.''

Manalo added: "The Bible instructs married couples not to deprive one another of intimate marital relations for long, extended periods of time; further, any abstinence at all for a married couple is supposed to be with mutual consent of husband and wife and not for the purpose of preventing pregnancy."

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