Church won’t argue with other religious groups backing RH bill

MANILA, Philippines—An official of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines on Tuesday said the Church would not argue with other religious groups promoting the controversial family planning measure to avoid religious conflict.

“The reproductive health bill is a moral issue so everybody has the right to speak on the matter regardless of religion,” said Fr. Melvin Castro, executive secretary of the CBCP Episcopal Commission on Family and Life.

The church’s fight against the RH bill would still continue to focus on the legislators who will soon debate on the measure, he said. “We don’t want a word war between religions [and] we also don’t want a ‘divide and conquer’ between religious groups,” added Castro.

He also appealed to staunch advocates of the bill to extend the Catholic Church the same conduct as with other church groups when it expresses its views on the bill.

“When the Catholic Church speaks against the measure, they invoke the separation of Church and State but when other churches speak in its favor, they don’t invoke it … let us be consistent about it because we are all stakeholders in this issue,” he stressed.

Several church denominations, including the influential Iglesia Ni Cristo have thrown their support for artificial birth control methods and urged for the swift passage of the bill in Congress.

The INC, which endorsed President Benigno Aquino during the May 2010 elections, stated that it was supporting modern methods of contraception “as long as these methods are empirically [not] abortifacients.”

Unlike the Catholic Church, which promotes natural birth methods, the INC views such as “ineffective” and “immoral” since they counter “the commandment that God has given to married couples.”

Protestant churches, including the National Council of Churches in the Philippines, United Church of Christ of the Philippines, the United Methodist Church, have also declared their support for the passage of the RH bill.

Former senator Francisco Tatad, a board member of pro-life group, International Right to Life Federation, also warned against using the RH bill to promote religious conflict.

“There need not be any religious conflict arising from this,” Tatad said during the weekly forum hosted by the Catholic Media Network in Intramuros, Manila yesterday.

But he noted that the varying views on contraception by the Catholic Church and other religious groups “are real conflict of positions.”

“But the Church is not asking the State to enforce its teaching on population, it is simply saying that… if you pass the bill, you are trampling on the basic beliefs of Catholics,” he continued.

“If you don’t pass this bill, you will not be offending other churches because they will continue to practice the use of contraceptive because there is no law that prohibits contraception.”