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Millions of families live in extreme poverty around the world today. Poverty
is the first reality they must contend with every day of their lives. It begins
with their most basic needs; the failure to meet those needs could tear the
marriage apart, expose the children to vagrancy, prostitution and drugs, and
make everyone lose their faith in God and everybody else.
In my country, the state tries to address this problem through various
anti-poverty measures, education and training, emergency relief activities, and
peace initiatives in conflict areas. The Church on the other hand tries to
mitigate it through its own regular feeding and disaster relief programs, and
initiatives in education and leadership training especially for the youth and
women; livelihood in agriculture and small enterprise; health care especially
for the poorest families; policy setting for social legislation and relevant
programs; peace and justice in conflict areas; and human development where
greater access is needed.
Church and state personnel work hand in hand to deliver services. Where the
work of the Church tends to have a much greater impact on the personal lives of
families, the government tries to course some of its activities through church
volunteer workers.
In many instances, poverty could serve as the very glue to keep the family
together. It takes a lot of mutual sacrifice and self-giving to face up to
problems that never go away, and use them as a means to bring the family closer
together. But such heroism is not rare, especially among the poor who take their
family duties seriously. I have seen this at work in my own home and in so many
other homes in my own country.
In recent years, extreme poverty and the desire for a better life have forced
millions of Filipinos to leave their homes in search of jobs in foreign
countries. The inevitable separation of spouses has many times led to marital
infidelities on the part of one spouse or both that ultimately broke the
marriage. The Church’s constant effort to provide moral encouragement and
spiritual help has saved and continues to save many troubled families.
Through spiritual counseling and healing, frequent confession and reception of
the Eucharist, the support of Bible-study and prayer groups and other
supernatural aids, many families have survived the threats to their family life.
Left to purely natural and human means, the threatened family simply
disintegrated.
The importance of being spiritually connected cannot be overstated. A family
that frames its daily struggle purely in economic or material terms is likely to
crumble as soon as the going gets rough. Marriages that survive the prolonged
separation of the spouses or any kind of trial at all are usually those in which
the spouses, helped by the Church, retain their hope in God, and know what the
Pope means when he says “man is not a lost atom in a random universe.”
[1]
I use the term Church being Catholic, to stay on familiar ground. Otherwise, in
an ecumenical world of many confessions, where one speaks of many religions but
one covenant, church here would mean synagogue, temple and mosque for others.
Each of these institutions has to accompany every marriage and every family
with their prayers and counsel in everyday life. They have to be open to them,
draw them in, so that no family ever stands alone to face the torments of the
modern world.
The family, which is the basic unit of society, is not only the first school of
life and love but also the first domestic church. It does not stand alone. It
is part of a much larger whole, Christ’s Church, properly understood, which has
always engaged the world on questions of human dignity and every other
fundamental question.
We have seen how poverty in the poor countries, no different than that in rich
countries, exerts such pressures on family life. Poor families need no further
aggravation from any source. Nevertheless since the last century, a recurring
Malthusian fear of the world not having enough to eat and a not so muted
eugenicist fear of the “socially unfit” swarming over the planet have fueled
various forms of external interventions in the otherwise sacred and inviolate
precincts of the family, most aggressively in poor countries.
A well-funded global campaign to change the parameters of human sexuality,
marriage, the family, and the very nature of man himself has targeted families
everywhere, and this has not been easy to resist. Especially because presented
as a great social good, indispensable to social progress.
The announced aim is to liberate the poor, especially women and their families.
But women have since been reduced into sex objects and the family deconstructed
to accommodate divorce, same-sex union, civil partnership, contraception,
sterilization, abortion, euthanasia, and everything else that prevents any
unwelcome entrant into the world of the living where some had put up the old
sign, “Verboten” or “Off-limits.”
Situations of poverty, hunger, poor education and inadequate health care have
become the ready-made excuse for powerful governments, multilateral institutions
and nongovernmental organizations to introduce measures whose manifest resolve,
regardless of their announced intent, is simply to bring down the size of the
family and the national birth rate and nothing much else.
Some are hoping that because the world financial crisis has put a strain on the
resources of many governments, this effort would now slow down. There should be
more pressing priorities. That notwithstanding, it could in fact still
intensify, because of US President Obama’s order lifting the restriction
imposed by President Reagan in 1984 on the use of American funds to support
abortion and related activities in the developing world.
There is no reason why poor families in the poor countries should continue to
absorb this assault. After all, all predictions of great famines wiping out
millions of earthlings before the end of the last century had failed. Birth and
fertility rates in the most advanced countries have fallen, and their abortion
and other anti-family laws have created nothing but broken homes, drunken
divorcees, fatherless children, pregnant teenagers, teenage suicides, and an
infirm and aging population. All moral and ethical values have broken down, and
the post-modern world has sunk into a deep moral relativism where every truth is
lost and doubt alone exists----especially on the most fundamental questions.
These should have sufficed to bury this tragic folly. But old habits die
hard, so the same disastrous policies and programs are recycled over and over,
regardless of the harm they do to poor families everywhere. This is what is
happening in my poor heroic country, the Philippines.
The Philippines is a country of 90 million, growing at an annual rate of 2.04%,
with a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 3.02, according to its National Statistics
Office. (The CIA World Factbook, 2008, however, quotes the birth rate at
1.72%, the TFR at 3.00.) In 1974, we were one of 13 developing countries
whose combined population growth inspired the U.S. government, through its
National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200, to proclaim a world population
plan that called for, among other things, a two-child family everywhere by the
year 2000.[2]
Today our birth and fertility rates are down. The large families are gone;
the average family size now is five, two parents and three children, and getting
smaller still. About 12 million Filipinos live and work abroad; a million more
migrate each year. The average Filipino worker is 23 years old, neither too
young nor too old. A healthy and dynamic population. No cause for alarm.
Alarm, if at all, should come from those who fear that our fertility rate is
already so dangerously close to the replacement level. Last month, the biggest
explosion heard in Seoul, Korea was a report saying that by year 2050 Korea
would become the most aged society in the OECD with 38.2% of its
population----or four out of every 10 Koreans----being 65 years old or over due
to its low birth rates and its rapidly aging population. This prompted the head
of the Planned Population Federation of Korea urgently to appeal to all Korean
women to beget more children---the exact opposite of what he had been telling
them for years.
At no time has it become so clear to everyone that people are indeed every
nation’s first and ultimate resource. Julian Simon said it before, but
populous India, with its 1.3 billion people, has produced a new expert witness
for our times. In his book, Imagining India, Nandan Nilekani,
co-founder of Infosys, a global leader in information technology, proclaims
authoritatively that India owes its booming economy today to its teeming
millions of entrepreneurs and workers. A fitting reproach to those who had
previously written off India as a basket case because of its outsize population.
But instead of addressing the real problem of falling birthrates and aging
population, the culture of death lobby continues to look in the opposite
direction. As world markets tumbled and every government worth its salt tried
to find a possible way out, we in the Philippines were absorbed in a
reproductive health bill that seeks to provide everything proscribed by the
Church, local custom, and the Constitution.
The country is predominantly Catholic. Abortion is a crime, divorce, civil
partnership, and same sex-union are out, the only marriage we recognize is the
sacramental or civil union of one man and one woman, for one lifetime. The
State may not get involved in promoting contraception or sterilization, but it
will not force Humanae Vitae on ignorant or disobedient churchgoers. No
law prohibits contraception or sterilization.
The Constitution recognizes “the sanctity of family life,” vows to “protect and
strengthen the family as a basic autonomous social institution “ and to “equally
protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception.” It
proclaims marriage as “the foundation of the family,” and the family as “the
foundation of the nation.”
There are those who disrespect some of these laws. But on the whole they have
served the nation well. They have kept most marriages intact, most of our
unmarried young men and women chaste, the two sexes different and distinct from
each other. And they have kept the society together despite its various fissures
and myriad problems.
Still, the bill’s proponents tried to railroad their measure, cheered on by
NGOs, the secular media, foreign-degreed academics, economists and scientists,
and full-page newspaper ads paid for by some foreign-funded organization.
Faced with such challenge, the families in opposition decided to transform the
legislative fight into a spiritual battle. They brought the issue to their
Bible studies, prayer meetings and to the Bishops, who promptly mobilized their
priests and the various lay organizations within their respective dioceses. The
Bishops then began individually to engage the legislators, offering them moral
and spiritual advice, while simultaneously catechesizing everybody else. Many
original supporters of the bill have since withdrawn, and many more are
rethinking their position.
The fight in Congress is not yet over, but the fight for the family has gained
ground. In church, the masses are always full, more and more people are seeking
spiritual direction, the lines to the confessional are getting longer. At
home, more families are finding time to sit and enjoy their meals together, talk
about their work, the children’s studies, their community and church activities,
and intimate
questions about
human sexuality, which were taboo before. A great catechesis is going on.
There is no reason why this catechesis cannot be transformed into something
infinitely larger, involving all the other churches and religions. They all
have a duty to defend God’s covenant with man, and the best way to do so is for
the Christian to become a good Christian, the Jew a good Jew, the Moslem a good
Moslem, and together defend the right of the family to be free from any
atheistic impositions by the State and the right of God to be present in every
heart and every home and in the public square.
Endnotes:
[1]
Pope Benedict XVI quoting his own 2006 homily at mass in Islinger Feld,
Regensburg, in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, 29 June 2009
[2] The others are India, Bangladesh,
Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey,
Ethiopia and Columbia.
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