– Fr Leonard E Dollentas
For more than 20 years, the divorce bill in the Philippines has repeatedly been proposed and discussed by the Philippine Congress, with no success. It has always been intensely opposed by the Catholic Church and by a number of Philippine presidents themselves. One president worth recalling who opposed divorce was Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, a bachelor. When divorce was gaining an amount of support in 2010, he vehemently condemned it and those who supported it by revealing to the media that he did not want to turn the Philippines into Las Vegas, where “you get married in the morning and you get divorced in the afternoon.”
Today, the Philippines is still the only remaining country in the world, aside from the Vatican City, where divorce is illegal. But more recently, in a vote of 134-57, the lower house of Philippine Congress approved on third and final reading House Bill 7303 or “An Act Instituting Absolute Divorce and Dissolution of Marriage in the Philippines.” This bill aims to legalize divorce in the predominantly Catholic country in Asia. To become a law, the bill needs to be passed by the Senate and approved by the president.
ADVOCACY GROUPS AND DIVORCE
Lawyer Clara Padilla, the executive director of EnGendeRights, one of the women’s rights advocacy groups and a tough proponent of the passage of the divorce law in the Philippines claimed that the Philippines remains “pretty much behind the rest of the world” — in the “dark ages” — when it comes to issues like divorce and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) rights. In the globalized and digitalized world today, unless we don’t fit in to the latest fashionable secular views on moral issues like divorce, we are outdated. The famous author Rick Warren (The Purpose Driven Life) reminds us: “Those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it.” We are pretty much behind the rest of the world because we insist that our faithfulness to Christ and His teachings cannot be compromised with other values. Family, and the sacrament of marriage that binds it, is of higher value.
Marriage is held as a sacred union among Filipinos. It is a commitment to God, that not even the State nor the Church has the power to separate, only God. In Philippine culture, a family founded on marriage is considered as a source of love, protection and care. One would understand why many members of the Filipino family would leave their families to find better work in other countries. Filipinos are more than willing to sacrifice everything – for love of their families. It is a tremendous sacrifice, an act of heroic love, when a mother has to leave her own little children home to care for other children not her own. In Philippine society marital break-ups are experiences of eternal sadness, brokenness and shame.
CONSEQUENCES OF DIVORCE IN THE US
According to the US Census Bureau, in America, there is one divorce approximately every 36 seconds. That’s nearly 2,400 divorces per day, 16,800 divorces per week and 876,000 divorces a year. Twenty-eight percent of children living with a divorced parent live in a household with an income below the poverty line. Half of all American children will witness the breakup of a parent’s marriage. Of these children, close to half will also see the breakup of a parent’s second marriage.
This shows that the consequences of the family breakdown brought by divorce have been catastrophic. The survey also indicated that the increase in child poverty in the US since the 1970s is due almost entirely to decline in the percentage of children reared in stable and intact families, and this is because children in single-parent homes are likely to receive less support from their fathers. It is quite obvious from this empirical fact that children have paid a heavy price for the divorce of their parents.
INTACT AND HAPPY FAMILY – JOY OF FILIPINOS
The Philippine Catholic Bishops guaranteed that being the last holdout of the divorce law, the Philippines will have the reputation of being the most children-friendly nation and can reach a gradual high ranking in the happiness index of the world. Many surveys indicate that the greatest joy of Filipinos comes from an intact and happy family. They believed that “failed marriages” among Filipino couples could be saved by the intervention of family, friends, pastors, and counselors.
The present divorce bill is expected to face opposition when it is received in the Senate, where several senators have publicly declared their opposition to the bill.
The new Senate President Vicente Sotto, a staunch ally of President Rodrigo Duterte, had earlier said that as far as he is concerned, the divorce bill is not his priority.
It is expected that even if the two chambers of Congress approved the same version of the bill, it would still be elevated to Malacañang for the signature of the president. President Duterte, however, might veto a Congress-approved divorce bill as he has been vocal in his disapproval. During the March 2016 presidential debates, he (Duterte) publicly thumbed down divorce, and those opposing the bill are praying he will not change his mind.
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