Church and State in the Philippines: Tackling Life Issues in a "Culture of Death" (Report‪)‬

Above all, society must learn to embrace once more the great gift of life, to cherish it, to protect it, and to defend it against the culture of death, itself an expression of the great fear that stalks our times ... A society with a diminished sense of the value of human life at its earliest stages has already opened the door to a culture of death.--Pope John Paul II, October 1998. In 1998, then Pope John Paul II addressed visiting American Bishops in Rome. As the Catholic Church approached its Jubilee year in 2000, the former Pontiff reiterated that the most important task of Bishops was to be proactive in fighting a pernicious "culture of death"--an indictment on those who sought to normalize abortion and artificial forms of birth control. Half a world away, that message was heard loud and clear. A decade since the former Pontiff's address, the "great fear" of a "culture of death" still resonates strongly within the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the Philippines. The Filipino clergy's stance on issues such as contraception and birth control has brought them in direct contestation with legislators, particularly as the need for a definitive national policy on the demographic and sexual well-being of the Filipino people is deliberated upon in the Philippine Congress. On which issues do the agendas of the Church and the state intersect in the Philippines? And to what extent does the Philippine Church remain beholden to the traditional teachings of the Vatican?