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  • Action for Economic Reforms

LETTER TO BISHOPS

Buencamino is a fellow of Action for Economic Reforms. This was published in the October 13, 2010 edition of the Business Mirror, page A6.



Like in basketball, the bill has not yet reached the first base. – Sen. Joker Arroyo on the RH bill


Your Graces,


Thank you for declaring a unilateral ceasefire in your war on the President’s advocacy for responsible parenthood. It calmed the hysteria that your hysterics created. Everyone needed a little peace, especially me, after what I had been through recently.


I threw away my wife’s facial creams and body lotions.


“Why?” she screamed.


“They are made from the fetus of sheep,” I explained to her.


“But the Church does not prohibit aborting sheep,” she protested. So I reminded her that we are all sheep in the eyes of the Lord.


She kicked me out of the house. But I forgave her. One can be Christian and Catholic at the same time, Insha’Allah.


Your Graces, I have never questioned anything you taught me. I still shave my hands everyday even though I’ve been told that what you said about hair growing on the palms of naughty hands is not true. I still rue the day Congress passed the Rizal Law making the Noli and the Fili compulsory reading in schools.


That law exposed me, at a tender age, to Rizal’s sacrilegious thoughts and subversive ideas.

Don’t worry, I have never wavered, my faith remains strong. I must confess, however, that I find the behavior of some people coming from opposite ends of the responsible parenthood debate quite comical.


Sen. Joker Arroyo mixed up basketball and baseball. (See quotation above.) Hopefully he will not confuse contraception with abortion when the bill reaches first base.


Archbishop Oscar Cruz who is against all forms of gambling wants couples to gamble on the rhythm method.


Carlos Celdran, the tour guide, got so worked-up by your supposed meddling in politics that he dressed up like Charlie Chaplin and likened you to Fr. Damaso.


I wanted to tell him Fr. Salvi was the evil friar but… Oh well, as historian Ambeth Ocampo said, “It’s a pity that we have a national hero who wrote a lot for a nation that does not read.”

Celdran must have read the constitutional provision on the separation of Church and State ass backwards. It is the State that is forbidden from meddling in religion– not the other way around. Sadly, Celdran is not alone; the loquacious Rep. Edcel Lagman stands with him.

“The message of Celdran is that ‘Father Damasos’ have survived the Spanish era and continue to bedevil government up to today,” Lagman said, echoing Celdran. Stupidity is contagious, the urge to display it irresistible.


Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philipines (CBCP) president Bishop Nereo Odchimar threatened the president with excommunication and then said he did no such thing.

He denied ever saying that Aquino’s excommunication was a “proximate possibility” but he did not disavow his statement that Aquino could be excommunicated.


“Dahil (Because) for us, abortion is a grave crime, as a matter of fact, excommunication is attached to those who commit abortion,” he said. By the way, I don’t hear much about pedophile priests being excommunicated, is pedophilia a misdemeanor?


I’m starting to digress so before I wander off to some other issue, let me get to the point: I think all presidents should be excommunicated. That way a president who is robbing the country blind will not be able to hide behind false piety. The people will hold him accountable to the Constitution and the laws of the land only. That will be good for the country. And for Catholics as well because you won’t have to shower blessings and give Holy Communion to a corrupt president ever again.


Yours in Christ, Insha’Allah


MB

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