Today, the Philippines is at the crossroads of history, where a greater majority of our 90 million population is dependent upon the judgment of a handful of associate justices of the Supreme Court (SC) who would listen to the oral arguments on the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of the so-called Reproductive Health (RH) Law. To date, there are 15 petitions that were sent to the SC and the last two surprisingly came from a religion supposedly opposed to Christianity. Muslim groups asked the SC not to implement the RH Law in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).
By July 16, the SC's Status Quo Ante Order against the implementation of the RH Law would expire, which means that our associate justices have to make their decision on this issue whether they like it or not. Of course, if they want to, they could just extend this deadline and hold it indefinitely. But then what good would that do to this divided nation?
I don't need to give you another defense for the innocent and the unborn for we've been writing those topics in the past two years. What we need to do right now is for all of us to sit down in prayer and seek God's divine intervention to jolt our justices on their role to help and support the defenseless, more so that the RH Law isn't a homegrown law, but one presented to the Philippines by other nations in order to curb our population.
I understand that the SC has reduced the issues to be discussed to only four, which are: Whether or not the RH Law violates our freedom of religion, speech and academic freedom; Whether or not the RH Law violates the natural law; Whether the RH Law violates the autonomy of the local government and equal protection of the law and; Whether the RH Law violates the right to life and health.
Allow me to reiterate the article that we wrote in The Philippine Star last June 29, “If a single living cell was found in a distant planet, scientists would exclaim that we have found life elsewhere in the universe! So the question is why is it that a single cell found in the womb of a pregnant woman is not considered life?†This is the best argument that I have stumbled on about the beginning of life, which should put an end to this controversial argument.
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For the billions of Catholics worldwide, the great news we got from the Vatican is that come October, we will witness the canonization of two popes who lived in our generation, Blessed Pope John XXlll and Blessed Pope John Paul II. For Pope John XXIII, Pope Francis apparently waived the requirement for a second miracle because he is one pope who made church history when he convened Vatican II in 1962-1965 and brought the Catholic Church into the modern age. Of course, it also allowed Satan to sow more confusion to the reforms of Vatican II, arrogating its own understanding of these reforms where some members of the clergy ventured into Liberation Theology, which no less than Pope John Paul II chastised and corrected.
As for Pope John Paul II, a second miracle has been secured to assure his sainthood. But nevertheless, the world looked differently at the Vatican when in December 1991, the Cold War ended with the destruction of communism in Russia, when the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) fell under its own weight of gross inefficiency and political mismanagement and ushered in a new non-communist era in the birth place of communism.
All this was attributed to Pope John Paul II's efforts and prayer and his visit to his native Poland, which at that time was under communist control as Poland belonged to the so-called “Iron Curtain.†Pope John Paul II's visit to Poland encouraged the creation of the Solidarity Movement, which infected the other countries within the Eastern Communist bloc.
One joke attributed to then Soviet Russia's Secretary General Leonid Brezhnev about the Pope's talk against communism says, “How many divisions does the Pope have compared to our military?†In the end, the Soviet Union collapsed without a shot being fired. Pope John Paul II did not need divisions, but only God's divine providence to awaken the people under the Eastern bloc to secure their own individual freedoms.
Soon the restless Germans in East Germany woke up to protest against their communist government and suddenly the Berlin wall collapsed and Germany became one nation again and Russia rid itself of the ideals of communism that controlled it since the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. While communism is still very much around and near us like China or North Korea, we Filipinos must make a commitment to fight our homegrown and decade's old communist insurgency. It's about time that we set a deadline to end this internal strife once and for all. Alas, we cannot expect this to happen under the Aquino regime for they are just too uncomfortably lovey-dovey with the above ground allies of the Philippine Communist Party.
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