Posted on 04/21/2008 11:49:39 AM PDT by Pyro7480
The day after Pope Benedict XVI departed the U.S..., Blaine Harden of the Washington Post lamented the Catholic Church’s influence in the Philippines, specifically, the government of Philippines "acceding to Catholic doctrine" by "supporting only what it calls ‘natural’ family planning," rejecting "modern contraception" as part of family planning." Throughout his article, titled "Birthrates Help Keep Filipinos in Poverty," Harden painted a bleak picture of "the fastest-growing segment of the Philippine population," which is "very poor people with large families," and sought to blame their poverty and backwardness on their following Catholic teaching, brushing aside corruption and other factors that contribute to poverty. A photo accompanying the article in the print-edition of the Post showed a poor Filipino mother in her shack with her four children, two of whom are naked.
Harden described the Church’s influence throughout the article, hinting that it had created a climate of fear in the country "An organization that is helping Espinoza [a poor Filipino woman who plans to get a contraceptive intrauterine device] agreed to introduce this reporter to her on condition that it not be named. The group’s health workers said they fear retaliation and harassment from officials in the national and city government, as well as from the Catholic Church." He immediately mentioned after this that in 2005, the "Catholic bishops in the southern Philippines announced that they would refuse Communion to government health workers who distributed birth control devices."
The article seemed to be prompted, at least partially, by the fact that the "[d]istribution of donated contraceptives... ends this year, as does a contraception-commodities program paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development." ...This means the U.S. taxpayers, millions of whom who are opposed to contraceptives, are paying for these contraceptive programs in the Philippines...
(Excerpt) Read more at newsbusters.org ...
You’re a Catholic?
More like a CINO.
False.
BS...the Church is encourageing people who have no skills/no education/abject poverty to have more hungry babies......not ethical, not right, simple as that. Being Catholic does not mean you stop thinking for yourself.
The Church does not "encourage" people to have children they can't care for.
NFP has a 99% success rate, requires at most a thermometer and some paper, and is therefore a whole lot cheaper than pills or devices. It it has absolutely no side effects, unlike the pill which has been known to kill women. And yes, it has been and is being taught in the 3rd world.
Some certainly seem to think otherwise (though the same is true of a number of Protestants I know).
I mean, what’s wrong with me and my wife unilaterally deciding to thwart God’s will and deny Him His right to join His creative power to our marital love-making?
Who in the hell does He think He is?
If “thinking for myself” equals “sinning,” then it really isn’t “thinking for myself,” it’s “I’ll do what I want, despite the fact I know it’s wrong.”
ah-hhh..but you’re wrong....they encourage the poor and illiterate to reproduce and call it a sin if they use birth control.
I think that the sin is in having millions of poor hungry babies with HUGE death rates before they ar 5...the Church needs to step in and change this teaching. Simple as that.
It is what it is. It's not made up. It truly is wrong to use artificial birth control. The rest of your thought is just conspiracy theory.
On that note, the Church isn't going to change its teaching. You act like the faith is just something someone made up, like the secularists think.
Being Catholic means believing the teachings of Catholicism.
815 welcomes you.
Well with that definition of sin that you hold I won’t even bother to argue about this.
In my opinion it’s at least as bad to discourage birth control when the result is an ever-increasing poor population. Though as I noted above, poor people seem to be pretty good at reproducing even without Catholic views on birth control.
And they're brown too!!!
You claim to be Catholic. I call B.S.
Since you aren't paying attention to what we're saying, arguing with you is a waste of time.
You: “In my opinion it’s at least as bad to discourage birth control when the result is an ever-increasing poor population...”
Me: Ay - there’s the rub! This is why you are one of the moral relativists the pope has warned us about. You can justify anything — even shutting God out of the procreative acts He designed and wills to participate in — based on your relativisitic machiniations (aka rationalization).
Your blindness to this reality is a tragedy. You view sexual desire to be so strong that not even love of God could cause one to curb it or else welcome the pro-creative possibiliities it entails.
You should see the editorial in today’s issue of the USA Today... it was titled something like ‘Is Religion Killing Us?’ and went on to say that because of religion (primarily Catholicism and Mormonism, it mentioned ‘some sects of other religions like Islam or Judaism’ like once) population growth would overcrowd the planet and we’d all die because the lakes will be dried up from global warming so we won’t have anything left to drink, and religion is to blame for that, too...
Anyways, on the topic at hand, I have mixed feelings. These people may feel it’s immoral to use birth control (even condoms and stuff that definitely don’t act as an abortifacient, the pill is a whole different issue), but when the alternative is that they’ll have children they can’t provide for, IMO it’s a lesser-of-two-evils scenario, and one that people should decide for themselves.
From what I can find, the fertility rate for Fillipino women is only about 3.1 per woman. Although higher than the mass-suicidal European societies, and even higher than the US, clinging barely to replacement-level fertility rates, the Fillipino fertility rate is hardly high enough even for the likes of the Washington Post and associated liberals to take the blame for societal poverty.
Why do people not understand 1) being able to count to 14 or 2) self-restraint?
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