MANILA (UCAN): In the third week of September, the Philippine Senate began hearing proposals from various sectors to pass a law
Two divorce bills pending in the senate propose a six-month cooling-off period after couples file a petition for divorce as a final attempt at reconciliation between estranged spouses.
Some of the proposed grounds for divorce include physical violence, grossly abusive conduct, drug addiction, habitual alcoholism, chronic gambling, homosexuality, bigamy and infidelity.
Senate president, Vicente Sotto, said senators are unsure about divorce but may be willing to pass a bill allowing for the dissolution of a marriage.
The Philippines is the only country besides the Vatican City without a legal provision for divorce.
Last year, the country’s Lower House of Congress passed a divorce bill which was not supported in the senate.
Catholic Church leaders have reiterated their opposition to the bill, saying divorce is anti-marriage and anti-family.
Father Jerome Secillano, executive secretary of the public affairs office of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), responding to a senator, Risa Hontiveros, called on legislators not to twist facts about divorce “just to suit a particular agenda.”
Hontiveros is the proponent of one of the bills and said her proposed law is “pro-marriage, pro-family and pro-children.”
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Father Secillano stressed, “Divorce can never be pro-marriage, pro-family and pro-children.”
Hontiveros said Filipinos, especially women and children, “should be free from abusive and loveless relationships” to be given another chance in life. She said divorce “makes us respect marriage more by being more discerning with our choices in life.”
Father Secillano, however, maintained that divorce, if passed into law, would lead to the disintegration of families.
“Is (Hontiveros) saying now that the Family Code and our constitution are anti-family, anti-marriage and anti-children because they do not guarantee divorce?” the priest asked.
He admitted that marital relationships are not always perfect but added that there are legal processes already available to couples on the verge of separation.
Fenny Tatad, of the Family and Life office of the CBCP, called the proposal to pass a divorce law “a misplaced concern.”
Tatad said, “The Philippines has a lot to teach and the rest of the world has much to learn from the Philippines in defending the sanctity and indissolubility of marriage.”
She said marriage is “a human institution, rather than the creation of any legislature and should, therefore, be protected from any undue state interference.”
She added, “The legal positivist may legislate divorce, but as far as the objective moral law is concerned, it is an unjust law which cannot bind together in conscience.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that divorce is a “grave offense” against natural law as “it claims to break the contract, to which the spouses freely consented, to live with each other ‘till death.”
It also says divorce is “immoral” as it “introduces disorder into the family and into society.”
Filipinos are, however, increasingly in favour of divorce, with a 2017 survey showing that half of adult Filipinos believe that the measure should be legalised.
