MISSIONARY TRIP TO THE PHILIPPINES

Reported by Brian Clowes, January 2-12, 2010

It always amuses me when people gripe about the length of the trip on a cross?country flight, say from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles. They think that five hours of enforced inactivity is a trial. They should try a five?hour flight, followed by a fourteen?hour flight, followed by a three?hour flight, with a thirteen?hour time difference thrown in to make things interesting!

The L.A. to Tokyo leg of my ninth trip to the Philippines seemed to take forever. This feeling was reinforced when the airplane's cabin electronics went bonkers and informed us that we had been in the air for 47 hours and that we had already flown 26,825 miles, a distance greater than the circumference of the earth! That, combined with the movie "Angels and Demons," and no water for the last half of the trip, made for a fascinating ride.

This trip to the Philippines was definitely my most enjoyable (after getting off the plane) – and, hopefully, the most productive.

Instead of staying alone at a quiet and sterile hotel, I stayed with Ai?Ai and Rose Padilla Galvez and their five children. Their home is beautiful, having been built partly from materials of the Padilla family's ancestral home. I was amazed by the highly polished wood flooring, made of huge planks of exotic hardwood thirty feet long, a foot wide, and three inches thick! The home is open in its architecture, so huge black bees, birds and even stray cats and squirrels wander in and out.
The Galvez home is very large, the only one I have ever seen with three time zones. It has to be big to accommodate the frequent family get?togethers; Ai?Ai comes from a family of twelve, and Rose from a family of ten, so the respective family reunions each have more than sixty people at them.

When a dozen or so relatives came over to the Galvez' home for dinner and a meeting the first night, I was deeply impressed by how the little ones are the stars of the show, and everyone pitches in to care for them and play with them. Everyone was joyful to be a part of such a large extended family, and I envied them secretly, having grown up with only one brother.

But this kind of serene and happy family life is anathema to the population controllers, who are trying their best to destroy it with their fanatical meddling. Their DEATH bill (Divorce, Euthanasia, Abortion, Total population control and Homosexuality) went down to defeat yet again with the adjournment of the Filipino Fourteenth Congress in February, but the Devil never gives up. This bill, in its various forms, has been introduced at the beginning of the last several three?year Congresses, and will inevitably be introduced again in July 2010, when the Fifteenth Congress begins.

SECURING THE PHILIPPINES AGAINST THE CULTURE OF DEATH

In order to fortify the Philippines against these vicious and uncaring attacks, I spoke to more than one hundred Couples for Christ?Foundation for Family Life (CFC?FFL) leaders at the San Carlos Seminary in Manila for three full days. We had ten hours of talks and close to a hundred short discussions and questions during this time, and we went over the entire Pro-Life Basic Training Program in detail. The leaders were especially interested in the topics of condoms and homosexuality, both of which are being relentlessly pushed in the Philippines against the will of the majority of the Catholic people.

The condom pushers, more than anyone else, betray the ugly face of the blind population control ideology. The Philippines has largely kept the ineffective condom out of the country (thanks in large part to HLI's Dr. Rene Josef Bullecer), but Thailand has been flooding its people with condoms for more than two decades. The result is predictable: The 2007 adult HIV infection rate for Thailand was one in 90, and the adult HIV infection rate for the Philippines was one in 22,000!

Homosexuality was another hot topic of discussion. I gave many quotes by the homosexuals themselves, showing that the sexual abuse of minor children is common among "gays," and this is a concern in the Philippines. I also spoke about how more than 80 percent of the child molestation that happened during the clergy scandal in the United States was committed by homosexual priests.

The homophiles are softening up the Philippines with an ongoing campaign of desensitization. The last time I was in Manila, a huge forty-foot advertising banner showing two women kissing hung from the side of the giant Megamall in one of the busiest parts of Manila. The first time a person sees this, he will be shocked and outraged; the fifth time, he will be disturbed; the twentieth time, he will just shrug.

That, of course, is the idea.

This time, a giant billboard along the Southern Freeway showed a popular "gay" disc jockey advertising for GlutaMax, a compound that allegedly lightens skin color. The picture shows him lying naked on a bed with another man in the background, and the slogan is "I feel whiter and gay each day." Curiously, Filipino homosexuals prefer very light skin, the whiter the better. They do not seem to recognize the racism of this attitude and would apparently prefer to be identified as "gay" rather than Filipino.

TRADITIONAL PRO-LIFE STRONGHOLDS FALLING LIKE DOMINOS

The next day, my hosts told me that we would be going to a meeting of CFC?FFL leaders. Now, when someone tells me that we are "going to a meeting," I naturally expect maybe 15 or 20 people sitting around a boardroom table in a nice air?conditioned office. What I didn't expect was 4,000 screaming Filipino pro-lifers crammed into a full-sized basketball stadium! I didn't mind, until Frank Padilla asked me to talk for a couple of minutes after Holy Communion. Needless to say, I did not pay much attention to the homily, trying frantically to think up what I was going to say.

The people did like what I had to say, and I meant every word: During our 40?year battle against impossible odds for the lives of the unborn in the United States, we American pro?lifers have often looked overseas for encouragement and edification. But we have seen our inspirations fall like dominos, one by one.

There was a time when we looked to Ireland; but the Land of Saints and Scholars seems desperately eager to trade its rich heritage and history for a mess of stinking pottage just so it can be considered stylish and "European" enough to be a part of the EU. It welcomes fetal stem cell researchers with open arms; the numbers of Irish seminarians has dropped by more than half in the past 20 years; more than 5,000 Irish women make a short hop to London to kill their preborn children every year (Cromwell lives!); and Ireland has a sub-replacement total fertility rate of 1.67.

How about the land of Pope John Paul the Great? Although we were hugely encouraged by the fall of Communism and the overturning of pro?abortion laws in Poland, the nation proves the adage that Communism simply poisons the hearts and souls of the people, and there seems to be no antidote. Even with pro?life laws, no Polish woman need travel more than a few hours to get her preborn child killed in a neighboring nation, and busloads do exactly that every day. Poland's TFR is one of the lowest in the world at only 1.04, and its population is already decreasing, leading to many severe demographic problems.

Malta's laws are the most truly pro?life in Europe, and the Maltese are holding strong, but the island's small population of only 410,000 will soon begin to decline, because women there only have an average of one child per family.

This leaves the Philippines, which is now unique in all the world. Its population of 90 million is more than 90 percent Catholic—although, less than half of these attend weekly Mass—and despite a very severe priest shortage, signs of the Faith are everywhere in the country. Ten million Filipinos live in other countries, and I meant it when I called them the "yeast of the Faith," spreading it everywhere they go. I urged the people not to follow the sad example of the United States and give up the only two things that will make them happy: Faith and family.
I finished by saying that practically everyone admires the United States, if grudgingly, because we are the greatest military and economic powerhouse the world has ever seen. But what does God care about how many trillions of dollars we generate, or how many tanks and guns we have? In the eyes of God, Faith is all that matters, and from His perspective, there must be only one First World nation on Earth: the Philippines!

EMBRACING A CULTURE OF LIFE

The pro?abortionists are using all of their tired tricks in their attempts to convince the people that they really do want abortion. They did one of their phony public opinion polls that allegedly showed that more than 80 percent of Filipinos are "pro?choice," but of course, they gave leading questions and deliberately skewed their results. Manila Mayor Lito Atienza commissioned a study with neutral questions that showed the truth: More than 80 percent of Filipinos are strongly pro?life!

During my last day in Manila, Rose took me to see Lito and Beng Atienza's "Home for the Angels," which has been in existence for 15 years and has adopted out about 300 lucky children during that time. They had six children there presently, including "Angel," who has lived there since shortly after she was born six years and 11 months ago. She was born severely handicapped in both mind and body, but her beautiful face smiles when you stroke her hands or feet. She also cried when Rose and I said "Bye?bye," because she wanted us to stay. The staff said that was real progress. She really captured my heart.

The last stop before going back to Ninoy Aquino International Airport was a small barangay school just a mile away from the Home for the Angels. We had to thread our way through a narrow warren of alleys just off a main road, and I was lost almost right away. At this school, a young grandmother has taken on the task of teaching nearly 100 three? to five?year-old children very basic concepts. She does this in three shifts in a room measuring about eight by ten feet. When Rose and I were there, they were counting and learning how to greet strangers politely. The small amount of education they receive at this neighborhood school probably greatly increases their chances of having a better job once they enter the labor market.

PRO-LIFE INSPIRATION

As I began the 30?hour trip home, I thought about the importance of the Philippines to the international pro?life movement. We have to do everything we can to protect the Faith of this country and the lives of its people, because if the Philippines collapses into the anti?life swamp along with virtually every other nation in the world, who will we have left to give us a good example?

You can be assured that we at Human Life International are doing absolutely everything we can to keep Catholic Philippines pro-life.