By BRIAN CLOWES
During our 41-year battle against nearly impossible odds, we pro-life Americans 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 desperate to trade its rich heritage for a mess of 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 number 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; and the country has a sub-replacement total fertility rate (TFR) of 1.6.
What about the land of soon-to-be St. John Paul the Great? Although we were encouraged by the fall of Communism and the overturning of pro-abortion laws in Poland, the nation proves that decades of unlimited free abortions under Communism poisons the 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 1.1, and its population has been slowly decreasing for two decades.
Malta’s laws are the most pro-life in Europe, but the island’s small population of only 425,000 has peaked and will soon begin to decline because women there only have an average of one child per family.
Fortunately there are dozens of other pro-life nations, primarily in the Southern hemisphere, and the largest of these are Uganda, Nigeria, and the Philippines.
Among pro-life countries, the Philippines is unique because it is the most Catholic in the world. More important, a huge number of the people put their faith into action. The Philippines is a beacon of hope to pro-lifers all over the world due to its strong defense of both the faith and preborn human life. As such, the Culture of Death knows that the nation’s values must be eroded, diluted, and ultimately neutralized if it is to enact its worldwide agenda.
The Philippines is powerfully symbolic and strategic to both the Culture of Life and to the Culture of Death. If its love of faith and family can be destroyed, one of the last beacons of hope will be extinguished.
More than 90 percent of Filipinos are Catholic, and two-thirds attend Mass at least once a week. Metropolitan Catholic churches seating thousands of people frequently have ten or more daily Masses, all well attended, and priests are kept very busy hearing Confessions.
The Philippines was the only nation to formally celebrate the birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary and is the only nation to officially mark the 40th anniversary of the great encyclical Humanae Vitae. In 2008, the cardinal archbishop of Manila gave permission for the city’s 30 Catholic schools to suspend classes for the day so their thousands of students could attend the Humanae Vitae rally at the University of Santo Tomas on July 25.
Since faith and family are anathema to the anti-lifers, they have done their best to destroy both — and they appear to be making progress.
When I first visited the Philippines in 1995, the first thing I saw when walking into the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila was a large statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Now there are no religious statues or images anywhere in the airport. Then, I heard traditional Filipino songs being sung in the countryside. Now there is karaoke.
In 1995, I saw fine religious woodwork in many different stores. During my last visit, I saw ghastly sculptures that appeared to be large preserved reptile cadavers being pierced by various sharp instruments.
In 1995, most Filipinos had charming names like “Policarpio,” “Felicisimo,” “Wenceslao,” “Candelaria,” and “Angelito.” Now names like “Britney,” “Hannah,” and “Nick” predominate among the teens and younger children.
Destroyers Of Diversity
The people who claim that “diversity” is their highest good seem to have no qualms about destroying it on a worldwide scale. They have embarked on a program of cultural homogenization which aims to make mindless media followers out of everyone on Earth. The Filipino way of life is quickly slipping away and there seem to be few mourners in the rush to modernization.
The life expectancy for a baby born in the Philippines in 1965 was 55 years, and today it is 71 years. Despite this dramatic improvement, the population growth rate of the country has plunged from three percent annually in 1965 to 1.3 percent now. More troubling is the fact that the average Filipina had just under seven children in 1965; this has been cut by more than one-half to 2.8 children now, and the United Nations expects that the TFR of the Philippines will reach replacement in ten years and a disastrously low 1.6 by 2050.
What will this mean for the rest of the world when the Philippines stops exporting millions of people who have a deep and ingrained love of faith and family? Who will serve as a holy example? I have always said that the Filipinos are “the yeast of the faith” — wherever they go, the faith rises. Now the time has come for them to rescue their own homeland, because if the Philippines succumbs to the poison peddled by the population controllers, the greatest light of the pro-life movement will be extinguished.
The population controllers in the Philippines are lavishly funded by Europe and North America, and they never give up. After half a dozen tries, they finally passed the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act, generally known as the “RH Bill,” in December 2012.
Backing this effort was the usual wide range of more than 30 major pro-abortion and population control groups, which have spent more than $1.2 billion on population control activities in the Philippines since 1990. This is not surprising, since the United States government’s 1974 National Security Study Memorandum 200, which is still official United States population policy, made the Philippines one of its 13 target nations.
DEATH On The March
Filipino pro-life leaders take the term “Culture of DEATH” quite literally, and identify its primary goals as Divorce, Euthanasia, Abortion, Total sex education, and Homosexuality, all of which are being pushed relentlessly in their land by foreign interests.
Filipinos sum up their nation’s history by saying that they spent “400 years in the convent with the Spanish, five years in Hell with the Japanese, and 50 years in Hollywood with the Americans.” The occupation continues, but in a more subtle and dangerous way. Instead of taking over the land, the West is taking over the minds of the Filipinos.
Money won’t make you happy. Nor will sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, power, possessions, influence, or popularity. Only faith and family do the job. And these are exactly the two things the foreign-funded population controllers are actively destroying in the Philippines. All they are doing is making large poor families into small poor families, and doing irreparable damage to the nation in the process.
Most people in other lands admire the United States, 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 of GDP we generate, or how many tanks and guns we have?
Ultimately, only Faith, Hope, and Love matter — and using these measurements, the Philippines is still a first-world superpower!
It is time to just let the Filipinos make their own way and enjoy the benefits of their faith, their families, and their own natural resources. Let them alone while North America and Europe disintegrate. If they survive all of this meddling, they may very well be among the leaders of the world in a couple of decades.
It is time for us to say to all of the peddlers of death: “Hands off the Philippines!”
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