Sunday, January 5, 2014

How about a Pro-Morality Vote?

In my humble opinion: it may be good to push for a Pro-Morality Vote (pro-God, pro-family, pro-life, pro-chastity, pro-justice, and pro-truth) aside from, or even instead of, a Catholic vote.

A Pro-Morality vote --or an Ethical Vote or whatever it may be called-- can do the following:

  • It can unite Evangelicals, Moslems, Catholics, Hindus, Shintoists, Buddhists and all men of good will against same-sex marriage, divorce, contraception, homosexuality, value-less sex education, secularist anti-religion, etc.  that are now threatening to break in and deluge this country.
  • It can clarify that RH or contraception is not a religious issue but a moral/ethical issue as Fr. Penacoba argued vs Fr. Bernas: The evil of RH does not lie in breaking the teaching of religious authorities nor in irreligious behavior, but in the fact that contraception attacks the dignity of the human person and the inherent sacredness of human sexuality. 
  • It can bring back to the fore a key social category that is in danger of being lost: the moral order. Secularist writers, analysts, intellectuals are leading the common people towards a society that does not talk about morality or does not even want to mention the word morality
  • It can help prioritize what should be absolutely prioritized within society. Vatican II's second document taught about the "absolute primacy of the objective moral order". And it said that the moral order "by itself surpasses and fittingly coordinates all other spheres of human affairs...even though they be endowed with notable dignity".
  • It can pull the rug under the feet of the "primacy of the conscience" vote,  the central tenet of liberal Catholic politics. 
  • It can counteract the "loss of the sense of sin" which John Paul II said should be addressed with "particular urgency".
  • It can revive the consciousness of the reality that sin --an offense against reason and God-- is "the greatest evil" in society, as per Ratzinger's Instruction on Liberation Theology. Many have forgotten this most basic of truths, expressed by Blessed Cardinal Newman thus:

The Church holds it better for sun and moon to drop from Heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in the most extreme agony... than that one soul... should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth or should steal one poor farthing.

If the moral order has absolute primacy, then there is absolutely nothing more important to work on than morality.

Note: I wrote this article around May 18, 2013, a few days after the proclamation of  winning senators in the 2013 National Elections. I did not publish it at that time, but am now publishing it after reading Kit Tatad's A Call to a Moral Revolution published on  January 1, 2014, and the enthusiastic reaction of several friends to his article. 

Tatad said: "Our real crisis is moral before it is anything else. The solution, therefore, has to be moral before anything else. We need a moral revolution, and we need leaders of genuine moral integrity to lead it. The nation--its entire political, economic and social system – must be transformed."  

In America, the Moral Majority actually changed the political scene. 

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