Laity creating a counterpart to CBCP?

It’s the start of the Holy Week… and it is the perfect time to start our Holy Week reflection and asked ourselves… have we led our lives in line with the will of God? or are we living our lives according to our will? Perhaps we can start with a quote from St. John the Baptist, who after he baptized our Lord Jesus Christ said of our Lord in John 1:29 “The next day, John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” Later in John 3:30, St. John the Baptist said

This should be our attitude for the Holy Week…that we must decrease in our earthly work and increase our spirituality in our Lord Jesus Christ. This is why Catholics who are true to their Christian faith and vocation must use the Holy Week as a week for reflection. Better still, it is best to go into a retreat and withdraw from the hassle and bustle of our daily routine and commune with the Lord and reflect on his passion and death on the cross for which purpose he was sent by God the Father for the ultimate sacrifice to die in lieu of the sins of mankind. No easy feat even for one who is God, who had to become human, just like one of us.

I have no doubt that the majority of Catholics in this country would go back to their provinces for their annual reunion, which is a good thing. After all, in the Filipino culture, the family is most important to us. In fact, Vatican II recognizes the Family unit as the “Domestic Church.” Thinking about this: it is this Domestic Church that our liberal brethren who supported the Reproductive Health (RH) Law were trying to destroy.

Thankfully, the Supreme Court (SC) skillfully came up with their ruling on the RH Law as “not unconstitutional” but upholding the 1987 Constitution on the rights of the unborn and parental rights over the state. I have no doubt that the Holy Spirit guided the SC Justices when they made their ruling on the RH Law… a law that has been rendered “toothless” and therefore cannot be implemented with the force of other laws with penal clauses.

Last Friday afternoon, April 11, we had a short recollection with our group called Task Force for Life & Family (TFLF) in the residence of Mrs. Fe Barino and the big question on the table was asked, “After the SC ruling on the RH Law… where do we go from here?” Indeed, many of us formed various task forces to fight the spiritual battle for the Catholic Church, a battle that caused the nation to be so divided between pros and antis. This is why suddenly a group emerged from nowhere who called them “Catholics for RH,” a group that obviously “profited” from the huge funding that supporters of the RH Law were given from the United Nations (UN).

But I dare say that this division had a direct link to the division within the Catholic Clergy, represented by the Catholic Bishops of the Philippines (CBCP), who more often than not did not have the guts to confront the Aquino regime for pushing the RH Bill simply because some of these Bishops believed in the Aquino propaganda machinery. So when the Lay Catholics ask the Bishops to confront the Aquino regime, many of these Bishops would throw the issue back to the Laity and say… “This should be spearheaded by Lay people and the Church would follow your lead.”

So reading excerpts from Vatican II, Fr. John Rona gave the definition of the Layman taken from Lumen Gentium, “The chosen people of God is one; ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism.’ As members, they share in a common dignity from their rebirth in Christ. They have the same filial grace and the same vocation to perfection. They possess in common one salvation, one hope, and on undivided charity…. And if by the will of Christ some are made teachers, dispensers of mysteries and shepherds on behalf of others, yet all share a true equality with regard the dignity and to the activity common to all faithful for the building up of the Body of Christ.”

Actually, there is more in Lumen Gentium that gives authority to the Laity and especially in this Year of the Laity, we must come up with a body that could help unify our Christian brethren towards the Love of Christ because of the division within the CBCP. So at exactly 2 p.m., a new group emerged from the ashes of the battle against the RH Law, in reply to the big question Catholics are asking themselves “Where do we go from here?”

So the leaders of the Task Force for Life & Family (TFFL) composed of 12 Lay Catholic members suggested to create a counterpart of the CBCP was decided… that in the Year of the Laity, Lay Catholics from all regions in this country would create what we call the Catholic Lay Conference of the Philippines (CLCP) as the Lay counterpart of the CBCP. The seeds of this body will be planted in Cebu where the seeds of Christianity was first planted and we expect it to grow and support the CBCP in this noble cause to unify Catholics to restore ourselves as one nation, one people under one God. We will explain more about this in our column for Holy Thursday.

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