For centuries, our people have remained hostage to the belief that marriage is an inviolable social institution. Claiming to be the beacon of morality, the clerics have silently imposed their tight grip on our economy. Church power and influence today is omnipresent that one could hardly distinguish them from the traditional ruling class that has engendered antagonism and hatred from our people.
Many of them have openly sided with the yellow political party that is committed to brokering the country’s interest to the imperialist to bankroll their ambition. As the class that controls the social order, automatically they control and define our moral precepts, and the prohibition of divorce has been utilized to subjugate us to submit to an institution that promotes the inbreeding of feudalistic and immoral values reflective of the grave economic inequality and social injustice.
While we justify the prohibition of divorce on the ecclesiastical supposition that “marriage being the foundation of the family that should be protected by the State,” our hypocrisy has created a much serious problem of inverse immorality in our society. Even if ours is a patriarchal society, that did not prevent some of our so-called “liberated” women from indulging polygamous relationship with men.
To be frank about it, the female senator who is now in jail admitted having a sexual liaison with her driver knowing that the latter is married. She could equally be held liable for concubinage. Most disgusting is the scene that wherever she goes, she is surrounded and accompanied by nuns as if to sanitize her from the stigma of immorality.
Ironically, and despite being the only Christian nation in Asia, we already elected two presidents who have imperfect marriages. It is not for us to judge them because laws to rectify their mistake are not available. Former President Joseph “Erap” Estrada has several mistresses and does not keep it a secret, while former President Fidel Ramos and his wife were not seen together in public, and rumors had it that their being together is only for show. One broadsheet in 1993 revealed his relations with a notable socialite.
It is high time for us to accord people suffering from imperfect marriages the remedy to dissolve their marriage to give them a fresh start. Payment of alimony and support is to remind the parties the cost-effect of their irresponsibility. Right now, our people see this inverse immorality as more of a vice of the well-to-do, and clerics often keep silent because they are the same sinners who contribute to their coffers or are sponsors to many of their business activities.
Our society has somewhat accepted this immoral practice because the Church does not accord the sinners a way to correct their mistake. Once divorce is allowed, the practice of maintaining a “kabit” will die down because no woman would like to be called or looked upon as kabit or common-law wife. Some ultra-conservative members of the clergy do not even allow the body of the deceased faithful to be brought inside the Church to be given the last rite if it came to the clergy’s knowledge that during his lifetime, he was living with a woman not his wife.
The poor do not enjoy the luxury of maintaining a mistress nor could afford the money-making Church annulment of marriage. They separate without fanfare even if caused by the total irresponsibility of one to support the family. The entire family is perpetually mired in poverty because the loafing partner more often has a vice which contribute to financially ruin the family. The absence of divorce amounts to double jeopardy much that the indissolubility of marriage punishes the battered wife in perpetuity.
Seldom could one find a family that has not experienced any marital problem, or should we say have an immaculate married life. Surely, the clerics cannot deny that some of them have their own indiscretion or have been accused of child molestation or paedophilia, and violated their vow of celibacy.
Nonetheless, my concern is the continued injustice to women trapped in their status as mistresses. A mistress cannot even demand the formalization of her relations by asking her “benefactor” to divorce his wife so they could legally elevate their status to husband and wife. A mistress only enjoys the material benefits borne out of that anomalous and immoral relation. Once he dies, it is not only the illicit relation that is cut, but also the financial support.
Even if the man has shown more affection to his mistress, there is nothing he can do, for it seems this kind of inverse immorality has been decreed by the Church to become permanent. Many wives tolerate such scandalous relation either because the couple think they come from the so-called alta sociedad or that the wife has no other source of income, except to depend on the support of the unfaithful husband. In the first instance, the couple pretends to value marriage because of the alleged moral precept, while in the second instance, the legal wife sticks to her husband for reasons of economic necessity to hang on.
Likewise, the absence of divorce serves to reenforce the feudal practice of wealth concentration in the hands of the few. The oligarchy hypocritically scorns the idea not because they care much about morality but of the worrying consequence that divorce will result in the division of property and the giving of alimony to the aggrieved party.
Instead of property distribution consequent to the dissolution of marriage, property ownership remains concentrated in the hands of the few even if one spouse is wallowing in immorality. Such is compounded by our continued adherence to the feudalistic Spanish laws on succession that favor the reconsolidation of property to the original owner. Ascendants, by the legal concept of reserva troncal, reacquire the property acquired by the descendant through inheritance who died without an issue. This feudalistic mode of succession applies only to legitimate and valid marriage. In other words, reserva troncal will no longer apply to societies that allow divorce.
If one would analyze the reason why the Philippines remains in the economic backwater as with many Latin American countries colonized by Spain and lorded over by the Catholic Church, one could immediately notice the concentration of property ownership in the hands of the few. The Church unwittingly condemns the poor because there is nothing they could receive by donation through indulgence.