Sunday, November 11, 2007
Bishops urge faithful to be strong in fight vs poverty
THE suicide of a minor due to the widespread poverty has prompted members of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) to urge the faithful not to lose hope in the fight against poverty.
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"They said the reason why a person commits suicide is because the person lost hope. A Christian should never lose hope even if he is being surrounded by so many difficulties in life. A Christian has always something to look up to and that is God," says Bishop Leonardo Medroso, head of the Episcopal Commission on Canon Law of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (ECCL-CBCP).
Medroso issued the reminder to the faithful in view of the recent case of suicide of a 12-year-old girl in Davao City.
He said the Church views suicide as not a good deed that's why those who commit such act are called public sinners and they are not given funeral rites.
"The presumption would be that the one who committed the crime or the bad deed has to be punished accordingly, but that is just a presumption. When it comes to individual cases for example the case in Davao, the one concern, the bishop or the parish priest in that place, has to hear the reason why she committed suicide. So from the narration of some relatives perhaps, then we would make a decision whether to give a funeral rites or not," said Medroso.
But Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Oscar Cruz said the Catholic Church reversed its discipline on suicide victims due to the advancement of behavioral sciences.
"After years of the advancement of behavioral sciences the Church is convinced that those who commit suicide are not themselves and consequently the presumption is that they lack the necessary deliberation to commit a mortal offense against the giver of life and therefore there is now a relaxation of the law of funeral blessing and burial for those who commit suicide," Cruz, a Canon law expert, told reporters.
"If formerly they were denied of the funeral rites and even the burial in a Catholic cemetery, now those practices no longer hold true. I think all experts of psychology and psychiatry are one in saying that all those who killed themselves are not in their right mind," he added.
Mariannet Amper, 12 years old resident of Davao City, committed suicide last Nov. 2 by hanging herself after losing hope over her family's miserable condition. (Marie Neri/Sunnex)