by Raffy Gutierrez
Every June 12, we wave our flags. We sing Lupang Hinirang. We post photos of Aguinaldo’s house in Kawit, Cavite. We congratulate ourselves on 127 years of independence. And then, on June 13, we go back to being governed by an institution whose headquarters is not in Manila, not in Quezon City — but in Rome. The same Rome that sent priests to the Philippines in 1565 to make sure we stayed on our knees. Tell me — what exactly are we celebrating?
I want to talk about divorce. Not because I am promoting broken families. Not because I want Filipinos to treat marriage like a fast-food order they can return when the flavor doesn’t suit them. I want to talk about divorce because the Philippines — a nation of 110 million people with a Constitution that explicitly declares the separation of Church and State — is, outside the Vatican, the LAST COUNTRY ON EARTH without a divorce law. Let that sink in. Not the last in Asia. Not the last in Southeast Asia. The last on the planet. And we are supposed to call this an achievement? We are supposed to call this Filipino values? No. I call it what it is: the longest-running political hostage situation in the history of the Philippine republic because of the underlying influence of the Roman Catholic Church.
Here is the question nobody in power wants to answer honestly: if the separation of Church and State is — and I quote the 1987 Constitution directly — inviolable, then why does the same Constitution define marriage in language borrowed straight from Catholic sacramental theology? “An inviolable social institution.” Inviolable. That is not the language of a secular legal document. That is the language of a bishop’s pastoral letter. And it should surprise no one that the 1987 Constitutional Commission that produced this document included Bishop Teodoro Bacani, Jesuit priest-lawyer Fr. Joaquin Bernas, and a leader of Opus Dei. These are good men, perhaps. But they were not writing secular law. They were writing Catholic doctrine and calling it a constitution. The separation of Church and State in the Philippines is not a reality. It is a performance. A very long, very expensive, very harmful performance.
The anti-divorce crowd has its talking points and I have heard all of them so many times they play in my head like a broken record. Divorce will ruin marriages. No — failed marriages ruin marriages. Divorce is just the paperwork that acknowledges what already happened. Divorce is an easy way out. Are you serious? Annulment in this country costs between PHP 300,000 and PHP 1,000,000 and takes an average of five to ten years. There is nothing easy about it. What you are actually defending — whether you realize it or not — is a system where the rich can afford to legally dissolve a dead marriage and the poor cannot. That is not a defense of the sanctity of marriage. That is a defense of class privilege wearing a rosary.
But what about the children? This is the argument that lands the hardest, and I will not dismiss it lightly. Yes — research shows that divorce can affect children negatively. What that same research also consistently shows, and what the anti-divorce camp conveniently never mentions, is that the decisive factor is not divorce itself but sustained parental conflict. A child trapped in a household of silent hostility, physical abuse, or the quiet devastation of a parent’s infidelity is not being protected. That child is being sacrificed — on the altar of a legal fiction that the Church calls an inviolable institution. Right now, today, there are millions of Filipino children living in de facto broken homes with no legal framework protecting them. No court-mandated child support. No enforceable custody arrangements. No division of marital assets. These children are invisible to the law because their parents could not afford an annulment — and the people screaming about protecting children have the gall to call that a victory.
I want to name the real obstacle clearly, because the pro-divorce movement in this country has been frustratingly reluctant to do so. It is not the Constitution alone. It is the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines — the CBCP — and its decades-long stranglehold on legislators who know better but are too afraid to say so. The divorce bill passed the House in May 2024 with 126 votes. One hundred and twenty-six. In the Senate? Silence. Total, calculated, cowardly silence. Sources inside Congress have said repeatedly that a majority of senators privately support the bill. Privately. Because publicly, they are terrified of being labeled anti-Catholic. This is the Church’s real power in 2026 — not the thundering condemnations of Cardinal Sin’s era, but the quiet, pervasive fear it plants in the hearts of elected officials who have confused their personal faith with their public duty.
And please, do not hand me the CBCP’s 2024 pastoral statement where they said — with breathtaking irony — that “the Church is in no position to dictate on the state what is best for Filipino families.” The same statement then called on all Catholics to pray that senators would not pass the divorce bill. You cannot claim you do not dictate in one sentence and then mobilize the spiritual anxieties of millions of voters against specific legislation in the next. That is not pastoral guidance. That is lobbying in a white cassock.
The most glaring hypocrisy in this entire debate — and there is serious competition for that title — is the annulment system. The Catholic Church tells us marriage is indissoluble, a sacred bond no human authority can break. And then the Church’s own canon law provides an elaborate system of “declarations of nullity” — which are, in every practical sense, divorces with extra steps. Civil annulment in the Philippines mirrors this almost exactly: you go to court, you pay a fortune, you submit to a psychiatric evaluation, you testify that your spouse was “psychologically incapacitated,” and after years of humiliation, you get your exit. If you can afford it. The Church’s theological opposition to divorce, in practice, functions as a class-based restriction on personal freedom: ang mayayaman, makakakuha ng labasan. Ang mahihirap, hindi. The rich get out. The poor stay trapped. In what universe is this the protection of the Filipino family?
Let me bring this home with a number: 17.5%. That is the percentage of Filipino women aged 15 to 49 who experience violence from their intimate partners. For these women, the absence of divorce law is not an abstract philosophical problem. It is a physical reality. It is a door that will not open. A woman whose husband beats her, rapes her, systematically destroys her sense of self — her legal options are: a legal separation that does not allow her to remarry, an annulment she cannot afford, or simply enduring it. When the Church says it opposes divorce to protect Filipino families, what it is actually doing — in the lives of these women — is protecting their abusers. I am not interested in softening that sentence. It should be said exactly that way.
The Muslim-Filipino community has had access to divorce under Presidential Decree 1083 since 1977. Nearly fifty years. Did Muslim families in the Philippines collapse? Did their society disintegrate? Did the children of Muslim Filipinos grow up as moral catastrophes? Hindi. The doomsday arguments being deployed against the divorce bill today are directly contradicted by half a century of lived Filipino experience. If divorce is safe enough for Filipino Muslims — and it demonstrably is — then the refusal to extend that same legal right to all other Filipinos is not a principled stand. It is discrimination dressed up as theology. A theology that belongs to the Medieval Ages (The ironic alternate name “Dark Ages” when the Roman Catholic Church was at its peak power) — desperately clinging to relevance in a society that has largely woken up from its indoctrination — has no business writing the civil laws of a modern republic. .
Here is what I believe with every fiber of my atheist, anti-clerical conviction: the Philippines will not pass a divorce law until the pro-divorce movement stops being polite about the Church. Stop framing this as a debate about Filipino family values — you are playing on their court, with their rules, and their referee. This is a debate about whether a foreign religious institution has the right to embed its sacramental theology into the civil law of a secular republic. The answer is no. It was always no. It needs to be said publicly, loudly, and without the apologetic hedging that has neutered this movement for thirty years. Name the obstacle. The obstacle is the CBCP’s political influence. Name it. Every single time.
There is a reason Malta legalized divorce in 2011 — in a country arguably more Catholic than the Philippines, where the archbishop himself preached against it. They held a referendum. The people voted 53-47 to legalize it. The sky did not fall. Maltese families did not collapse. Maltese children did not become social delinquents. What happened was simpler and more profound than any of the Church’s prophecies of doom: people were allowed to be honest about their lives. That is all divorce law does. It makes honesty legal.
We have been independent since 1898. We removed the Spanish flag. We eventually removed the American one. But the cross — the specific, institutional, politically weaponized cross of the Roman Catholic Church — never came down. It was planted so deep in our constitutional language, in our legislative timidity, in our social stigmas, in the silence of senators who know the right thing to do and choose not to do it, that most of us stopped noticing it was there. This June 12, I am asking you to notice. I am asking you to look at the woman in your barangay who cannot leave. Look at the children living in the performance of an intact family that shattered years ago. Look at the senators who mouth Catholic pieties in public and privately wish they could vote differently. Look at a Constitution that says Church and State are separate in one breath and embeds Catholic sacramental doctrine in the next. And ask yourself — honestly, without the fog of 500 years of colonial programming — is this what independence looks like?
Hindi pa tayo tunay na malaya. We are not yet truly free. Not until the law of this land belongs to all Filipinos — to the battered wife in Samar, to the broken man in Davao, to the children who deserve legal protection regardless of whether their parents could afford a lawyer — and not to an institution in Rome that never asked our permission to govern our most intimate lives, and has never shown the slightest intention of giving that power back.
Isn’t it about time we freed ourselves from the clutches of this 500 year old ancient indoctrination? Or are we going to wait another 500 years to finally wake up?
Raffy Gutierrez writes a weekly column on politics, religion, and civil society. The views expressed are solely his own.
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Raffy Gutierrez
Microsoft Certified Trainer, CompTIA Technical Trainer
