....but Filiponos are not listening.
The recently signed Reporductive Health Bill (RH Bill), promising to greatly expand contraceptive access in the Philippines, was a victory almost 15 years in the making.
For more than five years, I worked with Catholics for Reproductive Health, a group central to the fight against those other Catholics against RH, otherwise known as the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP).
The bishops and their allies aren't celebrating with us that the country's huge unmet contraceptive need and rising rate of HIV infections may soon be somewhat ameliorated.
Instead, they are busy planning the downfall of the legislators who courageously withstood the many statements that "contraception is corruption" and that RH Bill supporters were jeopardizing their standing with the Catholic church.
The 80% Catholic populace has already left behind the small opposition that simply will not recogize defeat-proving wone more than the institutional church doesn't understand what Filipinos need, how they think or how to reach them.
Though the CBCP attempts to shepherd its flock to vote according to its anti-reproductive health party line, the truth is, there is no such thing as a Catholic vote in the Philippines.
The hierarchy has supported plenty of candidates who were rejected by voters. Others, such as Congresswoman Janette Garin, co-author of the RH Bill, have been elected despite being targeted by local priests and bishops.
Promising to defeat pro-RH policymakers in the May election, the bishops issued a statement encouraging Catholics to become politically active.
One such lay initiative is Catholic Vote Philippines, which is developing a database comparing politicians' votes with a version of Catholic doctrine heavily slanted against reproductive health.
This is an odd strategy, given that policymakers, who helped pass the bill garnered a tremendous amount of positive publicity, in part because they proved stronger than the bishops' no-holds-barred assault.
But the CBCP's decision to turn up the political pressure seems like more of the same.
It also illustrates that the bishops are poor studies of Filipino psychology.
In my country, people love cheering the underdog. By threatening a massive show of force during the May elections, the hierarchy is flexing its political muscles, and citizens are likely to recoil.
Everyone knows that the institutional church has a tremendous advantage in its well-developed infrastructure, which can funnel information from the bishops' conference at the top through the dioceses and into the ears of those parishioners who are forced to listen to politically-slanted pastoral letters read in the place of homilies.
The bishops are also no strangers to the media. But what is missing from their didactic statements is the sort of messaging at which the pro-RH movement excels.
The legislatprs amd advocates who made the RH Bill a reality were well-served by their admirable restraint throughout many years of often nasty opposition.
Avoiding criticism of the church, they appealed to reason and the common good-explaining what, on a practical level, contraception, sexuality education and HIV prevention mean for indiviuals' lives.
It ook much patient effort, but I believe we are at a point now where the majority supports RH-even though that's not always the viewpoint that registers the loudest in the media.
I have friends who, like many Filipinos, have never been to a pro-RH rally and have remained silent throughout the public debate.
But these are the people who quietly take me aside to express how much they appreciate what the movement is doing for their daughters' futures.
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