Separation of Church and State: A Perspective of a Catholic Lay

This legal principle of the "Separation of Church and State" is often used by anti-Church crusaders who preached a dualist worldview of the separation of the sacred and the profane-- the church deals with the sacred and politics with the profane. In so doing, they attempted to delimit the church activities within the realm of the spiritual, the sacred reality; to confine the church ministries within the altar and other sacramental activities which concerns only to the salvation of the soul. Christian evangelization does not hold such a worldview as it speaks of holistic and integral evangelization which concerns itself of total human development and social justice. 

However, Atty Jo Imbong did not argue on this integral evangelization approach where the church is not only concern with the spiritual well-being of the human persons but also to their material needs. Instead, she recognized the distinct role of the State and the Church: "(The Church and the State) may differ in their domain and purpose, but they do not necessarily antagonize or cancel each other.  In fact it is only through their co-existence and harmony that the well-being of man is achieved, that is, the State providing for the material goods of man and religion ministering to man’s spiritual needs. This co-existence comes about because they have a common form of reference–man’s well-being."

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Separation of Church and State

Atty. Jo Imbong
PRO  BONO

Separation of Church and State

SEPARATION of Church and State is a legal principle misunderstood and wrongly invoked to discredit the pro-life agenda. This is unfortunate, for the principle actually protects the realms and mandates of those two institutions which are both oriented to human good. To dispel the error, I am posting a refutation of U.P. Professor Florin Hilbay’s Paper that was published in a broadsheet on June 7, 2012.

What the Constitution says on the principle of separation is, One, the State cannot establish a national religion, and Two, the State cannot interfere in the free exercise of religious belief of its citizens.

To simplistically interpret this principle to mean that religion is anathema to good governance is to fail to understand that the function of the State is to serve the well-being of its citizens. Man is made up of body and soul, and the Constitution acknowledges this spiritual orientation of man when it mandates that the State should not violate the religious belief of its citizens.  This is so because religious belief is essentially part of a citizen’s perception of his well being.  The flaw of Prof. Hilbay lies in his assumption that there is an inherent conflict between the State and religion, and that all conflicts and differences connote contradiction or incompatibility.

According to Filipino philosopher Felix M. Montemayor, there is no such thing as contradiction in nature. Contradiction occurs only in language. Rather, there are only opposites, polarities or contrasts. Opposites and contrasts co-exist and are inseparable from each other (e.g., body and soul, freedom and obligation, right and duty, male and female) without which, humanity is non-existent, in the same way that without positive and negative polarities there is no electricity, just as there is no day without night, etc.

The same thing can be said of the State and religion. They may differ in their domain and purpose, but they do not necessarily antagonize or cancel each other.  In fact it is only through their co-existence and harmony that the well-being of man is achieved, that is, the State providing for the material goods of man and religion ministering to man’s spiritual needs. This co-existence comes about because they have a common form of reference–man’s well-being.

The next thrust of Prof. Hilbay is that, being openly against the reproductive health and divorce bills, same-sex union and the recent concert of Lady Gaga, the organization AngProlife is necessarily an association organized for religious purposes, hence, disqualified from the Partylist system. This is false.  AngProlife’s objection to the reproductive health bill is anchored on the sanctity of life and the corresponding right to life which the Constitution recognizes as the highest in the hierarchy of rights. In fact, this right to life constitutes the very reason under the Social Contract doctrine why the people have found the  need to organize the state at all: to protect the former against the state, including assault against the former  by the state.  The right to life is inalienable and non-waivable even by man himself. The economic theory of population control to promote the alleged “quality of life” is nothing less than putting the cart before the horse, which is an absurdity. If Prof. Hilbay will look deeper into the reproductive health bill he will discover the bill’s fiendish attempt to eradicate poverty by eliminating the poor for being a burden to the economic resources of the country. But life is more than bread.  It is also about knowing what is right and what is wrong.

Life precedes economics, not the other way around. Life is the end, and economics is only the means to sustain it. German philosopher Emmanuel Kant is of the same mind with his moral philosophy that man is always the end and never a means to anything else, economic or otherwise.

AngProlife, like other like-minded groups, is composed of civic-minded persons motivated by the desire to become responsible and upright citizens except that most of all, it is committed to protect life and the family, the latter being the basic foundation of society, an institution that has become marginalized by the practices which the reproductive health bill seeks to legitimize into a norm of society, dooming it to decadence.

Will the fact that AngProlife believes that to protect life is more than just a constitutional mandate but a transcendent spiritual truth operate to disqualify it from the Party-list system? Do Pro-Life groups have to profess Atheism to be able to participate in a political exercise? But does not the Constitution precisely protect the free exercise of religious belief?

One should go slow in demonizing religion whose only concern is the development of virtuous people. Prof. Hilbay should realize that only a virtuous people can be promoters of the common good. In fact, history teaches us that without a strong moral foundation no civilization can survive. If civilization is the fruit, morality is the stem and religion is the root. Considering the importance of religion to national development, Church and State relations should not be interpreted along the divisive spirit of contradiction and separation but by the harmonization and the reconciliation of the material and spiritual demands of man’s well being. Church and State are both needed to promote the well-being of man.