MANILA — When citizens of the small Mediterranean nation of Malta voted in a referendum last month to legalize divorce, they reignited debate in the Philippines, one of the last countries, along with Vatican City, where divorce is still banned.
Days later, the issue surfaced at a hearing in the Philippine House of Representatives on a long-dormant bill.
“The global reality is that divorce has been recognized as a legitimate option for couples, particularly for women, who are trapped in unhappy, even violent, unions,” said Luz Ilagan, a congresswoman representing the Gabriela Women’s Party and co-author of the bill. “If they can do it in Malta, we can do it here. Let us not remain in the Dark Ages.”
But the re-emergence of the divorce proposal has inflamed opponents in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country and riled the church authorities, who have called it part of an “orchestrated war against the Filipino family.”
Oscar V. Cruz, a retired archbishop who is now the leading church voice against the bill, said Filipino Catholics should not be ashamed that they are global holdouts on divorce.
“That is a distinction that we should all be very proud of,” Archbishop Cruz said. “It says that we are not one of those who believe the family can be destroyed.”
Divorce is not an alien concept in the Philippines; it was legal during the U.S. and Japanese occupations in the early part of the 20th century. However, it was prohibited with the enactment of the 1949 Civil Code.
The bill to legalize divorce was first filed by Ms. Ilagan’s party in 2005 but was generally ignored. The party refiled the bill twice after that, most recently in July 2010. But it did not come up for discussion in a congressional committee until this month, together with other proposals to amend the Family Code, which was passed in 1987 to supplant sections of the Civil Code concerning marriage.
Even with the greater attention to the Philippines’ isolation on this issue after the Malta vote, the bill is not expected to be approved soon. Catholic leaders have vowed to campaign hard against it. Opponents in Congress say they will fight it all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. Rufus Rodriguez, a conservative congressman, called the bill unconstitutional and divorce unnecessary.
President Benigno S. Aquino III, who has clashed with the Catholic Church over other legislation — the Reproductive Health Bill, which seeks to guarantee access to birth control information and methods but which the church has assailed as pro-abortion — has distanced himself from the divorce bill.
“It is not a priority, and I don’t see it becoming a priority even in the near future,” he said recently. “The sanctity of families is very important to us.”
Archbishop Cruz, the former bishop, rued what he saw as a pattern of anti-family measures, with the Reproductive Health Bill being debated in Congress and now the divorce bill.
“What they will do next?” he asked in an interview. “Allow same-sex marriage here?”
The Philippines, he said, faces so many problems “and yet we are bogged down by all these attacks against the family.”
But proponents of the bill, while recognizing the difficulty of passing it, are undeterred.
“Many Filipinos, especially women, are trapped in abusive and unhealthy relationships, and the remedies afforded them are inadequate,” said Ms. Ilagan.
“The introduction of divorce in the Philippines will provide an additional option to women who seek to get out of abusive and unhappy marriages,” said Lana Linaban, secretary general of the Gabriela Women’s Party.
The Family Code currently provides three options for spouses who want to get out of their marriage: legal separation, annulment or a declaration of nullity of marriage. Lawmakers who advocate the legalization of divorce say those are inadequate.
In a legal separation, they note, spouses cannot remarry because the marriage is not dissolved. An annulment, which requires the testimony of psychiatrists that one party is psychologically too incapacitated to sustain the marriage, is typically too complicated and costly for most people to pursue. A declaration of nullity requires a court to find that the marriage was never valid to begin with because of factors like fraud.
According to government records, thousands of Filipinos have filed for separation, mostly for infidelity, physical abuse and abandonment. And the numbers are growing. According to the Office of the Solicitor General, 7,753 petitions for legal separations, annulments and declarations of nullity of marriage were filed in 2007, compared with 4,520 in 2001.
A survey done in March and released this month by the Social Weather Stations, an independent polling company based in Manila, found that 50 percent of respondents favored legalizing divorce, up from 43 percent in a similar survey in 2005. Thirty-three percent were opposed and 16 percent undecided, with a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
“Let’s not be hypocritical about this,” Ms. Ilagan said. “The church itself grants annulments.”
She calls her bill “divorce, Filipino-style” because of its stringent requirements for applicants, among them that petitioner and spouse have been legally separated for at least five years.
“There won’t be any Britney Spears marriages under our divorce law,” said Ms. Ilagan, referring to the singer’s marriage to her high school sweetheart in 2004, which lasted less than three days.
