The Philippines: A Crypto-Catholic Nation

“[T]he idea of formulated rights comes…not from John Locke and Thomas Jefferson—as many might assume—but from the Canon law of the Catholic Church.” – Thomas Woods

Only fools will deny that our country is in shambles. Politicians are corrupt, innocent people are dying, and the poor remain at the bottom of society. We have to ask: what has caused all of these? Why is the Philippines suffering? What can we do to restore this broken nation?

I have an answer to these questions, although I must admit that this is an answer you won’t hear often: the Philippines is falling because it has rejected the Catholic intellectual tradition that has built it, and the only way to fix everything is to return to it.

Allow me to explain what I mean by “the Catholic intellectual tradition”. I don’t mean “what the Bible says” nor am I referring to the Church’s sacraments or anything related to the Catholic devotional life. Also, I do not mean the teachings and pastoral exhortations of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), although they might be alluring at times to what I’m referring to. The key word here is “intellectual”, meaning I’m talking about the philosophical school of thought that the Church has made Her own. I’m talking about Catholicism’s Aristotelian-Thomist leanings, specifically Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas’ concept of the Natural Law.

It is the Natural Law that the Philippines is built upon, because it is a republic. It is also the Natural Law that the Philippines has abandoned, that’s why it’s failing. The country has left Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy for what Catholic philosopher and author Timothy J. Gordon calls the “Prot-Enlight” ideology, an intellectual system stemming from the ideas of the Protestant reformation and the Enlightenment. If the Philippines won’t return to its Catholic roots and remain “Protestant/Enlightenment” in its ways, it will die.

What is the Natural Law?

Now, let’s back pedal a bit here since not all readers of this article are trained philosophers, so allow me to explain further. Thomas Aquinas, arguably the greatest Aristotelian that has ever lived, adapted Aristotle’s notion of the four causes. It is a philosophical doctrine that teaches all material things have formal, material, efficient, and final causes. The concept of the Natural Law is intrinsically tied to the idea of formal and final causation. A formal cause is the form, pattern, or the nature a material thing exhibits. For example, the formal cause of a basketball is its roundness, sphericity, and bounciness. A final cause, on the other hand, is the end or goal of a thing. To use a basketball as an example once more, its final cause is to bounce and to provide an “instrument” that basketball players can use while training and playing.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but what’s important is for us to grasp the basics. Now, formal causality is connected to final causality since you cannot know what the end of a thing is if you don’t know what the thing is in the first place. You should determine first if a thing is a ball or not before you can know if it is for bouncing or not. Or, to use another example, to say that a being has the capacity for rational thought is to presuppose that being’s human nature. Also, if a thing’s effect is not its final cause (or one of its final causes), then we have no reason to think why that particular thing brought about a particular effect or range of effects in the first place, as Aquinas himself has pointed out (Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae I. 44. 4). Apply these concepts to humans and the moral realm and you arrive at the Natural Law ethics of Aquinas. We humans are rational, which means unlike the ball or any other material thing, we can know what we are and we can know the ends of our faculties. Also, since we have free will, we can choose whether or not to act in accordance to what fulfills our ends. It is our rationality, our capacity to grasp natures of things, including ours, and their ends that makes us moral beings. It’s what makes us accountable for our actions. To give a concrete example, since we are what Aristotle calls “social animals”, the flourishing of society is an end of human nature. Any attempt to destroy society, therefore, is immoral and ought to be criminalized. This is why we consider acts of theft, rape, and terrorism as wrong. These acts are contrary to the fulfillment of our human nature. And that, basically, is what the Natural Law is: what’s good or bad is determined by our very nature.

This concept of the Natural Law is affirmed by the Catholic magisterium. The Church has taught that besides what God has revealed to us to what we should do (what’s called the Divine Law), we are also bound by the Natural Law. Pope Paul VI in his encyclical Humanae Vitae wrote that besides the law of the Gospel, the Church also is the guardian and interpreter of “the natural law, which is also an expression of the will of God, the faithful fulfillment of which is equally necessary for salvation” (Humanae Vitae 4). As the sainted pontiff has pointed out, not only is following what is written in the Bible needed for us to be saved, but also following the precepts of the Natural Law. The Church considers Divine revelation and the ethics grounded in nature as distinct but not separated.

As we can see, the Catholic Church has made the Natural Law Her own, and the connection of the Church and this Aristotelian-Thomist ethical theory is so strong that when you deny one, you deny the other (as we will see later on, the anti-Catholic theological revolution of the Protestants and the anti-Catholic philosophical revolution of the Enlightenment both involve a rejection of the Natural Law). There is no Natural Law outside Catholicism, and a Catholicism divorced from the Natural Law is not Catholicism at all.

The Catholic Natural Law and the 1987 Constitution

As I’ve said, this same ethical theory that was picked up by the Catholic Church is the same ethical theory that built the Philippines as a republic, whether the writers of the constitution were aware or not. And if we really want to progress as a country, our constitution has to be precisely grounded in the Catholic Natural Law, because true republics presuppose the truth about human nature and morality, a truth that only the Natural Law can give. Without a presupposition to the Natural Law, republics become corrupted and become a relativism for the majority. A republic without grounding in the Natural Law will inevitably lose its belief in objective truth.

Consider article 3, section 1 of the constitution that says “[n]o person shall be deprived of life” and also article 2, sections 11 and 12 that recognizes human dignity and human rights and that affirms the necessary protection of family life. These statements in the constitution say that human life is inviolable and is to be protected from conception to natural death. But why should it be the case? Why is human life ought to be protected at all cost? What makes the life of an old man in persistent vegetative state, the life of a semi-developed fetus, and the life of a 20-year-old working professional as equally deserving of protection, as the constitution states? You see, those parts in the constitution that I just cited won’t make sense at all unless we acknowledge the fact that all humans share the same nature, essence, or form. In other words, unless the Aristotelian-Thomist doctrine of formal causality is presupposed by the constitution, aiming to protect all human life means nothing. Also, these sections in the constitution won’t make sense unless it presupposes that the preservation of existence is one of the ends of humanity, as Aquinas has taught. The concept of formal and final causality is very evident in these parts of the constitution cited above.

Consider also the preamble of the constitution. It lists the words “truth”, “justice”, “freedom”, “love”, “equality”, and “peace”. And the very aim of the Filipino society, according to the constitution, is to attain and secure “truth”, “justice” and so forth. Now, if there’s no such thing as formal causality-if there’s no such thing as objective natures or essences-then what could be the objective meaning of “freedom”, “love”, “equality” and all those words written in the preamble and in the constitution in general? If there are no real natures, then we can make up our own meaning of those words. We are in no position to question a bloodthirsty tyrant’s concept of “justice” if natures are non-existent. To drive the point home, if the Catholic Aristotelian-Thomist doctrine of formal causality is false, then whoever said that the constitution is just a paper, he’s right, since the words written in it are useless, nonsensical drops of ink.

Lastly, consider the first sentence of article 16, section 10 of the constitution. It says that “[s]cience and technology are essential for national development and progress”. Now, we can only say that science and technology is useful for progress unless we know where it progresses towards. In other words, the said sentence can never be properly interpreted unless science and technology have a final cause, an end, goal, or purpose. Once again, we see that Aristotelian-Thomism plays a huge part in our constitution, even when it comes to science and technology. Without it, science becomes purposeless.

To summarize the points above, the Philippines is crypto-Catholic in its roots (crypto, meaning hidden). Every Filipino, then, regardless of religious commitment or lack thereof, relies on Catholic principles in order to make sense of his rights, his humanity, and his purpose as a citizen of this republic. That means that even the Filipino Muslim is somehow, someway, a Catholic with regards to the foundation of the country in which he’s a citizen of. The concepts of rights, freedom, responsibility, law and others in our constitution relies in the concept of the Natural Law alone as formulated by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and later picked up by the great Scholastics such as Cajetan and Robert Bellarmine and was ultimately affirmed by the Catholic Church.

Three branches of the republic based on Aristotelian-Thomist concept of the three good regimes

Not only does (crypto-) Catholicism lie at the heart of our constitution, it’s also the foundation of the Philippines’ form of government: the republic.

Now, this might sound silly since the Church is commonly tied to monarchies in Her past. That is indeed true. But even if this is the case, the Church actually has never officially taught that one specific form of government is Her preferred one, or that a specific form of government is the best and that a Catholic who disagrees is bad Catholic. I would argue that if the monarchical form of government didn’t exist in the medieval times and that there were republics instead, the Church will have no problem associating Herself with republicans. Also, we must remember that the Church’s relationship with the monarchs isn’t always a good one. To mention a few examples, the persecution of the early Catholics by the Roman Empire and Henry VIII’s schism against Rome are proofs that Catholicism and monarchy aren’t essentially compatible.

But even if there’s no such thing as an official “Catholic politics” dogmatically defined by the Church, She strongly promotes a… wait for it… a three-branch republic which is based on… drumroll please… Aristotelian political theory adapted by St. Thomas Aquinas!

To see this, we have to look at what Aristotle’s political views first, specifically on what he believes as the good forms of government. In book 8 of Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle lists the 3 best forms of government in descending order, together with their corresponding corrupted forms: Monarchy (virtuous rule of the one), Aristocracy (virtuous rule of the few), and republic (virtuous rule of the many). The corruption of monarchy is tyranny, the corruption of aristocracy is oligarchy, and the corruption of republic is democracy. St. Thomas Aquinas follows Aristotle with the same ideas as we can see in his work On Kingship, Book 1, Chapter 1 and Commentary on the Politics, Book 3, Lecture 6.

Now, Aristotle and Aquinas are believers in the monarchical form of government, but they also believe that the corruption of the best is the worst, and therefore a bad king is the worst type of leader. Aquinas proposes a safer political regime by combining all the positive aspects of monarchy, aristocracy, and republic. He then gives a nod to how Israelites ran their government through a mixed regime of Moses and the people as stated in Exodus 18:21 (Summa Theologiae I-II. 105. 1).

And where is this political government as a mixture of the three good regimes more embodied than in the modern constitutional republic that the Philippines has adapted? Look at the three branches of our government: the executive branch is modeled after a monarchy, with one person, the president, ruling at the top; the judicial branch, imaging the Aristotelian concept of aristocracy, is comprised with chosen judges; and the legislative branch, structured after what Aristotle called republic, has the many congressmen, as representatives of their people, and senators running the show. And not only is this promotion of a three-branch government present in Catholicism’s intellectual tradition, it’s also found in the Church’s source of Divine Revelation, the Bible. Isaiah 33:22 says, “For the Lord is our Judge… our Lawgiver…our King”. The sacred scriptures itself connects God’s nature to the three forms of governance.

Also, in Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical on the social teachings of the Church, we can read that the advantages of organizing a three-branch government comprising of executive, judicial, and legislative are recognized by the said pope. Catholicism, even though it doesn’t require its adherents to revere the modern republican form of governance, actually endorses it.

With all these background ideas in place, the connection of our nation to Catholic principles seems more and more evident. With a republican form of government and a constitution built on the concepts of liberty, justice, peace and the flourishing of human nature, the Philippines not only has Catholicism as its largest religious group, it also has Catholicism flowing through its political veins. We can say that Catholicism is the blood of this country’s body.

But also like the human person, who dies when you separate his body from his blood, the Philippines is dying in our time precisely because Filipinos, through their novel ideologies, have separated this nation’s constitutional-republican body from its Catholic blood. These novel ideologies are none other than the ideas of the Protestant reformation and the Enlightenment.

Protestantism and its Political Effects

The aim of Protestantism, when it kicked off in the year 1517, wasn’t to “reform” the Church, it was actually to revolt against Her. The rebellion from Rome by the first protestants, most notably Martin Luther and John Calvin (especially the former), not only is a rebellion from Catholic theology, it was also an escape from Catholic philosophy, specifically from Aquinas the Aristotelian.

The Aristotelian-Thomist doctrine of the Natural Law presupposes that our minds can know what is good and bad apart from Divine revelation from the Bible or Sacred Tradition. In other words, the Natural Law presupposes that human reason has the power to know metaphysical truths (because it can!). It also presupposes that we are free beings that are able to choose whether or not to act on what’s good, on what would fulfill our natural ends. These 2 presuppositions of Catholic philosophy are what Luther had rejected. In effect, he rejected the Natural Law.

This rejection of the intellect and will’s power to know the good and to act in accordance with it is evident in Luther’s writing. He believed that man is a “dunghill”, that is, man is completely fallen. If that’s the case, then our intellects and wills are completely fallen. Reason and free will, therefore, cannot be properly used.

Luther called reason “the whore of the devil. It can only blaspheme and dishonor everything God has said or done”. He also said that we “must abandon your reason, know nothing of it, annihilate it completely or you will never enter heaven”.

And if reason is corrupt, so is man’s will. He writes, in 1517, that “[i]t is false to state that the will can by nature confirm to correct precept”. Luther believed that man can in no way choose to do good, that man “commits a sin as often as he draws his breath”. And he’s happy about it. He also wrote that “I frankly confess that, for myself, even if I could be, I should not want ‘free will’ to be given me, not anything to be left in my own hands to enable me to endeavor after salvation”. In short, it’s okay for Luther to not have the will to choose the good. This negative concept of man’s will is alien to Christianity before Luther. Emperor Charles wrote of Martin Luther in 1521, saying “[h]e is pagan in his denial of free will”.

Of course, Luther ought to believe what he believes about the intellect and will or else it will hurt one of the pillars of Protestantism: the doctrine of Justification Sola Fide (by faith alone). Since man’s reason and will is completely fallen, it cannot play any positive role in the salvation of man. Unlike Catholicism’s soteriology that teaches “faith without works is dead” (James 2:24), Protestantism taught that good works, like works of charity and most especially the reception of Divine grace through the sacraments, have no inherent connection to your righteousness before God. If you want to be saved, then just have faith. Of course, good works are done by the saved, but works, in and of themselves, have no contribution in man’s salvation. And as you may recall in your history class or your theology course, the other Protestant reformers, like John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, picked that doctrine up in one form or another. Calvin, for instance, taught the doctrine of Total Depravity, or that man is completely deprived of grace and there naturally corrupt and sinful.

Because of this, Martin Luther despised Aristotle and Aquinas. He accused Aquinas of “never [understanding] a chapter of the Gospel or Aristotle”. He said “[t]he whole Aristotle is to theology as darkness to light”. He also wrote in 1517 that he “would not hesitate to assert that he (Aristotle) was the Devil himself”.  Since the intellect and will is totally corrupt, it fully makes sense that the reformers have taught the doctrine of Sola Scriptura (Latin for Scripture alone), or that the Bible alone is the highest authority as source for knowledge of the Divine. Nature is ultimately unintelligible in Protestantism, only the Bible can be a source of true knowledge when it comes to morality and the like. In Protestantism, we cannot say, “according to the Natural Law, such-and-such an action is immoral because it actively frustrates the ends of our faculties”. We can only say “such-and-such an action is wrong because the Bible says so”.

This doctrine of Protestantism that has negative views of man’s intellect and will and on Artistotelian-Thomism has serious consequences on politics. Consider these questions: How can politicians pass laws in which the final cause is for the good if man cannot know what’s good? How can a nation believe in liberty if man isn’t free to choose the good? How can a criminal be accountable of the bad works he’s works he has no choice but to be bad? A nation based on Protestantism is a nation based on confusion and absurdity.

If man is saved by faith alone, then the Church, Her commands, and Her precepts are useless. The Catholic Church’s teaching authority, doctrines, and moral demands were shunned by the Protestants. If this is the case, then the Church has no right whatsoever to mingle with the state. Instead of the Church, the state became the highest authority for the people. With man’s totally corrupt nature and the Church’s inability to guide the people through the development of character, we have no choice but to attach to the politicians and to them alone, instead of them together with the priests and bishops’ office of governing, preaching, and sanctifying, the responsibility of taking control of society. This is exactly what Luther is saying when he writes that “[t]he princes of this world are gods, the common people are Satan…I would rather suffer a prince doing wrong than a people doing right”. Because man is evil by nature, the state alone ought to take full control to preserve order, since the Church can interfere no more. Because of this, Luther actually was against man’s right to revolt. In The Unintended Reformation, Brad S. Gregory writes that a “corollary to justification by faith alone was power exercised by secular rulers alone”. Joseph Costanzo wrote, “Luther restored to the state the sacred rights of the ancient pagan cities”. “The progress of the constitution”, according to Lord Acton, “which it was the work of Catholic Ages to build up, was interrupted by the attractions which the growth of absolutism excited and by the Reformation’s transferring the ecclesiastical power to the crown”. Luther never stated explicitly that he was advocating for some kind of political absolutism, but his writings point to that fact. Calling the common people “Satan” and calling princes “gods”… that doesn’t sound right, does it?  Luther’s ideas implicitly say that state rulers cannot be resisted anytime. This is contrary to Aristotelian-Thomism’s doctrine that by virtue of the Natural Law, society ought to flourish for man to flourish, and man can therefore revolt against a tyrant that acts contrary to society’s ends.

With Protestantism, all our protests, all our EDSA people power revolutions, all our activisms, are never allowed by all means. Anybody who hails people like Luther as a pioneer in promoting political liberty is either confused or delusional. Far from being a hero of freedom and limited government, Luther’s beliefs actually point to a rejection of it and therefore to an advocacy of political absolutism. By “liberating” themselves from the Catholic Church, the Protestants rejected liberty as a whole.

Enlightenment and its Political Effects

The Enlightenment, on the other hand- a school of thought that sprang from William of Ockham (although unintended) and popularized by the teachings of people like Renee Descartes and John Locke- rejected Catholic Natural Law from a secular perspective (as opposed to Protestantism which opposed it from a “Bible-based”, “Christian” perspective). So, even if the Protestants and the Enlightenment philosophers are, at first glance, seemingly opposed to each other, in the end they just have the same goal: to kill the Catholic intellectual tradition.

Enlightenment thought rejected formal and final causality, the very foundations of Catholic Natural Law, as is evident in Descartes’ (and other Enlightenment thinkers for that matter) mechanistic philosophy. The idea of mechanism focuses on studying the natural world with a mathematical and/or scientific emphasis. This would automatically entail a setting aside of Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics. So, to borrow an example from Thomist philosopher Dr. Edward Feser, if we ask a question, “Why does a cause A generate its typical effect B?”, the Aristotelian-Thomist and the Enlightenment thinker would answer it completely differently. While the former would say that by virtue of A’s substantial form, it has the generation of B as its final cause, the latter would say that A has no inherent connection to B whatsoever. It’s just a non-intrinsic regularity that A generates B. Had the laws of nature been different, A would generate an effect other than B. As David Hume puts it, all cause-and-effect relationships are entirely “loose and separate”. Had the circumstances been different, throwing a brick in a window won’t generate a broken window as an effect. It could’ve been a rabbit appearing out of nowhere, who knows? In the Enlightenment, there’s no such thing as natural tendencies, only laws imposed by an outside force.

Enlightenment’s ideologies point to modern secularism’s radical scientism. Scientism is a view that only natural science can give us objective descriptions of reality. Philosophy or religion is of no use in learning what is real. Since the Natural Law is a philosophical doctrine, it is therefore something to be rejected by our scientifically obsessed modern world. In Enlightenment thought, there’s no room for a morality rooted in human nature, since there’s no such thing as “nature” in a metaphysical sense.

Just like Protestantism, Enlightenment ideas would destroy a republic. Without a natural law-based politics, people are left with an idea of a political society as a mere “social contract”-based nation, with people having no objective reason to deviate from such a contract. Without grounding on Natural law’s objective rules, constitutional laws are just arbitrary. Laws become impermanent and can change if people simply want it to change.

Without a Natural law-based morality, we have no choice but to choose weaker alternatives as our basis for morality. We may become utilitarians, or those who base morality on what’s useful. But who decides what’s useful? The government? What if the government decides to kill poor people suspected to be drug addicts without due process because they think it’s useful? Is that objectively evil on utilitarian grounds? What makes you say so? Utilitarianism is a weak basis for morality; only by going back to the natural law can morality have an objective basis, and only through it can we sustain a republic.

What about consequentialism which teaches that an action is good or bad based on its consequences? This is also problematic upon analysis. Who decides if a consequence is good or bad? Should we ban vaccines since it produces that bad effect of pain? Should the government ban protests to avoid the bad consequences of potential bloodshed? Consequentialism is shaky, just like utilitarianism, and unless we use the Natural law as an alternative, we will be unable to combat the bad effects of other non-natural law-based moral theories. Only by rejecting the Enlightenment can this be done.

The Modern Philippines: a Protestant-Enlightenment Nation

Unfortunately, these 2 anti-Catholic schools of thought are the ideological presuppositions of the majority of Filipinos. When you are labeled a “conservative” in this country, you commonly sound like a protestant. On the other hand, if you are a “liberal”, you reason like an enlightenment thinker. The middle ground between “Prot-Enlight” ideas, the Catholic intellectual tradition grounded in Aristotelian-Thomism, seems hidden, despite the fact that it is presupposed by our republican form of government and our constitution. Because of this, Filipinos live in self-contradiction, rejecting (even if unaware most of the time) the foundations of their nation while trying their best to make sense of the laws and politics of it.

Consider the debate on whether or not same-sex marriage (SSM) should be legalized. Try to analyze the arguments from both sides. Those who don’t want same-sex marriage often argue like bible-thumping Protestants, don’t they? What do they commonly say? Isn’t it that same-sex marriage shouldn’t be legalized “because it’s against the teachings of Sacred Scripture”? That it’s against God’s law? After that, they fail to give an argument that corroborates their claims without appealing to any religious authority. Sure, they’re correct in saying that SSM is against God’s law, that’s why there has to be no human law that approves of it. But how can someone bridge God’s law and human law if there’s no natural law, the law that enables the natural world to participate in the eternal law, as Aquinas puts it?

Yes, sometimes you hear people object against SSM because it’s “unnatural”. But what exactly do they mean by that word? That SSM is not natural because it increases the chances of people having STDs? Well, can we just improve our laws on reproductive health to prevent such a thing from happening? Also, does this mean that people with eye defects cannot wear glasses since wearing glasses are not natural and that glasses are man-made? Once we clarify that the Natural law doesn’t condemn artificiality per se (since some artificial things like glasses can indeed help someone from achieving the end of his eyes, which is seeing) but only those actions/things that actively frustrates the accomplishment of the ends of out faculties, then this problem ceases to arise. See, a Christianity without a Natural law is a failed Christianity, a Christianity accused of being “outdated”, “unprogressive”, and worst of all, “irrational”. No wonder many atheists and skeptical secularists make fun of Christianity, because most Christians have abandoned the Natural law (and true Catholicism, for that matter).

On the other side, you have the liberals who untirelessly say “love is love” everytime they express their support for SSM. But have they ever considered the notion of final causality in Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy seriously? Have they really asked themselves “what is the final cause/end of marriage and sex”? Many of them claim to be tired of hearing the Bible verses and the threats of hellfire, but have they heard of the rational philosophical arguments against homosexuality from the Natural law and have they took a time to properly evaluate them? They just blindingly assume that the idea of final causality in sexuality has been buried together with the ancient Church that has taught it, so they dismiss it without taking a second look, just like the Enlightenment thinkers did. They think the only ones who object to SSM are those who speak like pastor Bob from the local Baptist church down the street. That only proves they haven’t met guys who can really think, like Aristotle.

The point is that the arguments of the people as to whether this law should be passed or not, or on whether this act is unconstitutional or not, has to go beyond debates with regards to our legal system. It has to go to what the legal system itself presupposes: proper philosophy, particularly, on whether or not Aquinas got it right. If he did (and yes he did), then the Philippines is built on an unshakable and unbreakable stone, and the modern day Filipinos are wrong in abandoning him and his principles.

The protestant reformers, who are the ideological ancestors of the average Filipino conservative, and the Enlightenment philosophers, who influenced the anti-traditionalist liberals of our nation, are missing the point, then. Because of this, many Filipinos have also missed the point. In doing so, they contradict their very identity as Filipinos, an identity built on Catholicism.

Conclusion: The Philippines should be honest of its Catholic roots or die

The solution to all this nation’s problems is this: the Philippines should reclaim its identity. Before we ask questions about politics and legality, we must first ask who we are. And who are we? Whether you are baptized as a Catholic or not, the right answer will always be: based on the recognition of my right, my freedom, and humanity, I am a “crypto-Catholic”. All our legislations, our form of government, then, should follow upon this identity. If we forget this precious identity of ours, we become confused, we pass laws contrary to the fulfillment of human flourishing, and we become chaotic.

We must return to our Catholic roots! We must acknowledge out Natural Law-based citizenship! Until the Philippines comes back to Catholicism, it will continue to fall and die a painful death.