Morning-After Pill Ignites Controversy in Peru

REUTERS, June 15 — Church leaders and other pro-lifers are outraged at Peruvian health minister Pilar Mazzetti's decision to allow free distribution of the morning-after pill. The pills would be available in three months.

Opponents of the decision called the move one step closer to the legalization of abortion in that country, where it is prohibited and where contraception has been available to unmarried women only for the past 20 years, Reuters reported.

Hector Chavez Chuchon, head of the Health Commission in Congress and a surgeon, called the health minister's move part of an anti-life policy and said he hoped the country would never be in the “shameful position of wanting or having to legalize abortion.”

“As a doctor, as a minister and as a woman, there's no way I'd accept anything that was an attack on life,” Mazzetti said. However, the morning-after pill is known to prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in a women's uterus, thus causing an abortion.

Philippines Vicariate Begins Jubilee Year

ASIANEWS, June 22 — With the motto “to make the lay aware of the Jubilee's significance,” the apostolic vicariate of Palawan, Philippines, approximately 364 miles southwest of Manila, is beginning its yearlong celebration of its elevation to apostolic vicariate July 3.

The vicariate, established by Pope St. Pius X in 1910 as an apostolic prefecture, was elevated to an apostolic vicariate on July 3, 1955. Because of its size — approximately 93,000 square miles — and increasing population — 800,000, 70% of which is Catholic — two years ago it was divided in two, AsiaNews reported.

All of the vicariate's clergy will attend an upcoming National Congress on the Clergy in Manila, which will coincide with the theme of the Jubilee, “Thanksgiving and the Renewal of the Clergy and Laity.”

Priests often walk for hours just to visit all of the chapels in their vicariate, just as the 17th-century Spanish missionaries did. The first missionaries, from the Spanish Order of Augustinian Recollects, arrived in Palawan in 1623.

Colombian Priests Regularly Risk Their Lives

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, June 22 — Being a priest in Colombia means more than baptizing babies, hearing confessions and celebrating the Eucharist. Priests also mediate for freedom for hostages, escort civilians through combat zones and work out temporary truces between warring factions.

In isolated regions of the country, the Associated Press noted, priests often fill a void left by the absence of government authority.

“The Church is the only institution that all sides respect,” one priest said. The government and a right-wing militia, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, have been sparring for 40 years, as have the government and the leftist National Liberation Army.

Pope John Paul II offered encouragement to Colombian priests June 17 at a Vatican meeting on peacemaking.

“In the particular case of your country,” the Holy Father said, “where for years an internal conflict has claimed so many innocent victims … you must give priority to peace and reconciliation, and so contribute to building a society on the Christian principles of truth, justice, love and freedom.”