QUEZON City, April 15, 2015—An official of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) has linked the booming cases of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) – Acquired Immune-deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in the country with the “less than ideal” domestic setup prevailing in many Filipino homes today, lamenting many “persons living with HIV-AIDs” hail from “broken families.”
Values formation at home
“Many young people these days have a distorted concept of sexuality due to the lack of what we call family values formation,” Fr. Dan Vicente Cancino, MI, executive secretary of CBCP’s Episcopal Commission on Health Care (ECHC), told Church-run Radio Veritas in an interview.
“Because of this, they were deprived of a deep parent-child relationship. The familial ties have been damaged. It is no wonder that many of our patients would come from “broken families,” dysfunctional families,” he explained.
Back to basics
Noting how poor parent-child relationship tends to influence the rise in HIV-AIDS incidence in the predominantly Catholic Philippines, Cancino called on the faithful to go “back to the basics”—family values and prayer—in order to combat the further spread of the lethal global pandemic.
“Let’s all go back to the basics: family values and prayer. Too bad, many of our people have neglected their prayer lives. They are only reminded to pray when they are suffering from illness. That’s the time most of them run to the Lord,” he added.
Growing HIV-AIDS population
Based on data from the Department of Health (DOH) – National Epidemiology Center (NEC), there has been a marked increase in HIV-AIDS cases nationwide.
In February, DOH-NEC recorded 646 new cases of the contagious disease. (Raymond A. Sebastián/CBCP News with reports from Roxanne dela Rosa)