Carnal knowledge

HE HAS known woman after all.
Who? What? I asked my seminary elder Don Luisito, finally catching up with him at Starbucks SM Pampanga after so many months in hiding. From me, that is.
Your compadre, who else. Admitting, albeit indirectly, having known woman in the biblical sense.
You mean dispensation-seeking suspended-priest, Comelec-recounted-out Gov. Eddie T. Panlilio had acknowledged having carnal knowledge with women, his priestly vow of celibacy notwithstanding?
Spare me of your corny modifiers, but for Panlilio what other politico will interest the public with disclosure of his peccadilloes?
Panlilio’s peccadilloes. Nice alliterative title there. But if as you said he admitted to having known women, that’s no petty indiscretion. Panlilio is a priest, for Christ’s sake. A priest having carnal knowledge of women makes a peccata mundi. Necessitating the most contrite plea of miserere nobis to the Lamb of God Himself. Anyways, how and when did he pull these skeletons out of the closet?
A mouthful of Latin there, but I am not impressed. So you did not watch Boy Abunda’s Bottomline?
I heard of his calling the media in Pampanga as mostly PR men. Which so incensed Ashley Manabat as to dare him to name names, to put up or shut up.
Uncharacteristically myopic of you to miss the juicier, okay more salacious, part of the interview.
Which was?
Abunda asking him if he has any child by any woman, and Panlilio answering he did not know.
That’s it and he already admitted he had had relations with women other than pastoral or pursuant to his ecclesiastical duties?
Tonto! That’s all there is to it. The admission is clear as day there. If he did not have any carnal knowledge with any woman he could not possibly have had any child by any woman. That he was not sure if he had is proof positive that he did engage in the marital act.
Okay, you did enlighten stupid me.
Then, in a subsequent interview with John Susi over dwRW, a repeat of the Abunda question merited a different but complementary response from Panlilio. He said he was (and is) no angel but a mortal man who can also fall to worldly temptation. There is that affirmation, if there’s any you still need to prove he has broken his vow of priestly celibacy.
Careful there, Don Luisito. For all your seminary training reaching to San Carlos, you may be treading on unknown territory.
What?
Your take on the vow of priestly celibacy. Here, consider these passages from the book Priest-Politicians that Among Oscar V. Cruz sent me:
Clerics are obliged to observe perfect and perpetual continence for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven, and are therefore bound to celibacy…(Canon 277, par. 1, CIC)…
Annotations…The first and foremost obligation of a cleric is continence, with celibacy as but its logical consequence. That is why celibacy, or the state of being single, is a big hypocrisy when a cleric is anything but continent…
A cleric can profess and claim his observance of celibacy while having women here and there, and even siring children every now and then. Needless to say, this is contrary to both the substance and the spirit of the law. The substance, rationale and spirit of the Law of Celibacy is the mandate of continence. Continence there specifically meaning “self-restraint, especially refraining from sexual intercourse.”
Whatever, the bottomline is that Panlilio has broken all his consecrated vows – first his obligation to reverence and obedience to his superior with his rejection of the call of his archbishop, Apu Ceto, for him not to run for governor in 2007; and now his distinctive obligation to observe continence in the celibate state of priestly life, as can be deduced from his Abunda and Susi interviews.
So whither goeth Panlilio from here?
A fast-track of the dispensation process, and he should drop the honorific and reverential Among before his name. That’s so hypocritical, as Among Oscar has long been saying.