That’s what Marbel Bishop Dinualdo Gutierrez told our Pambansang Kamao Manny Pacquiao. That’s also what I have been telling everybody, including the late His Eminence Jaime Cardinal Sin, for the past 30 years.
Bishop Gutierrez whose diocese includes Paquiao’s province of Sarangani told the boxing champion that “It is un-Christian to hurt others…Every person is a temple of the Holy Spirit. If you box someone and punch him, it’s like you’ve also punch the Holy Spirit…”
I took up the campaign against boxing, specifically children and youth boxing, when as school sports director of the then Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports in the 80’s, I confronted strong pressure from some local government officials and my own education colleagues, to include boxing in the Palarong Pambansa. I resisted the pressure because of the knowledge that in a previous Palaro held in Pangasinan in the 1950’s, a young boy was reported to have died after a boxing bout. Also, it was in the 80’s that the renowned and respected American Medical Association (AMA) and the World Medical Assembly have both declared that boxing poses medical risks to practitioners of the sport. In 1991, eleven other national medical associations likewise “confirmed their opposition to boxing, and expressed their concerns on its dangers, believing that ultimately it should cease to exist…modern medical technology demonstrate beyond doubt that chronic brain damage is caused by the recurrent blows to the head experienced by all boxers, amateur and professionals alike.” (Wikipedia)
The DepEd Palarong Pambansa, with the consent of Education Secretary and man of the cloth, Bro. Armin Luistro, sad to say, allows children boxing in the Palaro, despite my informing the officials of the Task Force on School Sports who manage the school games that boxing, in most schools in the US and other countries, have been banned since the 1950’s. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the AMA, and the British Medical Association have identified the following concerns: 1. Children have little awareness of risk, specifically the risk of chronic encephalopathy, which develops only after a lag period measured in decades or more; 2. There is no place in contemporary society for a youth sport which has, as its primary purpose, the infliction of acute brain damage to the opponent; and, 3. And, if boxing is allowed, no one under the age of 18 should participate.
The Vatican and many Catholic theologians share Bishop Gutierrez’s admonition addressed to Pacquiao. The Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano, the unofficial newspaper of the Vatican, in 1986 editorialized: “Is it legitimate to continue to accept a sport whose fundamental aim is ‘to inflict corporal damage to the adversary’ as the World Medical Assembly held in Venice some months ago defined it? Physicians are in the majority of one mind in responding that it is neither legitimate nor moral. Nonetheless, boxing remains a violent sport, if not in the intention of the contestants at least in its form of expression. The ring is a stage of confrontation, said to be reliable and regulated but always brutal and sometimes savage…No sporting discipline nor any kind of ‘show’ can be accepted by a civic conscience if it endangers human life. Much worthier causes call for putting lives at stake.”
Similarly, in 2005, the Civilta Cattolica, (Italian for The Catholic Civilization) an Italian biweekly printed by the Jesuits in Rome that reflects the official view of the Vatican, claimed that boxing and the business interest around it was immoral. Boxing is based on violence and run by business enterprises that are interested in making money from the violence and suffering that boxers inflict on each other.
In the wake of the Jan Jan (macho dancer) controversy, I wrote Tina Monson-Palma, Executive Director of the Bantay Bata Foundation of ABS-CBN informing her of the position of the AMA in an editorial published in its journal that (children boxing) “is predictable damage, and it involves children. And if adults promote, for their own pleasure, children bashing each other, hurting each other, then this makes a pretty good case of child abuse.”
Running priest militant, Fr. Robert Reyes, a friend of mine, upon my incessant pleading, accompanied me to see the late Jaime Cardinal Sin, to plead His Eminence to call for the abolition of boxing in Philippines, and most especially youth boxing. The Cardinal was, to my mind, too much of a politician to agree. All he advised me to do was to continue my campaign against boxing.
As I write this piece, billionaire Congressman Dr. Manny Pacquiao (he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Humanities by a university in Cebu), was reported to have just arrived in a private jet plane and ready to celebrate his Mommy Dionesia’s birthday bash with a budget of almost one million pesos. With that kind of social mobility that transformed Pacquiao from a poor daily-waged worker living in a hovel to now a resident-owner of a 1,100 sq. meter palatial mansion, no wonder that even Cardinal Sin who brought in the Filipino people to stage the 1986 EDZA Revolution that changed the world, just looked and smiled beatifically at me, when I pleaded with him to help me put an end to boxing in the Philippines.
Giving up is never an option. I will continue to hope that a miracle will happen and get Brother Armin Luistro and Tina Munzon-Palma to share my campaign against boxing and its potential to breed brain-damaged youths and violence in our midst.
