worries about the impact the habit has on families in Asia’s only predominantly Christian nation, BosNewsLife learned Monday, October 17.
In a pastoral letter read in all churches across the country the prelate, Oscar Cruz, said "number game-gambling" would "prey on the country’s poor like octopuses, squeezing the life out of their little and weak preys." He also urged governmental officials to "resist" re-establishing a popular nationwide lotto system or similar number game to fill state budget holes.
The government recently banned what was known as "Lotengo ng Bayan" in the country, leaving thousands of Filipinos involved in this gambling unemployed, BosNewsLife established. Local media say unemployment among former gamblers led to a growing number of theft and robbery cases in different parts of the Philippines.
The economic crisis has encouraged new forms of number-game gambling to mushroom across the country, despite church opposition. Archbishop Cruz, who is among several church leaders spearheading a campaign opposing all types of number-game gambling, said the games are an "easy way to make money which is morally wrong," and warned that "the poor are exploited."
IMPOVERISHED GAMBLERS
He stressed that "all types of gambling operated in the area may be legal forms of gambling but their objective is a way to impoverish the gamblers and enrich the gambling operations." Cruz urged the government to be more "creative and original in responding to help people to earn" a living.
Throwing his support behind the prelate a local official, Governor Victor Agbayani, said in published remarks he would appeal to authorities to help preserve the moral "gains of the archbishop’s crusade" and heed his call to "eradicate the culture of gambling."
There is concern that gambling games, which apparently increased after Asia’s financial crisis of the 1990’s, will undermine families and church life in the Philippines, where about 92 percent of the over 86 million people claim to be Christian. Muslims and Buddhists are estimated to comprise the remaining eight percent.
