Metro Manila seems like one of the mythic cities from Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville. When I was last here, over a decade ago, Filipinos referred to it as plain Manila, but that no longer does justice to one of the world's megacities, 11m strong. Now they often call it Metro Manila in everyday conversation, as if you've walked on to a science fiction film set. But while Godard's film conjured the future from 1960s Paris, Metro Manila evokes the future, present and the past- nowhere more so than in the square outside the Basilica of the Black Nazarene, where naked street kids play below a Blade Runner-style video hoarding. Demented faces hawking global brands peer down on to the alleys by the basilica, where they are selling candles for use in black magic, cheap internet access, and rows of plaster madonnas.
We are in Manila City, one of 17 cities and municipalities that make up Metro Manila. This is the heart of the gridlocked metropolis, where distance is measured in time (a crosstown meeting maybe two hours away). I am talking to Bishop Teodoro Buhain for a BBC Panorama documentary on the Pope's 25-year campaign for Catholic sexual values. The bishop is angrily displaying a bottle of elixir which promises women it will bring on periods. He accepts my invitation to condemn not only abortion, but other forms of sexual disorder on the Vatican hit list. These include artificial contraception-IUDs, condoms, the pill-and even masturbation. Anything that artificially divorces the "gift of self" in the sexual act from its procreative purpose is a breach of the natural law which-Cardinal Karol Wojtyla wrote before his election as John Paul II -is "written in the heart of man" and which "must not be altered." Yes, it's sex that seems to bear Manila City back into the past. The Pope would like to reverse the changes in sexual morality of the last three centuries-and here in Manila City he seems to be having his way.
At first glance, Manila seems as preoccupied with sex as any Asian capital. In trendy malls we're fooled by Rio-style girl-boys, in the business district they're selling "pretty girls" alongside fake Rolexes, and in girlie bars you're smothered by onrushing flesh. But the bars aren't topless, the pop group the Sex Bombs are oddly sexless, and the birthday girl in a restaurant giggling over a penis-shaped cake is just a Manila-style bohemian. Manila has a strain of sexual modesty which-for the Pope's supporters-makes it ripe for the taking.
And nobody is more hardline than Lito Atienza, a self-made businessman whose support for the pro-life movement sits uneasily with the quivering claws of the sushi lobster on our lunch table. Atienza is continuing a dialogue begun in a city necropolis-its walls crammed with caskets that will soon be full, he says, of the bodies of aborted foetuses and babies killed or abandoned "by irresponsible mothers." He has declared the cellar a mausoleum to what the Vatican calls "unborn persons," and it is impossible not to moved by his impassioned plea to respect unborn life, his belief that our failure to do so constitutes a massive human rights scandal.
But Atienza is also the mayor of Manila City, and has strong views on contraception as well as abortion. As the boss of the city council's health clinics-the sole resource for many women here-he is able to enforce those views. And they are views which, like John Paul II's, are deeply disturbing to most secular westerners. For like other pro-lifers, the mayor believes the west is contracepting itself to death. We are sailing into a grey future, he believes, an ageing bunch who can only sustain prosperity by importing surplus labour from countries like the Philippines whom we hypocritically condemn for producing it. Mention street kids and he says it's not too many people that's the problem, it is too many poor people-and that's the fault of an unjust global economy.
And so the mayor has banned artificial contraceptives from the city's clinics. They'll probably be running short in NGO clinics too if funds from USAid finally run out. The mayor won't give you contraceptives even if you are an Anglican, Jew or atheist-in line with Catholic doctrine, since natural law should apply to everyone. Atienza has even declared Manila City a pro-life zone, probably the first in the world. To anyone unsympathetic to his intent, Manila suddenly seems less Blade Runner and more The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood's chilling fable of state control over women's fertility.
In Congress, the national government has joined in, stalling a bill that would promote contraception, sex education and women's rights. This in a city where we found one 14-year-old girl pregnant because she'd mistaken Colgate for spermicide, and a 27-year-old licensed scavenger on a rubbish tip saying that her five kids are enough: what she wants is proper birth control.
In Manila City you glimpse a future in which the Enlightenment has been erased from memory along with the individualist, liberal, and sometimes frankly hedonistic vision that has been the west's model of the future for three centuries or more. And if that sounds too far fetched, just try standing in the rain amid the flickering candles, giant video hoardings, and laughing street kids of the pro-life city.
Panorama, "Sex and the Holy City" is on BBC1, Sunday 12th October, 10.15pm. Click here for more information.
