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Antonio Meloto is downplaying a split in the Catholic Church lay group Couples for Christ (CfC) that underpinned his highly successful Gawad Kalinga (GK) housing program to build a nation without slums, declaring “we are working more, talking less.”

The influential Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines was set to discuss the issue sometime this week, Church sources said, highlighting the gravity of the division in the movement established in the Philippines in 1981 and now has more than one million members in 160 countries.

Meloto, 57, whose work in Gawad Kalinga won for him and his organization the Ramon Magsaysay Award -- Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize -- for community leadership in 2006, spoke to the Philippine Daily Inquirer on Saturday, a week after CfC co-founder Frank Padilla announced his breakaway.

Padilla has formed the Restoration Movement, also called the Easter Group, according to a letter circulated in the United States by Ricky Cuenca, US coordinator of CfC, one of the world’s largest Catholic lay organizations.

“Couples for Christ and Gawad Kalinga are very much together. Gawad Kalinga remains a project of the Couples for Christ,” said Meloto, who stepped aside as executive director of GK in February purportedly to become an international ambassador of goodwill.

The February announcement then said GK was going global to improve the lives of the countless poor in other countries and that Meloto was to join Padilla, who also was GK chair, in the initiative.

“Walang iwanan (Nobody leaves),” Meloto then said.

Padilla in February resigned as member of the CfC council, the organization’s governing body, along with two other officials, according to the Cuenca report.

source: The Philippine Daily Inquirer

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