President Rodrigo Duterte has not commented on the current measure. But during the campaign in 2016, he said he was against divorce — a stance reiterated recently by his spokesman Harry Roque. House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, one of Mr. Duterte’s closest allies and a co-author of the bill, says he is optimistic he can bring the president around.

No bill on divorce has ever made it this far in Congress. The measure is the rare piece of legislation supported by representatives from both the majority and opposition parties in the House. A survey released this month found that 53 percent of Filipinos support legalizing divorce.

About 80 percent of Filipinos are Roman Catholic, and previous attempts to pass a divorce bill have faltered under the influence of the Catholic Church here, which vehemently opposes legislation that runs counter to its teachings.

The divorce bill comes in the wake of a bitter battle over a reproductive health law that provides modern family planning education and free birth control for the poor. It took more than 13 years to pass into law, which occurred in 2012; it then languished in appeals for several years, and has yet to be implemented fully. Politicians who supported that measure were vilified by priests or threatened with excommunication.

“It’s just exhausting to be debating with the church all the time,” said the deputy House speaker, Pia Cayetano, a practicing Catholic who advocated both reproductive health and divorce, and was denounced as an agent of the devil during Sunday Masses. “A lot of my colleagues are just too scared” to take on the church, she said.

“While divorce may indeed vindicate the rights of women, as congressmen believed,” the Rev. Jerome Secillano, the executive secretary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, said in a statement, “it is unfortunately to the detriment of marriage and family as sacred institutions that should otherwise be protected by the state. Divorce is antimarriage and anti-family.”