Is the ritual of redemption dying?

Every year, on the second day of September, the image of the Nuestra Señora de Peñafrancia, is taken out of her shrine by the river and brought in a procession to the Naga Metropolitan Cathedral. The devotion is more than three hundred years; in 2010, its tercentenary was the center of a huge celebration.

The icon at the center of the feast is a Marian image, said to be one of the rare images not imposed by the colonizers but rather made a Patron Saint upon the request of the natives, who were then called “remontados.” These were people who avoided evangelization and went on to live away from the colonizing church.

The fiesta around the Virgin of Peñafrancia, lovingly called by Bikolanos as “Ina”, follows the Calendar of a novenario. Nine days are allotted for the journey from the shrine on land, Her stay in the old cathedral, and the return voyage on the third Saturday of September, by way this time of a fluvial procession in the Naga River.

In this sacred journey, the Virgin, a 17-inch image carved out of a santol tree, is joined by the “Divino Rostro,” a painting framed in silver, which shows the face of Christ on the veil of Veronica.

Another story backs up the reason for a Christ icon joining a Marian image in a massive Christian celebration. It was in 1882 that the Divino Rostro was placed alongside the Virgin of Peñafrancia. A cholera epidemic was raging in Manila. It so happened that a friar who came from Spain remembered how in 1834, the church authorities put on display the image of Divino Rostro for people to pray for protection from the affliction. The said image proved its efficacy then and this friar thought it would work in Nueva Caceres, the old name that encompassed the present Naga City and other areas. As in the friar’s birthplace and in his present place of assignment, the icon stopped the spread of cholera.

If we follow the logic—or miracle—of the story, then the Virgin of Peñafrancia backed by the Face of Christ would well be the best protection of the Bikol region. Indeed, with the region always at the typhoon path, the prayers to the two icons have always saved the land and its people.

But, last year, no procession took place. A month or so before September 2020, discussions raged among Bikolanos, between the believers and the institutional Church. The crisis was whether to hold a fiesta or not. The pandemic then was well into its sixth month. People were getting infected and the lockdowns were in full force. But there were doubters and the vac cine was nowhere in sight.

To ignore a religious tradition and belief that have survived revolutions and a world war was not easy. There was also this headstrong sense that, maybe, what we needed then, was a penitential procession that would put a stop to this evil virus. But the health policies proved to be the final arbiter—not history, not culture, not religion.

The second Friday of September in 2020 caused a dent, almost a physical depression in the collective memory not only of Bikolanos but also the multitude of devotees to Ina and to the Divino Rostro. The devotion had always been both secular and religious; it also had created a sense of identity for a group of people. It was a religion that was also a culture. And all this is under threat.

In the absence of myths and active folklores, it was the story of the origin of the belief—the potency of the Ina—that was being passed on from generation to generation, from families to families.

Favored among these narratives is the ancient lore of the dog whose blood was used to color the body of the icon. To use its blood, the animal needed to be killed. It was thus killed and its body thrown to the river. But the people who were there on the riverbank saw the butchered dog swimming, alive and whole again back to the ground. The Ina had conquered death for this dog whose blood was humility, service and love.

Devotees also keep in their hearts always the memory of that day in August of 1981 when one of the early worshippers in the shrine looked up from her praying and gazed at the altar above her. It took a while for the woman to see that there was no image there anymore. It was a full month before the fiesta and there was no image to be processed. After a year, the image was delivered to a Bikolano priest in Intramuros. On September 8, 1982, the Virgin of Peñafrancia returned to the city of Naga in the middle of a typhoon. The bells in all the churches around the city rang as the convoy of vehicles entered the old city.

There is now another story that will be passed from one believer to another. This is the story when a virus stopped the ritual that, in older, benign times, could have stopped any kind of infection. This is the story of science and religion standing side by side looking up at the heavens and finding there no questions and no answers.