Reconnecting with the poorer flock

IWRITE this while preparing to bring my family to Plaza Independencia for yesterday afternoon’s 51st International Eucharistic Congress’s (IEC) opening Mass. As the Cebu Archdiocese, host of the event, announced, the main celebrants of the Mass were Cebu Archbishop Jose Palma and Pope Francis’s representative, Burma’s Cardinal Charles Maung Bo, the papal legate.

I have already written about how big the event the IEC is for Filipino Catholics. This is an international gathering whose hosting is not easy to get. The last time the IEC was held here was in 1937 in Manila, when our own Archbishop Emeritus Ricardo Cardinal Vidal was still a first communicant. Vidal is now 84 years old.

And this is big, with hundreds of foreign delegates now in Cebu participating in the IEC’s various activities. Consider, too, that Cebu itself has hundreds of thousands of Catholic faithful, as shown in the recent feast of the Sto. Nino that brought in some three million devotees and revelers. Dioceses throughout the country are also sending delegates to Cebu.

*** The Philippines is predominantly a Catholic country. Unfortunately, this fact has not shown in our governance and in the people’s daily living. It looks like being in the majority has bred complacency both among the Filipino clergy and ordinary Catholics as far as the practice of the religion is concerned. I say Catholics would have acted differently had they been the minority.

A relative’s entire family became Born Again Christians recently, leaving behind years of practicing Roman Catholicism. The family patriarch tried inviting a sister and her family, all Catholics, to join them in a bible sharing session but was rebuffed. The sister was surprised by the turn of events, noting that had their mother, a devout Catholic, been alive, she would surely have scolded her brother.

“Bibile sharing” is not unique to Christian fundamentalists. Catholic groups that have sprouted the past decades conduct “bible sharing” sessions often. The problem is that this and other practices, which are being done by Christian minority groups, giving the impression theirs is a better religion, are embraced only by a few Catholics, those we describe as “devout.”

I roamed the mountains of Cebu City for six years and found out that, in the practice of our religion, priests and other church leaders leave ordinary Catholics to their own designs. Priests rarely stray into the hinterlands and if the farmers need to be serviced by priests they had to walk the proverbial mile to do it. No wonder religious cults exercised greater influence there.

When I visited the island of Bantayan in the ‘80s, I talked with a priest who was handling a small parish. His “church” was the size of a large chapel and only a few attend the scheduled Sunday Masses. What he did was hold the Masses in the villages. Meaning that circumstances forced him to acquire the zeal of a missionary. He didn’t have it when he was assigned in a big parish.

But he seemed to do it grudgingly. In our talk, he was complaining much about how the Cebu Archdiocese deployed priests to parishes. It sounded to me like priests were battling to get big and therefore “rich” parishes at the expense of smaller and therefore “poorer” ones. It looks like some priests were more “inspired” to celebrate Mass in big parishes than in small ones.

I said this before. Until priests reacquire their missionary zeal by living with their flock in the mountains or slums and not ensconce themselves in the comforts of the churches and convents, living like kings to be served by their servants, Catholicism will continue to lose its relevance to our lives.