NOTE: This series is based on the findings of a study done in 2018 made possible by a grant from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). It is Sisay Kita?’s modest contribution to the observance of the Diocese of Virac’s Golden Jubilee comes August 27, 2024.
So far in this series, we have built up the case for the singular significance of the ermitas of Virac as material cultural heritage, their existence as testament to the common folk’s creativity, resourcefulness, industry and abiding faith. We have also described “ermita religiosity” as a form of popular piety that the ermita has spawned. It is an entire complex of traditional practices that the lay folk observe and sustain. Both ermita and ermita religiosity are hybrid forms that integrated pre-colonial and Spanish features, thereby representing continuities rather than breaks in the people’s journeying in faith.
In this last part, we discuss how ermita religiosity carried through to contemporary times. Essentially traditional, ermita religiosity took in changes – without being obliterated; its essential aspects retained – in order to become relevant to modern imperatives. If there was continuity from pre-colonial to colonial forms, such continuity extended on to the present. To be sure, it was not exactly smooth; it was attended by contradictions and tensions just like any historical unfolding.
In the wake of Vatican II reforms
Religious systems, with the Catholic Church as a case-in-point, largely thrive on tradition. But change being “the only thing permanent” is inevitable. In the first half of the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council convened to outline the course the Catholic Church will take in facing the challenges of modernity. When its mandates started to seep in, it created quite a quandary. Growing up in the 60s, those years of drastic re-orientation impressed deeply on me. First, we saw the old Spanish Virac parish church torn down to give way to a modern structure. The altars were stripped of the retablos and depopulated of its saintly host in order to be more Christ-centered. Then the priest started saying mass facing the congregation, according to a new Bikol missal titled “Misa na Kaiba an Banwaan.” It was set to upbeat music using guitar and drums and called an “a go-go mass.” The womenfolk had to readjust their pious apparel. Their must-have veil evolved from the expansive rectangular manto to a smaller triangular piece, to an even smaller circular cloth that covered only their scalp. Until eventually, the ladies worshipped with their bare crowning glories.
So it was mainly a moving away from tradition. For a couple of years, the Kagharong and singing of the gozos were done away with during Christmas, while the Lenten observance became severe without the pasos clogging the streets in processions. Easter tonton was likewise scrapped. Surely, there were widespread complaints. Even my own parents who were deeply religious but open to change (my father being an educator), thought it was too much. Soon, the initial radical shift was relaxed as a concession and the colorful traditional practices were back. But they were not anymore according to their full original grandeur. They were toned down and revised in order to make them more Bible-based. For example, the aleluya reenactment did away with the angel being made to dangle from a kastilyo (representing heaven) but appeared out of a made-up cave representing Christ’s tomb.
If anything, it was popular religiosity that took much of the brunt of the Vatican II reforms. It was deemed that these forms of piety were diverting the faithful from the centrality of Christ and competed with the most important form of worship which is the celebration of the mass. I remember how the priests back then were incessantly sermonizing on this topic. They decried (indeed satirized) how some “fanatic” parishioners (zeroing in on women) would come to church carrying thick missals made more voluminous by novena booklets inserted between the pages. They walked with a forward hunch not so much due to old age but to the weight of religious medals and scapulars hanging on their fronts. What else, these extra-pious souls would multi-task: while hearing mass they fingered their rosary beads or recited a novena. But the priests reserved their most indignant criticism to the substitution of the mass with these popular devotional practices.
It must be pointed out that such substitution was more practical than anything to many parishioners, especially those in rural areas. With just a few priests in service, the rural villages get to hear mass only during the annual fiesta. Ermita religiosity based on the novenario remained the major modality of religious worship in these remote places.
Renewal in the local church
The impetus of Vatican II in Catanduanes took an important boost when the province became a separate diocese in 1974. Now with its own bishop, the local church warmed up with enthusiasm to its new status. It acquired a vitality particularized as openness to new possibilities, an attitude of building up from an overly wrought and “tired” tradition: a renewal. It helped that the first bishop, Msgr. Jose C. Sorra, was a cleric of the modernist mold. The new pastoral incumbency was signaled by the launching of novel programs such as the “Encounter” sessions offered to sectoral groups mainly the youth, married couples, professionals. Using the methodology of group dynamics (structured group experience), the encounter was designed to establish a new framework in the practice of the faith by re-orienting to the foundational gospel values and how to realize them in the imperatives of everyday mundane life. The approach was to move away from being “Sunday Christians” who practice their faith only on occasions rather than in the totality of their lives. Religion is not to be a part-time preoccupation. In another way of putting it, it was about transcending one’s being a “cultural Catholic” and become an authentic one. The operating principle was that religion is not only for specialists, or the “clothed” ones with religious vows, but for everybody. It was about spirituality of the lay people.
Aside from the encounter program, other renewal groups took root such as the Charismatics, the Neo-Catechumenate, the Anawim Covenant Communities and the Couples for Christ. However, all that seemed to have formed a new “religious elite” among the lay that marginalized the rest of the Catholic faithful still engaged in popular religiosity. Recognizing this dilemma, church leaders consolidated its basic pastoral approach called “New Evangelization.” It is based on the premise that most Church members who had become Catholics at the point of their baptism in infancy need a re-evangelization in their adulthood to bring them to the authentic practice of Catholic Christianity. While this is being fulfilled by the renewal movements (Neo, Anawim, etc.), the big pastoral challenge was how to replicate this to the great masses of the faithful.
Along this line, the basic strategy developed by the Church in the re-evangelization of the masses was the organizing of what came to be known as “Basic Ecclesial Communities” or BECs. It was piloted starting in the late 70s and saw great success in many parts of the developing Catholic countries, such as in Latin America and in some areas in the Philippines. The BEC is a small group of lay people engaged in a sustained “faith-life reflection.” They regularly meet to worship, study the Bible and reflect on how the Word of God applies in their daily life. It is supposed to be the Church operating at the grassroots. But implementing it is a tedious organizing enterprise. The challenge was how to permeate the lowest levels of the community with BECs. In the Diocese of Virac, the BECs got renamed as Basic Faith Communities (BFCs) in order to avoid the political implications the BEC had acquired in other places.
Renewal and ermita religiosity
In facing the challenge of re-evangelization, the local church leaders in Catanduanes seemed to have recognized a wealth of resource that had been in place all the time and which can be pivotal for the purpose. The ermita establishment is a long-standing built-in grassroots structure that can be tapped for the New Evangelization program. So what needs to be done is to bring the ermita pastoral units, hitherto marginalized, more into the institutional orbit. In sociological terms, it is about integrating the popular sector into the institutional. To be sure, this integration had long been in place, except that the ermitas remained marginalized due to the lack of priests.
One of the effects of the establishment of the new diocese was the increase in priestly vocation. Soon, there were more priests coming in. During the incumbency of the second Bishop of Virac, Msgr. Manolo delos Santos, the diocese saw the great increase in new pastoral units, namely parishes and mission churches, as new pastors had become available to manage them. The effect was a decentralization of pastoral supervision. The barangays/sitios therefore saw more priestly ministration in their religious fare, like being able to regularly hear mass in their ermitas over and above the annual fiesta. But more than that, institutional presence was translated in organizational terms. A new Manual was promulgated in 2013 to redefine the structure of the barangay/sitio pastoral council. In the new system, the barangay/sitio council was deemed a “consultative body” that assists the priest in managing the religious affairs of the involved community. It was going to be administered by an Executive Board with the priest as Director. The matanda and other lay officers are members of this board.
So, gone were the days of marginalization of ermita affairs. With increased engagement from the top, the parish authority that is, the largely popular religious fare of the ermita, basically the novenario, was mixed with and enhanced by an array of other areas of concern such as family life, youth, stewardship and yes, new evangelization. It was about an integrated approach to pastoral care based on the assumption that faith must permeate into all aspects of living. But it was such a tall order. For one thing it meant a massive re-orientation to the new framework of the stakeholders, mainly ordinary lay people. For now, such re-orientation at the very least has targeted the members of the barangay/sitio pastoral councils through formation programs. Meanwhile, establishment of NEP communities has been piloted in some barangays, but their wide proliferation and sustainability are at best uneven. It remains the biggest challenge of the local church: to do effective and sustained re-evangelization of the masses of ordinary members.
By the 1980s, there seemed to be a new historical turn in the Church as a whole. There is a perceptible conservatism creeping back in. This was readily apparent at the materially visible aspects such as ecclesiastical art (architecture, etc.) and ritual. As a graduate student in Manila some 40 years ago, I witnessed how churches in the capital city built according to the modern style were being remodeled to take on old Baroque motifs. This trend caught on locally when the Cathedral of Virac took major rebuilding and re-styling with a neo-Baroque design. Soon, many of the ermitas followed the lead. Also, the old pomp and pageantry of liturgy has been called back. But it remains ambivalent whether this return to material conservatism might just be about surfaces or symptomatic of a more fundamental return to the past as regards doctrines and practices. In any case, it was a Catholic Church trying to reassert its identity in the light of challenges faced by Catholicism in particular and by religion in general in the contemporary times.
Such a trend of re-appropriating tradition included a revitalization of popular religiosity. The notion brought forth by the early onslaught of Vatican II that popular religiosity was some kind of a baggage or indeed “impurities” of the one true faith was abandoned. So we witnessed a resurgence of colorful traditional expressions of Catholic religiosity. Like Catholicism becoming “Catholic” again and with a vengeance. In the Diocese of Virac, we saw revival of traditional practices, but raised to even new heights of pomp. An exemplar is how the old and humble kinallobong built during Lent became such lavish enterprise involving huge construction works and spectacular production designs complete with human tableaus. The Kagharong, to name another tradition, has proliferated to the remotest corners to the island in a scope never seen before. And all these taken up by the lay sector resulting to their wide participation through the network of ermita-based pastoral units under the auspices of the Centro Catolico. Popular religiosity anyway has always been indeed the domain of the laity.
It must be said that this reverting back to tradition, with especial mention of popular religiosity, is not necessarily a regressive turn. It is rather a calling back to vitality of tradition in the service of renewal that brings the Church in step with contemporary imperatives. It is a smart way, if we may say so, to mobilize the resources of the past to push for greater relevance in the present and the future.
To sum up, it can be said that after almost sixty years of journeying since Vatican II, the Church, as exemplified by the Diocese of Virac, seemed to have settled on to a two-pronged approach to its enterprise of renewal. On the one hand is to offer the members emotionally and esthetically appealing experience through spectacular visuals and rituals that inspire and compel awe. This is basically drawn from the wealth of tradition as a whole, but largely from the Baroque period. It must be said that the Baroque period (15th century onwards) came into being as a way to counter the effects of Protestant Reformation in Europe. Its aim was to attract back the people to the Church, away from the protestant alternative. Then as it is now, the point is to bring the hordes of the faithful to the Church and get them to participate in communal religious events.
But surely that is not the end in itself. The next and more important step is to deepen religiosity into a sustaining spirituality through formation programs. Here comes in the BECs (BFCs) and other renewal groups. Here, material expression of religiosity is to be transcended through concretization of the Christian values in everyday personal and communal life such that the Church becomes a lived out reality and not simply reenacted on religious occasions.
What is truly remarkable in the Diocese of Virac is that both these two layers of approaches are facilitated in large measure by the ermita establishment. As such it lends the local Church’s renewal and revitalization enterprise a strong lay and grassroots character. The ermita has gone a full circle in its pivotal function and relevance in the history of the Church in Catanduanes,
Happy Golden Jubilee of the Diocese of Virac!