sense they subvert the hold of both the Catholic Church and a government in Manila run by the landed elite and long divorced from any real contact with indigenous sentiment. If in the Cordilleras up north and in Mindanao the strategy had been to resist actively incursions by the Spanish, that of the southern Luzon, in places like Banahaw, was to, seemingly blithely, accept these same intrusions but to recast them in their own image. One could engage in a guerrilla warfare of the spirit without killing any intruder, whether Westerner or fellow Filipino.
I ask the man, why women as priests?
“Women are cleaner. And it shouldn’t make a difference if women become priests.”
Later, we meet the woman who had presided over the mass, Padre Aurelia Ebreo, a serious twenty-one-year-old with a simplicity that is disarming. She explains that she, like other priests in the sect, has a contract for seven years with an option to renew her contract. Or she may opt to marry. It used to be that being a member of the priesthood was forever. No longer.
“Priesthood?”
“Yes, only women can become priests. And the term, why should it mean only men? In our religion men cannot act as priests or acolytes. And an acolyte can’t become a priest.” What Padre Ebreo doesn’t mention but must have known was that much of the Philippines has a venerable pre-Christian tradition of female shamans, babaylans—healers, sources of power, and repositories of tradition.
She guides us upstairs, into the konbento, or rectory, that is adjacent to the chapel, a large, almost bare room. On the far wall hangs the sect’s banner, patterned after the Philippine flag and with three triangularly shaped mountains representing the trinity. At the bottom are portraits of different revolutionary figures. Not surprisingly, the largest is Rizal’s. Why the emphasis on these men? we ask Padre Aurelia. She replies, “Our faith is in God and Country, that is why we revere our heroes.”
According to Padre Aurelia, the sect has no sacraments except for baptism and marriage. No one prays to the saints, though they are honored. Mass is celebrated three times a month on the 7th, 17th, and 27th, as the number 7 has mystical significance for the group (as it had for Ferdinand Marcos). Maintenance costs are apportioned throughout the community, with most labor given freely. Three times a year, believers from other provinces flock to Kinabuhayan: on January 27, August 27, and during Holy Week, the busiest period for the community, when many Catholics come here as well. All are welcome, Padre Aurelia states.
She invites us to breakfast downstairs in the konbento’s large, austere dining room. Grace is said before and after the meal, though no one makes the sign of the cross. The woman on my left, Estebana, fifty-five years old and unmarried, started serving the sect when she was twelve years old. Like other women at the table, neither priests nor acolytes (except for Padre Aurelia), she lives here. Some are married, others not, but all are nagseserbisyo: pledged to serve the sect, in roles similar to those of brothers in a Catholic priestly community.
In my mind’s eye, I can see my ate, or older sister, Myrna here, possibly as a babaylan, part of a religious community more solidly rooted in folk beliefs than the Catholic Church and more empowering of her as a woman. I remember attending her twenty-fifth anniversary celebration as a nun with the congregation of the Immaculate Coeur du Marie. The occasion was marked by a renewal of her vows, along with those of six other nuns. On that day, the celebrants, calling themselves “Doves,” released seven of the birds during rituals presided over by fifteen priests and headed by a bishop.
Considered a progressive by the more conservative members of her community, Myrna had evolved a decidedly feminist perspective. And yet what struck me about those proceedings was that fifteen Catholic priests, embodying patriarchal traditions, were giving their blessings to seven women. I have no doubt Myrna was aware of this ironic subtext. In her homily, she quoted Rilke, “Infinite dreams but finite deeds,” and referred to “a Steadfast Compassionate Mother God who knows where we are going, even if we ourselves sometimes don’t.” In that reference to God as female was encapsulated the part of her voyage that most of the congregation’s other members would refuse to undertake, a voyage that harked back to the sacred iconography of pre-Hispanic times when Bathala, the Divine Principle, had no gender and the first man, Malakas, and the first woman, Maganda, sprang forth from bamboo at the same time and as equals.
I never imagined my fun-loving ate would one day opt for the life of a religious. Before becoming a nun, Myrna—never a santasantita—had already been working, had had a busy social life, had had suitors. One night, coming home from a party, she had an epiphany and knew she wanted to be a nun. As she prepared for bed, Myrna remembers listening to Frank Sinatra singing these lines on the radio, “The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day/ You’ve burst your pretty balloon, and taken my breath away/ Now you must wake up…” For some reason, the ballad crystallized her feelings. (I think the worldly Hoboken crooner would have enjoyed this tidbit.)
Her decision made my mother unhappy. Just six months before, Joseph, one of my older brothers, had entered the Society of Jesus, convinced of his calling to be a priest. Partly, my mother’s unhappiness stemmed from the fact that she felt my sister didn’t quite know life yet, hadn’t explored its possibilities. Too, she and Joseph, working in the secular world, had considerably lightened the economic burden of caring for the rest of us, for by then my mother had become the main breadwinner; my father, moored in a castle of discontent and bitterness, welcomed these defections to the Divine. In time however my mother accepted my siblings’ decisions.
Myrna’s experiences as a missionary in the Philippines’ remote rural south, then in the Indian state of Kerala, and her studies in Europe, made her see how, in a country as poor and beleaguered as the Philippines, asserting a communal bond with the less privileged was, to her, much more compelling than the traditional route of contemplative isolation. She once told me that living among the fisher-folk of Mati, Davao Oriental in Mindanao, for two years during the Marcos regime “saved me from being a dried-up prune of a nun.”
As an educated urbanite, she initially displayed a smug self-righteousness, thinking she and the American missionaries based in Mindanao had true faith while the peasants only had superstitious beliefs. “My pompousness crumbled upon hearing their genuine faith reflections and their from-the-heart prayers. It was a real, liberating experience.” Marcos had declared martial law in 1972, yet the intensity of these peasants’ faith when confronted with an emboldened military opened her eyes “to the deeper realities of my country, those whom I previously never knew nor appreciated as bayani [heroes].”
It wasn’t so much that the fisherfolk performed what would conventionally be thought of as heroic deeds but that in leading ordinary, honest lives, in earning a modest living from the sea, and in trying to make sure that their children’s lives would be better, they had to be brave. And by being part of a Basic Christian Community—where members of a community, especially among the poor, were encouraged to become activist Christians organized around principles of social justice—they often became targets of harassment or worse by the army. In a throwback to a biblical Galilee, the fisherfolk activists Myrna worked with were thought by government agents to be subversive, charged by the army with spreading communist ideology. Myrna remembered the courage of the people she worked with, such as Nang Vecing, a fisherman’s wife. “She was no coward, whether facing priest or police. She said things as she saw them. Jailed by the local military unit, she declared: ‘Maybe the soldiers don’t know the gospel of Jesus and so they confuse Marx with Mark.’”
She remembered too a fisherman by the name of Noy Tonying, who, tagged a radical, was also jailed, his fishing boat confiscated. Myrna described him as a tiny “flashlight penetrating the sea of darkness.” This metaphor occurred to her after an unforgettable experience of being with Tonying and some cathecists at sea when their boat began to have engine trouble, putting them at the mercy of the waves. “I had a flashlight
