Carvajal: Playing favorites

Friday, January 13, 2012

THIS week’s civic rituals will, as usual, provide a superficial and distorted view of the historical role the much-revered Sto. Niño icon played in Spain’s conquest of the Filipino people.

Spain used the cross and the sword to advance her colonial ambitions. Thus, in 1521 Ferdinand Magellan gifted Queen Juana at her baptism with an icon that she started to worship as one of her anitos. Lapulapu, however, killed Magellan and forced the Spaniards, when they came back in 1565, to subdue us by torching the port of Cebu. A soldier, Juan Camus found the blackened (but “miraculously” not burnt) Sto. Niño icon from among the ashes of the once thriving port village.

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The icon’s miraculous survival from the fire gave birth, in all likelihood induced by the friars, to the devotion of the icon (anito?) as a protector from calamities and provider of temporal favors. This is how Spain tamed the natives into becoming docile and loyal subjects in spite of the fact that, as we know better now, she had no right whatsoever to take away our land from us and with it our dignity as a free people.

For their part, the feast’s religious rituals perpetuate the myth of Spain conquering Filipinos for the Christian faith and not for the enrichment of the Spanish crown. The masses and novenas are all designed to make people accept this injustice to Filipinos as God’s will with religious leaders making no attempt to correct the distortion of this truth.

Political leaders attending the festivities simply ride on the religious fervor of the devotees to get the latter’s votes. In the pseudo-religious frenzy people forget that Filipino political leaders simply took over our politics and economics from Spain and continued to this day the marginalization of the Filipino masses with self-serving and corrupt colonial-style governance.

But Sto. Niño came to earth to establish God’s kingdom of equality and brotherhood. Thus, we cannot be worshipping Him as an anito to ask favors from. Neither can we be thanking Him for sparing us from the floods because that would be insensitive to the victims of Sendong whom, by inference, Sto. Niño did not protect. We cannot be thanking him for favors granted like the well-being of our children because then who do street children, trafficked and prostituted children thank or blame for their misfortune?

If Sto. Niño is the savior of all, what is the significance of the feast to the lives of these marginalized Filipinos? Nothing for now and until we learn to interface our faith in the God-Child with the socio-political fact that the poor are marginalized by the greedy, corrupt and unconcerned among us. Nothing until we learn in word and deed that Sto. Niño plays no favorites.