Visita Iglesia has always been one of the features of our Holy Week ritual. When I was younger, I remember the “barkada” gathering around the big AM radio in the house near the sitio chapel, listening to the Holy Week-inspired radio dramas every Good Friday. No Visita Iglesia. Just us whiling away our time in our place in Sitio Kawayan (B. Rodiguez Ext.) at the back of the TB Pavilion. Sitio Kawayan is one of the villages in Barangay Sambag 2, Cebu City where I grew up.
It was when I married Edizza, who is from Barangay Inayawan, also in Cebu City, that the ritual started. Edizza’s late mother was from Ronda, one of the towns in southern Cebu, and she kept the Holy Week rituals that she grew up in even after she got married to an Inayawnon. It was from her that I learned about the rituals that many children who grew up in the city have forgotten.
The Visita Iglesia, this time around, was held with Edizza’s older and younger sister plus some of their children on Maundy Thursday. We did it early because they hired a vehicle and a driver and so we had to end the ritual early. Our family was more leisurely in the past because I had my own vehicle and drove it on my own.
Holding the Visita Iglesia at the same time when churches held Holy Week masses requires focus. But we did end early. We started at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish in Minglanilla then proceeded to the Naga church. Then we went down to some of the other churches in Naga, proceeded to Lipata in Minglanilla down to the Don Bosco church, Tabunok and then to Punta Princesa, to Basak and finally to the Sto. Tomas de Villanueva Parish in Barangay Pardo. I no longer counted how many churches we visited.
The Visita Iglesia allowed me and the Catholic faithful to observe the status of the churches, many of them old and built during the Spanish occupation of the archipelago. That occupation not only put us to heel (sword) but also introduced to us the Catholic faith (cross). The Visita Iglesia therefore has its roots during the Spanish period, which made it an old ritual, indeed.
When I roamed the mountains when I was younger, those Spanish rituals had not penetrated those areas. A historian once noted that if we look for the native Filipinos and their culture, we should look for them in the mountains because foreign influences are mainly found in the plains. The Catholic faith is mainly practiced in the plains.
When I was in the mountains of Cebu City, I found out that even priests do not go there. In this sense, priests are like government officials who rarely visit their constituents. Farmers in such hinterland barangays as Bonbon bring their dead to Pardo to be blessed there before they are buried, usually in the Calamba cemetery.
In my entire stay in the countryside (around seven years), I never saw a priest in the mountain villages, even during fiestas. And fiestas are not as important in the Cebu mountains as “kalag-kalag” or “adlaw sa mga minatay” when some of the farmers’ relatives, who now live in the plains, visit the mountains.