Jesus is Black! Or at least he is in Manila. Today, I went to visit the Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene, St. John the Baptist Parish, in Quiapo. This church holds a 17th century statue of a Jesus, the Black Nazarene, which was brought to the parish by the Recollect Fathers who came from Mexico. The church site has had six edifices on the site because the first five were either burned down or destroyed by earthquakes. The statue of the Black Nazarene has survived these many catastrophes.
Because of the suffering the statue both depicts and has endured, the people of the Philippines look to the image as a reminder of how Christ suffered and endured the greatest of pains in life. Many believe that if you touch the Black Nazareno, you will be cured of any ills. This leads to a tremendous devotion at the parish which can fill the massive church twelve times every Friday. This is what I witnessed today. Pilgrims start at the back of the church and travel on their knees to the foot of the altar, where they come around the back steps and touch the foot of the statue, hoping for miracles in their lives.
If you have downloaded Google Earth onto your computer, you can view my pictorial of the parish by clicking here. The sight is overwhelming, but it is nothing, so they tell me, in comparison to what happens on January 9, the commemoration of when the statue was brought to Manila. The statue is processed through the streets. People begin lining up at 4:00 in the morning, and the crowds number into the hundreds of thousands. This last year was a good year for the parish. No one was killed by trampling while trying to touch the statue in the procession. Sadly, this has happened in years past.
That is, it is a good year unless you consider what is happening in the neighborhood, a different kind of trampling. In addition to serving the incredible devotion witnessed in the religious practice of the people, the parish is very committed to serving the poor. They have three social workers on staff at the parish, under the direction of the pastor, Monsignor Josefino Ramirez. I had the privilege of spending the day with one social worker, Cezar Gleo Tan, who brought me into the streets where he works.
And what I saw was shocking, even after what I have seen already. There are squatters who live under a highway overpass. “Live” is such an insufficient word. More like colonized this corner of the Earth, hidden from both rain and sunshine. They have built houses, once 4 stories high, out of disregarded bricks, wood planks, cardboard, and tin. They fuse old wires together and tap into city street lights to steal a little electricity to watch TV, or cast a shimmer of light into the caverns of the forsaken that they have erected. If it isn’t bad enough that society has given them a pretty bad report, the city of Manila is making their life a little more difficult.
While I stood there in the rubble of broken waste these people call “home,” I watched a whole section of the underpass as city engineers with jackhammers and sledge-hammers routed the place. They were hired to clear out these make-shift homes, and just in case their safety is threatened while destroying the “homes” of the homeless, uniformed police officers guard their work. This is done all in the name of progress… that is to say, all in the name of making a parking lot.
I’d love to know what people are thinking right now when they hear what I just wrote. Some might be outraged by the indecency. Some might think, “Good riddance.” Some could care less. Some might want to hear the others side of the story.
The pictures I have taken of the squatters are interesting. You can see them directly by clicking here. You can see the pictures of the city engineers doing their work, but the pictures you see of the people remaining, are actually the ones who have already been evicted. They rebuilt these lean-to shelters, sometimes two stories high, after the city engineers have already destroyed their previous “homes.”
What is really happening is a bit complex. The people living here mostly make a living as street vendors. There are provisions for their relocation under the laws of the country, but the city is not always following the provisions. The biggest provision is that the government must pay for their relocation and arrange for future housing. The city is providing relocation housing, but it is much farther away from the city center, and if people accept the relocation, it becomes difficult to make it to the center of the city with their items to sell. So the people argue that they also need money to redevelop new jobs and/or “careers.” The whole process to hear the cases, make appeals, and then distribute reparations takes time. The city is not always willing to give the time, so they just kick the people out. But the people have nowhere to go, so after they are kicked out, they just come back. To complicate the problem, the people who were relocated, can’t find work, have spent their relocation money, and so come back as well. As soon as the city finishes clearing out one area, the previous areas are being rebuilt by the same squatters. It is an exercise in frustration.
Why is the church here? The parish of St. John the Baptist (Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene) in Quiapo has been very successful at developing small base communities. You will hear me talk a lot more about this process in Africa and South America. These are local neighborhood assemblies of the Catholic faithful which are organized to support the parishioners much more effectively than a large parish can. The parish then becomes a community of small communities. Cezar’s work is to help facilitate and support these communities.
The small base communities differ from place to place, but because of the grave injustice of the situation these squatters face (the social sin of poverty itself, compounded by the lack of due process on the part of the city), these small base communities need to respond beyond mere prayer and fellowship. The small base community also coordinates social action in order to find just solutions to the situation. Cezar, and the parish itself, do not take the social actions themselves, but they help support the small base community, and give guidance to the poor on how to stand up for their rights. The Church reminds these untouchables that they are human, and possess a dignity imbued by their creator, even when the rest of society ignores this sacred truth.
In the end, these people will lose. “You can’t fight City Hall.” as the expression goes. Eventually, you will see a new shopping center built up here and these people’s homes will be a parking lot, with a security guard to keep them out. The systems of control will crush them. The Church is not advocating, nor am I, that the area remain a slum. The real question becomes whether or not development can be done in such a way that honors the dignity of the human person and whether the persons will lower their defenses long enough to trust a system that has disregarded them so often in the past. This kind of work requires change in the methods that the government uses to encourage development. It requires change on the part of the people, to contribute to their own development against the crushing weight of society. A society that believes they will never do anything good.
I returned to these neighborhoods in the evening and watched as these small base communities gathered in street corners to say the rosary, and process the streets with crosses. To see this Google Earth pictorial, click here. Each small base community assigned stopping places in their community, illuminated with candles, and prayed the Stations of the Cross. It was a pungent contradiction to see the stations in which Jesus falls, juxtaposed with the background of men and women who have fallen to the bottom of society, who are being mocked, beaten, and evicted by the present day authorities. It made the stations acutely tangible. I saw neighborhood after neighborhood, gathering their children around them, lighting a candle, and praying in the streets.
And what about after the Station? Do we ever get to resurrection? Sure! This grotto of the poor, erected in the shelter of the city’s most forgotten, erupts with joy when the night has fallen. Karaoke blares as the children run under my feet. The men give me high fives and laugh. I am welcome. There is no pretense, nor inflated sense of importance by anyone here. If the people were reminded of how depressed the area was, they might go crazy. So they don’t. Instead they celebrate the fact that society hasn’t crushed them yet, and even if it does, they are still alive. They are still ALIVE.
Three things in my life will change because of today. I will always be able agree with someone when they tell me Jesus is black (because he is… at least in the Philippines). I will never again see the Stations of the Cross as merely a set of words, but an active retelling of the persecution that is happening today to the marginalized of society. And I will never hear the following song again, and think that the only way we destroy paradise is by tearing down forests and prairie glades, for truly, though I walked through a slum this evening, I saw a glimpse of the paradise that awaits us all. Big Yellow Taxi They paved paradiseAnd put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot