Owning the Church of the Poor

Msgr. Adolfo Depra used to speak of the Church of Balete as truly the Church of the Poor. He made that remark sometime in the 1990s, after celebrating the High Mass during the Feast of St. Rafael the Archangel, which had been rescheduled to October 23 instead of the traditional October 24.

In those days, the roles of the local Church and the civil government in the fiesta were clearly defined. The Church was not trying to take over what did not belong to her. She was simply claiming what was rightly hers.

The fiesta was a religious event. As such, the Church strove to manifest the truth of Christian life in every facet of its celebration: in the preparation, in the celebration itself—from Day 1 of the novena to its culmination—and even in the evaluation afterward. The fiesta was meant to be a witnessing to the ideals of our brotherhood in Christ Jesus; never merely a festal gathering of frenzy and wild abandon.

Perhaps this was what it meant to be a Church of the Poor: not simply to stand with the poor, but to protect what was sacred to them, even when doing so meant confronting the habits and interests that had gradually taken possession of the fiesta.

To claim the fiesta was therefore not to claim power over the people. It was to reclaim a meaning that belonged to the people in the first place.

And perhaps this is where the Church had to be both pastoral and prophetic. Pastoral, because it knew the people and their lived realities; prophetic, because it could not simply bless whatever had become customary. It had to ask whether our customs still bore witness to what we professed to believe.

The question was never: Who owns the fiesta?

The deeper question was: What has the fiesta become—and what does it say about us?

For a Church of the Poor, that question could not be avoided.