Mother of God

“If we fight against the RH bill, we will make Mama Mary happy,” says Cebu Archbishop Jose Palma. Palma is the incoming head of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, and tomorrow, Sept. 8, is the birthday of the Blessed Mother.

Palma may not know it, but he has just produced one of the richest ironies of late.

Who was Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ?

Today she is depicted, like Christ himself, as white Anglo-Saxon. Occasionally, you see a more Pinoy version of the Madonna and Child in paintings, that of a brown-skinned and gusgusin mother and child (ah, but artists have always been the boy who can see through the emperor’s new clothes). And occasionally you see belens that have the same brown-skinned, if not gusgusin, version of the Madonna and Child. But so only occasionally. What you generally see in churches is a Mary clad in white, grasping a rosary with hands that have never seen a day’s work.

In fact, Mary could pass off as one of the women in the urban poor communities today, the wife of a karpintero, who struggled to make ends meet. She represents the Filipino woman in far more ways than the Catholic Church has been able to fathom.

She was, first of all, as the very term “Mama Mary” signifies, a mother. As it is, “Mama Mary” already invests Mary with a rich or middle-class provenance. The wife of a karpintero is not called “Mama” by her brood, she is called “Inay.”

Of course, the Catholic Church refers to her as the Virgin Mary, but you have to take the virginity as a matter of faith. Whether God, or the Holy Spirit, had a hand in her pregnancy I leave to belief, but it is inconceivable that Joseph and Mary did not have normal physical relations before and after the birth of Christ. As far as I know, the instructions of the angel who came to visit Mary did not include a ban on sex, or stipulated that she marry Joseph to keep up a front. The marriage was for real.

Not quite incidentally, Mary was the mother of a single child. The faithful will say that was because God caused Mary—or Joseph—to be barren afterward. Or that God ordered Mary to be chaste, which would not only have given Joseph a fate worse than Job but would have been considered un-virtuous then (as now at least as prescribed by the Church) since wives were expected to submit obediently to the attentions of their husbands.

The faithless, or downright sacrilegious, will say that was because they practiced family planning.

Whatever. Less debatably, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was dirt-poor. She was so dirt-poor the inns closed their doors on her and her husband amid the wintry winds—the same way today’s rundown hotels in Quiapo would probably close their doors amid a storm to a couple fleeing a war zone in the province, the woman heavy with child—and she had to give birth to a son in a pen reserved for animals. We do not know how she raised her child in her desperate straits, but we know, or are told, that her son even in childhood showed signs of tremendous precociousness though being himself, as his father was, a karpintero.

Only in the end for Mary to see the same son arrested by the authorities for being a troublemaker. Only in the end for Mary to see their friends, their neighbors, and their entire community rise against him. Only in the end for Mary to see him nailed to the cross like a common criminal. Maybe Mary had the profoundest of faith and was convinced her son, though of her loins was not of this world, but she was a mother, too. And what mother would not have wept at the sight of her son’s agony? And what mother would not have wished things had been different and her son had met with another fate?

Which brings me to: Why should a proposal for the poor to breed children beyond their ability to raise them make Mary happy? You can always argue the opposite.

Her example at least must suggest that she would rather that parents gave their children a crack at a decent life. That is not possible in a huge family which, in the urban slums in particular, dooms many of the girls to a life of prostitution and the boys to a life of crime. Not everyone, if at all, among the mga anak ng karpintero can show signs of precociousness and go on to become leaders of men—leaders of gangs are more like it. No mother would like to see her son shot to death in a gangland war or in a heist. In this case, the monumental anguish cannot even be assuaged by the thought that the slain son will soon find his way into the bosom of his Father.

More than that, Mary’s devotion to her son must suggest that she would rather that mothers fretted more about the born than about the “unborn.” I put “unborn” in quotation marks because that is really a wrong way to put it. Contraception is not abortion, where you can argue for an “unborn child.” Unless you want to propose that couples never express their love for each other intimately unless they are willing to risk having another mouth to feed, even if they are not prepared to feed it. That is not pro-life, that is anti-life. That is not embracing life, that is scorning it.

That ultimately is what makes the bishops’ position against the RH bill a most astonishing thing, their ability to be passionate about non-existent children and scornful of existent ones. What does it mean to ask for an SUV during one’s own birthday? It means grabbing the food that should go to the mouths of hungry street kids, seizing the medicine that should go to the bodies of infants afflicted with dengue, putting on hold the classroom that should go to enlighten the benighted. If the bishops would just show a little more concern for the living, Mama Mary would have all the birthday gifts she could wish for. Right now, the spectacle they show just makes you want to expostulate, “Madre de Dios!”

Or in plainspeak, “Mother of God!”