FOR YOUR Semana Santa reading list, you may, perhaps, wish to add the paperback “Good Friday People” (Orbis, 1991).
“I coined [this title] for those who find themselves called to powerlessness and suffering,” writes Dr. Shiela Cassidy. A hospice director in England today, she was tortured by the Chilean military for treating wounded rebels.
The two thieves crucified alongside Christ do not appear in Cassidy’s book. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” one of them gasped. With a 4-year-old’s simplicity, our granddaughter prays that plea.
“There’s only one instance, in all four gospels, where someone calls Jesus by his given name,” author Ronald Rolheiser notes. “Maybe it is because at his death, he is most like us. Stripped, beaten, betrayed, he hangs among thieves.”
Doesn’t “the church look exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion, God hung among thieves?” the Oblate priest asks. To be a church member “is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and finest heroism.”
Nor does Cassidy mention Judas’ shabby greed. “What will you give me if I turn him over to you?” Judas haggled for 30 pieces of silver, now a universal symbol of cupidity.
“Greed is a tree that grows in arid soils,” an Ilocano axiom says. (Inquirer, 4/9/09) We see that from the coconut levy extortions to “Jose Velarde’s” spook accounts. And Newsweek’s feature “11 Greediest Persons of All Time” includes two women: Empress Dowager Cixi and Imelda Marcos.
In a starving China, Cixi dined with golden chopsticks at 150-course dinners. Imelda went on “$5-million shopping sprees, owned the Roumeloites gems and, all right, 1,060 pairs of shoes.”
Mid-April, the anti-graft court gave Imelda 30 days to return P12 million that dictator Ferdinand Marcos drew from the National Food Authority in 1983 and stashed into their private accounts. “Where will I get that amount?” Imelda wailed to the Telegraph.
Instead, Cassidy writes about “men and women, broken in body and assaulted in mind. [They’re] deprived not merely of things we take for granted,” she adds. “God calls them to walk the same road His Son trod.”
Among those called to powerlessness are victims of state violence and families and those gravely ill.
“Unable to wait for cancer-stricken Beth to die, her man went off with another woman. Day after day, Catherine expected visitors who never came: not her mother, nor her loves, not even her child.” Catherine’s tumor has spread, Cassidy notes. She has few symptoms now. But radiation only buys time. “I only want whatever is best for my daughter,” Catherine weeps.
Jesuit priest Rutilo Grande, in El Salvador, insisted seminarians live among slum dwellers and landless peasants. “However much one may know about poverty and oppression, at an intellectual level, meeting the poor themselves is something quite other.”
With Archbishop Oscar Romero, Grande helped the poor “rediscover the Old Testament concept of God as liberator of his oppressed people.” The poor showed what they required of their church. “Not just the catechism and sacraments but something much harder: to speak out against injustice.” Military goons murdered both.
Powerless men of peace here were likewise killed. Abu Sayyaf tortured, then murdered, Claretian Fr. Rhoel Gallardo in Basilan and Fr. Reynaldo Jesus Roda of the Oblates in Tawi-Tawi. Kalinga gunmen sauntered away after firing at Society of Divine Word Fr. Franciskus Madhu of Indonesia as he vested for Mass.
“There is rare beauty in selflessness,” Cassidy writes. “Some go to their deaths grasping everything. These are people who’ll call you from another patient’s deathbed to adjust their television.”
These outlaws resembled esquadrones de la muerte of PMA 1972 graduates, led by their barons, or Ampatuan police torturers who became generals and those who “salvaged” elected senators, notes the Yale study: “Closer Than Brothers.”
On Good Friday, the cry: “My God, My God. Why have you abandoned Me?” resonates. Don’t expect embattled TV5’s Willie Revillame to ask vulnerable Filipina mothers of the “disappeared” what that wail means. Erlinda Cadapan, Concepcion Empeño and Edita Burgos still scour morgues, hospitals, prisons looking for their children.
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo didn’t extend to families of desaparecidos even the balm of pinpointed graves. Military camps block their search with denials, despite the new writ of amparo.
Filipino communists stonewall families searching for victims of their pogroms, from “Ahos” to “Cadena de Amor.” Mass murder sowed chaos in the party even as executioners morphed into buttoned-down executives in Makati firms.
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel captures this absence of God in his book “Night.” At Auschwitz, 14-year-old Wiesel and other Holocaust prisoners watched the Gestapo execute a child.
“‘Where is God?’ someone behind me asked,” Wiesel recalls. And I heard a voice within me, answer: “Here He is, hanging on this gallow.”
“We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear,” Catholic philosopher François Mauriac writes in his foreword to Wiesel’s book. “All is grace. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word, for each one of us, belongs to Him. This is what I should have told this Jewish child,” Mauriac adds. “But I could only embrace him weeping.”
Indeed, “we are all potentially Good Friday people: frail earthen vessels who, should the potter choose, could be fashioned for his own mysterious purposes.” Cassidy adds, “And we tremble. Because we, too, may be called to powerlessness.”
(Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com)