MANILA, 19 April 2003 — A call by church leaders on members of the Catholic faith to avoid gory rituals appeared to have fallen on deaf ears as thousands of Filipinos yesterday flocked to places known for bizarre events.
Topping the list of gory sites was San Pedro Cutud, a farming village in the northern province of Pampanga, where 13 people volunteered to be nailed on wooden crosses in a re-enactment of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ by the Jews about 2,000 years ago.
This year’s volunteers in Cutud, three of the women, had their palms and feet nailed as a form of penance for sins, to pray for a sick relative or to fulfill a vow.
Dozens of men, with faces shrouded by scarves, formed a procession along a dusty road leading to the hill, followed by crowds of children and oglers. Stripped to their waists, the men cut their bare backs with broken bottles attached to a piece of wood and let more blood ooze by beating their backs with woven bamboo whips.
The Lenten ritual, which is opposed by religious leaders in the Philippines — Southeast Asia’s largest predominantly Roman Catholic nation — attracts droves of foreign and local tourists to the farming town of San Pedro Cutud, 70 kilometers (45 miles) north of the capital.
American missionary Cecil Sullivan from Illinois said the practice was against Christian principles and “is a proof that you can be very sincere but be sincerely wrong.”
Filipino Catholic priest Victor Nicdao said he sympathizes and wants to understand the devotees, who are mostly from very poor families, as they may have created their own rituals because they felt alienated from the church.
“This group is not what would be called church people. The very church building is alienating, the way it is constructed. Even the liturgy is something they don’t relate to,” he added.
Bishop Hernando Coronel, secretary-general of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), said Filipinos should avoid such gory rituals and instead observe the Holy Week by going to mass.
While many of the devotees are known to believe in what they were doing, some go to Cutud apparently for other purposes.
In 1996, a Japanese man who said he was seeking divine intervention to cure his cancer-stricken young brother had himself nailed to the cross. But it was later found out his friends who had filmed the act used it as a clip for an extreme porn movie in Japan. (With Inputs from Associated Press and Reuters)
