My own Christmas

CEBU, Philippines –  Soon it will be Christmas day!  The Christian world will celebrate this coming Thursday the birth anniversary of the God-man, our Lord Jesus Christ, which took place inside the not-so-well lighted and a quite quiet cave of Bethlehem, the smallest town in Judea, because “there was no place in the inn for them (Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary).”

What a different atmosphere we now have on Christmas day: lights, sounds of firecrackers and other instruments to produce sounds or music, parties and merrymaking almost everywhere!  And yet that Babe of Bethlehem was born poor, lived poor, died poor, and His constant sermon was “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven!”

In connection with this joyous season, I came across among my files a letter from a former parishioner in Ocaña, Carcar (this was not yet a city when I was the parish priest of that barangay, in 1977-79). Allow me to share it here:

December, 1979

Dear Fads,

We miss you this Christmas because we do like you. The reason why we like you is the same reason, I think, why you left the ministerial priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church and got married: YOU WANTED TO BE TRUE TO YOURSELF AND TO OTHERS.

While you were serving as our parish priest, we were aware of your romantic relationship with the woman you married, “kay wala may aso nga makumkom.”  It is good that you finally realized the injustice of your situation:  toward God to Whom you promised celibacy in the ministerial priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church; toward us your parishioners who look up to you as an exemplar of good moral conduct; toward the woman whom you should treat as a person and not as a means of satisfying your libido; toward yourself who were surely suffering from such a double life that you were leading before marrying her.

And you could not in conscience afford to preach love and justice, at least not effectively, when all the while your state was an injustice on those four counts.  Some parishioners advised you not to leave the lucrative ministerial priesthood on the ground that there is a lack of priests.  Others remarked that anyway the “kabit-querida system” is the usual practice nowadays.  You dismissed those suggestions by the thought that nobody, except God, is indispensable in this world and that the “kabit-querida system” is not made right by the number of people practicing it, even if some of them are clerics or priests.

Paradoxically and for all we know, Fads, now that you are married, you have more the spirit of the priesthood than when you were hypocritically functioning as a priest with all your double life. Have you realized that you now have the spirit of Christmas? By becoming a child at Christmas, God emptied Himself and became man in order to save mankind.  By getting married, you emptied yourself of the ministerial priesthood in order to do justice to God , to the priesthood, to the people, to the woman you married and to yourself.

So even now that you are suspended from the active ministry of the Roman Catholic priesthood by your getting married, you should be happy at Christmas and all the years to come. All this in spite of the fact that you do miss us because you also like and love us.

Holy Christmas and Happy New Year to you and to your dear ones!

Your Parishioner