FREEMAN employees will take a much-needed Christmas break today and tomorrow to be with their families and loved ones, so there will be no issue of the paper tomorrow, December 25, and on the following day, December 26. Publication resumes on Monday, December 27.
So allow us to take this opportunity now to greet everyone, our readers and advertisers, as well as all Cebuanos for whom The FREEMAN has served for more than 90 years, a very merry Christmas. May peace and love reign in our hearts long enough to make us better persons to all.
But even as we give of ourselves by way of this greeting, we do so with a little sadness at the way the sanctity of certain things we hold dear and close to our hearts is being assailed by either willful provocation or licentious ignorance. The movie is called “Father Jejemon.”
Specifically, we refer to a movie by the usually wholesome Dolphy in which he plays a priest who, during Communion, ineptly drops the Host onto the cleavage of a woman, and drives yet another Host into the dentures of an elderly citizen.
Why the movie found it appropriate to use the Communion and the Host as vehicles to provoke laughter is incomprehensible, insensitive, provocative, and downright stupid. Such scenes must be deleted by the producers or they could face a storm of protest.
At the City Council of Cebu, councilor Edgardo Labella has filed a resolution calling for such a deletion of the offensive scenes, with the warning that the city may ban the showing of the move in Cebu City if such scenes are not deleted.
All Cebuanos should support the move. They, more than they may realize, have a very high stake in protecting the Christian values that are their heritage. Cebu was where the first seeds of Christianity in the Orient were sown. Cebuanos were the first Christians in the Philippines.
Blood would have spilled had such a blasphemous scene been about some other religion. But Christians have loving and forgiving hearts, more so Cebuanos who are warm and friendly. So all we might ask is for the deletion of such offensive and insensitive scenes.
But if the producers insist on something as ephemeral as artistic license, then the City of Cebu, exercising its authority, and Cebuanos their better judgment, can very well act against the movie in ways that can make those behind it sorry that they tried to spoil our Christmas.