Revenge Visita Iglesia

As in pre-pandemic times, Metro Manila looked like a ghost town on Maundy Thursday with the exodus of people going on revenge vacation out of town. I thought it would be better (and safer from the crowds and possible COVID infection) for my mother to go on her traditional Visita Iglesia in Metro Manila.

It turned out that a lot of other people thought the same. It seemed like even people from outside the National Capital Region decided to do their church visits and mark the Way of the Cross in the NCR. Every church we visited was packed – a post-COVID revenge Visita Iglesia.

At the Padre Pio Shrine in Libis, Quezon City, the line of cars crawling along to enter was so long we decided to visit instead the Padre Pio Parish in Parañaque later in the day. From Libis we proceeded to the Parish of the Holy Sacrifice at the University of the Philippines in Diliman.

Before this we made a brief stop at the nearby Balara Filters Park – a site I have never visited. It’s a 60-hectare area with rolling terrain at the heart of Metro Manila that deserves to be restored; the NCR has so few green spaces and this one must be preserved.

The filtration plant was built in 1938 by the Metropolitan Water District, the predecessor of the National Waterworks and Sewerage System and now the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System. The MWSS turned over the area to Manila Water when NCR water distribution was privatized in the 1990s. Surely the company can revive the park. Or it can work with UP, which runs a hotel on campus near the church, to operate the park as a public recreation area.

In 1953 the park, with a rest house and three large swimming pools, was opened to the public. Near the pool is a spacious pavilion whose roof with Southeast Asian motif was designed by National Artist Francisco Mañosa. When we dropped by, the pools were empty, and people were swimming in a nearby creek.

The complex still has art deco buildings that can be restored, plus a windmill and a replica of the Carriedo Fountain circa 1882 in front of the Sta. Cruz Church at Plaza Lacson in Manila. The replica is a creation of National Artist Napoleon Abueva.

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From UP, we proceeded to Christ the King because my mother wanted to visit the church from where her Sunday noon mass is live-streamed. The place was packed.

Next stop was the Shrine of Espiritu Santo in Sta. Cruz, Manila, where there were fewer cars but still a lot of people. My parochial school, which I haven’t visited in ages, looked much smaller, but I guess this is common when kids become adults.

Having seen the Carriedo Fountain replica, I decided to see the original, and visit the Sta. Cruz Church where my parents got married. The altar is exactly as I remember it from my youth when women and girls still wore veils when attending mass.

From there we proceeded to the Binondo Church, the National Shrine of Lorenzo Ruiz, where the crowd was so huge entry and exit had to be managed, and even the surrounding streets were packed.

Devotees seemed to be walking from the Quiapo Church to the Sta. Cruz Church and through Ongpin to the Lorenzo Ruiz shrine. Eng Bee Tin’s Gerry Chua must have sponsored the Holy Week service beside the church, providing free bottled water and free blood pressure check-up to devotees; the volunteers were all wearing his signature color, ube purple.

The guys directing traffic and parking also wore purple, and did not accept any payment from motorists for their work. This is a standout service compared to the P50 that a woman grumpily demanded from us, without a receipt, at Plaza Lacson.

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For greed during Holy Week, the dubious honor goes to the parking attendants around San Agustin Church in Intramuros. They closed off several streets around the church, but let in motorists who were willing to fork out P100 for a parking slot. That’s P25 higher than the entrance fee to Fort Santiago. When we protested that the parking rate was only P50 around nearby Manila Cathedral, they said P40 would go to the barangay, so why should the parking attendants get only P10?

Intramuros on Maundy Thursday was absolute traffic chaos – a perfect example of failure of governance. I wouldn’t have minded the highway robbery to park for my Visita Iglesia if someone at least made an effort to manage traffic. Considering that it’s such a tiny area, traffic management wouldn’t have required rocket science.

Where were the personnel of the barangay, the Intramuros Administration plus city hall? Maybe everyone was on vacation. Everyone simply wanted to collect money from motorists, with no receipts issued, and who cares about maintaining order in the streets?

The crowds in Intramuros were massive, spilling over into the park in front of the Manila Cathedral and into the surrounding streets. After visiting the cathedral where a mass was being celebrated, we gave up trying to reach San Agustin Church and instead proceeded to the Paco Park and Cemetery, where there were fewer people because the chapel was closed. But the park was enchanting at dusk, and there were people marking the Way of the Cross within the cemetery walls.

The challenge for the Church is to sustain this level of in-person religious observance beyond the Holy Week.