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CATHOLIC parishes that allow cross-dressing
homosexuals to play female saints in the Santacruzan or Santa Cruz
de Mayo procession do not honor but instead insult the Blessed
Virgin Mary and will be punished, Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales,
Archbishop of Manila, warned on Monday.
The punishment is the removal of
the faculty for Holy Masses in those parishes.
In the Catholic Church, the month
of May is devoted to Mary, who is revered as the Mother of God since
her son Jesus is God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Pious
Catholics go on pilgrimages to shrines dedicated to the Blessed
Virgin Mary.
Parishes organize the Santacruzan
or Santa Cruz de Mayo procession. It is actually a novena (nine days
of devotion) during which the participants pray and sing the holy
rosary. When sung, the words of the Hail Mary prayer are in Spanish
(“Dios te salve, Maria …”), which shows that the Santacruzan
novena harks back to Spanish times.
As with everything in the
Philippines, the show business and beauty pageant culture invaded
the Santacruzan. The May procession originally involved life-size
images of saints—the Blessed Virgin, Queen Helena, the mother of
Roman Emperor Constantine, who stopped the persecution of Christians
and favored Catholicism over the original pagan religions of Italy
and other female saints of early Christianity.
Then the processions started to
feature reigning beauty queens as Queen Helena. The runners-up take
the roles of the other saints. All wear tiaras and glittering gowns.
Before long, consumer-goods
companies sponsored citywide and televised Santacruzan processions.
Movie stars now play the role of Saint Helena (who is credited with
finding the original cross of Calvary) and their leading men as
consorts. This was never in the original Church novena.
Then, with the emergence of
empowered gay groups, some neighborhoods—independently of the
local Catholic parish priest and parish council—held their own
Santacruzan processions with cross-dressing gays as the saints.
Soon enough, some parishes
assumed the highly successful homosexual-organized processions as
their own.
This is what Cardinal Rosales
condemned in the Monday radio interview on Catholic Church-owned and
operated Radio Veritas.
“We should keep sacred what is
sacred,” Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales said as he attacked parishes
for allowing male homosexuals to play Saint Helena and other female
saints in the Santacruzan procession.
“The procession is religious.
[But] what the [parishes] do is organize it as a parade of
homosexual cross-dressers. That’s an insult to the Blessed Mother.
Ay, naku po, nakakapanghilakbot! [Oh, mother of mine, it’s
hair-raising]” the Cardinal said.
Rosales added that he had taken
the leaders of one parish to task for having gay cross-dressers
participate in these processions.
“I told them that’s not right
because it’s a sacred procession. You are destroying the purity of
the devotion,” he said.
Rosales announced that the Church
will ban the holding of Masses at any parish that disregards the
warning.
He clarified that he was not
discriminating against homosexuals but only wanted “to preserve
the solemnity of the processions that are meant to honor the Mother
of God.”
--AFP And Anthony Vargas
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