THE DOWNTOWN streets of the City of San Fernando were filled with solemnity, beauty, and elegance as the capital city staged the annual Flores De Mayo on May 18 in line with the celebration of Pyestang Fernandino 2019.
Flores de Mayo, a Catholic tradition of giving honor to the Blessed Virgin Mary through flower offering, was successfully carried out as the candidates of this year’s Mutya at Lakan ning San Fernando participated by wearing Filipiniana gowns and “barong tagalog.”
Also, the candidates for this year’s Little Miss Fernandina and selected senior citizens from different villages in the city joined the said activity.
Meanwhile, Binibining Pilipinas Globe 2018 Michelle Gumabao, graced this year’s Flores De Mayo as the Reyna de las Flores or Queen of Flowers…
SO WAS captioned a series of photos from the city information office that found publication in a number of print and online outlets here, Punto! online included.
I searched through the cache of pictures but found none with but the minutest image of the Blessed Virgin, the very reason for the sacred celebration.
Absent the Virgin, if only in image, the solemnity, aye, the sanctity inhering in these religious rites readily devolve to sheer spectacle of worldly beauty.
It was over ten years ago that I was struck with this reduction, okay, secularization of the Flores de Mayo to a virtual showcase of fashion and display of beauty. Thoroughly “deVirginized,” in fact, and therefore losing whatever spiritually meritorious, and assuming everything meretricious.
So, who can still remember the essential Flores de Mayo that children of my generation took in all solemnity, in all the innocence of age, of grace?
Recall how…
Catechetical instructions started right after Labor Day. The first lessons: the sign of the cross and its meaning, the mystery of the One True God in Three Persons.
(Always the caveat: The Holy Trinity is a mystery of faith one cannot question. Not even the great Doctor of the Church, St. Augustine, unraveled it. Once Augustine was by the seashore wracking his brains over the mystery. He chanced upon a child cupping water with his hands and pouring it to a hole on the beach. What are you doing? Augustine asked. Transferring the water of the sea to this hole, the child replied. That’s impossible, Augustine was supposed to have remarked. More impossible is to find human explanation to what you are thinking about, the child retorted.)
Three weeks after – through the Our Father- Hail Mary-Glory Be, the Apostles’ Creed and the mysteries of the Holy Rosary, Salve Regina and the Angelus, the Mass, the Ten Commandments, sins – cardinal, mortal, and venial, and the Act of Contrition – came one’s first trip to the curtained box by the entrance of the church to pass the penitential rite.
The day that followed – always a Sunday – in immaculate white, down to the shoes, one skipped breakfast in order to prepare one’s body for the entry of the mystical Body of Christ on his first holy communion.
But not before one, along with all the other first communicants, lined up, flower in hand, singing Indung Alang Musing (Immaculate Mother) to take his turn at offering the blooms – of yellow zinnias and red gumamelas, fragrant white camia and pink roses, suntans in assorted hues and even the violet flowers of banaba – by the foot of an image of the Virgin Mary. (As indeed the catechism lessons always concluded with the same floral offerings, but on a lesser scale.)
No way that sanctified Flores de Mayo can ever get even the slightest resemblance to the Flores de Mayo as malpracticed now.
The impropriety turned outrageous with the decolletaged Binibining Pilipinas Miss Globe as Reina de las Flores with the cartoonized SpongeBob and Patrick Star as escorts.
Already outrageous, further abutting on the sacrilegious with that very account of “… Catholic tradition of giving honor to the Blessed Virgin Mary through flower offering, was successfully carried out as the candidates of this year’s Mutya at Lakan ning San Fernando participated by wearing Filipiniana gowns and “barong tagalog.”
The fulfillment of the sacred rites achieved by the mere “participation” of native-garbed beauty pageant candidates! What branch of theology, even but as mere academic discipline, can rationalize such depravity?
Reaffirmed now a thesis I postulated the first time, in 2008, that I took to task this perversion of this festival for the Mary month of May:
…FLORES DE Mayo (has come to be) … a part of a cultural heritage…Not of our Catholic and Spanish heritage though, but way earlier in the march of time. The way it is celebrated today, Flores de Mayo goes back to the pre-Christian era, way, way back to mythical Olympus itself and the worship of its pantheon of gods, in this wise, Bacchus and Aphrodite. Our sagalas taking after the vestal virgins, their couturiers after the eunuchs at the temples and palaces.
And as if these were not enough a desecration of the religious essence of the ceremony, there now are Flores de Mayo celebrations by, for, and of the gay community. One even sported the very funny and punned Flawless de Mayo. Which tortured the Philippine Catholic hierarchy no end.
Neither homophobe nor homophile am I, but a line’s got to be drawn between the unrestrained expression of rights and the disparagement of faith.
Or maybe, I am just a medieval monk lost in contemporary times. Call Grand Inquisitor Torquemada! Save Mother Church! Burn all heretics at the stake!
Good God, what has become of us.
