Fr. Alberto: Shepherd to a Stubborn Flock
Fr. Alberto looked at me quizzically when he opened the door, but he quickly invited me in. Small, grey-haired, and kindly-faced, his eyes still sparkled with a youthful energy behind his spectacles. We were in a mountain village in Ifugao province on Luzon Island; his presbytery brushed shoulders with a small church and a hospital.
Being an outsider who did not speak the local dialect, he admitted to having problems communicating with his flock. However, he pointed out that his curate spoke the local language. He oversaw ten thousand Catholics out of a total of twenty-four thousand in his parish.
“Of course, some of them are dead already,” he said, leaning back in his chair with an infectious laugh. I didn’t pursue the puzzling remark. “But then again,” he continued, “others are born: new babies, new baptisms, you know.”
I asked if it was difficult to steer them away from their ancestral customs.
“Yes, very much so,” he stressed. “The people are primitive. They have many strange beliefs.” He laughed, noting they were animists who believed in spirits. “Of course, we should not condemn them for that—maybe we were all animists at one time.”
At this point, Fr. Alberto’s curate, Fr. Francis, passed the open study door. Alberto beckoned him in. Fr. Francis looked to be in his early twenties, handsome and possessed of a serious, older soul.
“You know, they have these sacrifices,” Fr. Alberto continued. “They kill chickens, pigs, even caribou. It’s difficult to stop.”
Fr. Francis pursed his lips. “You must realize these people are tied to the agricultural cycle. When they plant the rice, they sacrifice to the Rice Goddess. At harvest, they have ceremonies to give thanks.”
“But that’s to keep away the rats, too,” Fr. Alberto interrupted with an aside.
“What we do,” Fr. Alberto explained, “is try to Christianize these practices, not stop them. We try to spiritualize them—to lift them above the pagan. I don’t always see eye to eye with the bishop on this.” His face became serious. “There’s often a lot in what they do; some of them have power. If you have a skin problem, there’s a man who blows on it and it heals. I told the bishop we can’t be too hard on them.”
Persuading the elders to be baptized remained a challenge. Sometimes a dying person would send for him, but often they performed their own rites. Fr. Alberto explained that the Ifugao have a traditional baptism called Huldung, performed when a child is seven. A medium blows a mixture of betel nut and tobacco onto the child’s forehead and names them after an ancestor. The Church’s influence was visible in the village children’s names—José, Maria, Francis—though most carried a traditional second name.
Marriage presented another hurdle. “If there are no children, the man puts the woman away,” Fr. Alberto said wistfully. “Divorce is easy. Some women have been married many times, but if they have no children, it’s no good.” Even church weddings weren’t immune to this cultural law.
“We are trying to teach them about adoption,” Fr. Francis added, though Fr. Alberto admitted it was hard to spark interest in children who weren’t blood relations. In a traditional marriage rite, the shaman prays that the couple “survive and multiply.” Fr. Francis looked optimistic that adoption could fill that gap; Fr. Alberto looked pessimistic.
The conversation turned to burial customs. “Strange things they do,” Fr. Alberto said, back in high spirits. “They mummify the bodies in smoke. They keep them a long time—up to twenty days if they are rich. They kill animals to eat every day the body is kept. It is very expensive.” He admitted, a bit embarrassed, that he had never actually attended a native burial.
“Of course, headhunting is a thing of the past?” I suggested.
Fr. Alberto erupted in laughter, gesturing toward Fr. Francis. “Ask him! He ran away, you know. He ran away!”
Fr. Francis spoke enigmatically. “It was the uncle of my cousin. He was killed.”
“They made him sit in the circle,” Fr. Alberto giggled.
Fr. Francis retook the story. “He was killed, so my family had to revenge him. That was the duty of the men.”
“He was only fifteen,” Fr. Alberto expostulated. “They make all the men of the family sit in a circle, then they cut the head off a chicken. It jumps around, and whoever it stops in front of must carry out the revenge. He must take the head of the other man. The chicken stopped in front of Francis—but he ran away.”
“My two brothers were also in the circle,” Fr. Francis added softly.
I asked if the killer had been punished. Fr. Francis noted the man was in jail, but added, “It makes no difference to the revenge of the family. They still must take revenge on him or his kin.” His voice was quiet, devoid of remorse or anger. “There will be a head for a head.”
“He ran away to a convent that time,” Fr. Alberto explained. “And now he’s a priest. Our hope is with the young people. They go away to the lowlands; they don’t want the old ways anymore.” He leaned forward, though I couldn’t tell if he viewed this modern disobedience as a good or bad omen.
I thanked him and wandered back, balancing on the narrow mud-walls of the terraced paddy fields. I felt like the two priests: balancing between two worlds. In the village, army patrols were heading out to protect road-building machinery from angry locals. The road, bringing modern ideas from the lowlands, was meeting stiff resistance in the heart of the mountains of Luzon.