This corner received an unexpected e-mail last week from Anne Griffin, who works closely with the Pontifical Committee on International Eucharistic Congress (IEC). Griffin and Vatican executive Fr. Vittore Buchardi are set to visit Cebu next month to meet with local organizers, presumably to see how provisions and arrangements for the Catholic global gathering set to happen 18 months from now are going.
As we are all aware, the 51st IEC is slated to be held in Cebu on Jan. 24 to 30, 2016. In September last year, Archbishop Piero Marini, President of the Pontifical Committee on IEC together with Fr. Buchardi and Griffin visited our city to confer with the Cebu Archdiocese on possible venues for the congress.
Archbishop Jose Palma had presented the Cebu International Convention Center and a still to be built facility nearby. Vatican officials did not like the idea of spreading 10,000 delegates to multiple venues so plans to construct a “Eucharistic City” near Park Mall was offered and it looked like a feasible idea at the time.
The Vatican officials were apparently satisfied with the initial 2016 IEC blueprint except that nobody factored in the tragic events in October and November last year. Bohol and Cebu were rocked by a massive 7.2-magnitude earthquake in Oct. 15 and less than three weeks later, supertyphoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan), the strongest tropical cyclone ever recorded in history, devastated the Visayas and, as they say, the rest, including original plans for the 2016 IEC became history.
What a difference two huge disasters make.
Last Feb. 15, the Cebu Archdiocese broke ground for the IEC Pavilion in an area inside the Seminario Mayor de San Carlos in Mabolo, Cebu City. The 10,000-square meter lot will be transformed into a so-called Eucharistic Village where conferences, workshops, catechisms and Eucharistic celebrations will be held. The tab for the Eucharistic Village is estimated to reach P380 million. The main IEC venue is expected to be finished in October next year barring unforeseen calamities.
By the way, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference Philippines (CBCP) has urged the faithful to recite the oratio imperata for deliverance from calamities and I think the obligatory prayer also suits the intentions of the Church for the 2016 IEC. Our Vatican visitors, Fr. Buchardi and Griffin will certainly hear plenty of positive developments in so far as ground preparations for the IEC are concerned but another thing that the Vatican will be very pleased to know about are developments in the local Church.
There is an emerging phenomenon happening in the Church in the Philippines, in Cebu in particular, one that contradicts what Pope Francis called the “exodus” of Roman Catholics to Protestant churches and other denominations.
I gathered this from Nonito “Tatay Dodong” Limchua, leader of the Oasis of Love lay charismatic community in Cebu. Tatay Dodong who has been spreading the good news together with lay volunteers for the past 19 years, told me that more than 120 Protestant pastors have converted to the Catholic faith through the Oasis of Love Community since last year. Mostly coming from Mindanao, these Protestant teachers and heads of their local churches found a virtual oasis in the community after a lot of soul searching, according to Tatay Dodong.
If the figures merely represented ordinary members of the Protestant church, I don’t think it will matter a lot because conversions happen every day. Many people do so for a number of reasons. But more than a hundred Protestant pastors converting to the Catholic faith is very significant and dramatic because they were schooled, subsidized and immersed in the Protestant church throughout their adult life. In fact, when I heard the news from Tatay Dodong, I couldn’t help but think about Scott Hahn, a former Presbyterian minister and professor of a major Protestant seminary who had converted to the Catholic faith and is now an internationally-known apologist for the Catholic Church.
I joined the Oasis of Love seminar last week and I heard former Protestant pastor named Sonny Hagos share his journey from a fervent Protestant pastor to a committed member of the Catholic renewal movement. It was a moving and powerful story, one which I will write about in another article.
Charismatic communities like the Oasis of Love target mostly nominal Catholics who go to church only for baptism, weddings and funerals. The crisis of faith is at the heart of the problem of the Church, not only in the Philippines, but also in the west. Even Pope Francis openly admitted this during last year’s World Youth Day in Brazil where he referred to the “hemorrhaging of the Church” in many countries.
“The Church has been losing members throughout the world to secularism and to other religions,” according to Francis who acknowledged that many people see the Catholic Church as a “relic of the past, and too caught up in itself and a prisoner of its own rigid formulas.”
I guess he was also referring to the Philippines, which, although still a bastion of the Church in East Asia, has likewise lost significant numbers to other religions over the past decades. Fifty years ago, 92.5 percent of the population belonged to the Catholic Church. The numbers still remain significant but according to statistics, the figures have fallen to about 80 percent.
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