The r eason Kapampangans have pasyon,puni and magdarame is the failure of the Catholic Church, through the Spanish missionaries, to bring God closer to our ancestors. They brought Christianity to Pampanga 450 years ago, but what they really brought was just the rituals and trappings of the religion, not the good news that would have given the early Kapampangans the full experience of what really means to be a Christian.

For 300 years, our ancestors were forbidden to own or read the Bible and the Spaniards never printed or translated it. Only those who were fluent in Spanish or Latin could understand the Word of God. The first translation of any part of the Scriptures into a local language happened only in 1887 (less than 10 years before the Revolution) when the Gospel of Luke was translated into Pangasinense. What our Kapampangan ancestors did was to put together the bits and pieces they heard during the Mass and made their own folk version of the Bible as they recalled it and as they understood it. And that’s how the pasyon started.

And because the pasyon was not the official Word of God, and therefore banned from churches and chapels, our ancestors built their own makeshift churches and chapels made of

it bamboos and palm leaves. And that’s how the puni started.

And because the missionaries threatened our sinning ancestors with the wrath of God and terrorized them with sermons about the fires of hell, our ancestors sidestepped the sacrament of confession and tortured themselves— literally imitating the suffering Christ— to earn forgiveness from God. And that’s how

the magdarame started.

Today some priests have continued to ignore, belittle or suppress these Lenten practices of the common folk, not realizing that it was the inadequacies of the Catholic Church in colonial times that had created these “an om al i es.”

Instead of banning the pasyon, the Church should reach out to the practitioners and evangelize them. Instead of urging the faithful to skip the puni and go straight to the church, our priests should deepen the Lenten experience of their parishioners, beyond the excessive and expensive pageantry of the Maundy Thursday expositions and the Good Friday processions. And instead of closing the door on flagellants and penitents, the Church should embrace and convince them about God’s love and forgiveness and like Christ, tell them “Go and sin no more.”