Hard questions about Nazareno 2025

FILE PHOTO (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)

To arrive at a consensus – mostly on security matters and the prevention of untoward incidents involving millions of persons – the national and local government representatives, police and church leaders spend dozens of hours in meetings before January 9 of every year.

Over 6 million devotees from far and wide flocked to this religious event in 2024.

The annual feast of the Black Nazarene, the kissing (pahalik) of the sacred image, and the traditional traslacion, appear to be interconnected cultural and religious events that are taken very seriously by Filipinos. The yearly show of devotion to Jesus carrying the cross captures the density of our cultural and religious mindset as a people.

Pope Francis himself is supportive of popular devotion. I remember the Holy Father telling the participants of the Mediterranean Congress on Popular Religiosity in France that popular piety communicates “the Christian faith and the cultural values of a given people, uniting hearts and building community” (Ajaccio, 15 December 2024).

The secular world watches with amazement how a mammoth crowd of million Filipinos from all walks of life join the penitential procession of the statue of the Black Nazarene.

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For many global citizens, the procession is such a spectacular yearly event that benefits both the Church and the Philippine tourism: the Church, because it is an occasion of the Filipino display of intense faith, and the tourism industry, because it attracts international interest and visitors from everywhere.

Popular religiosity and the Filipino mass display of intense faith

Inside the minor basilica of Quiapo, there is an endless flow of worshippers. While others come to tell our Poong Nazareno both their dreams and their problems, some are there to give back to God the immense blessings they have received.

When elsewhere in the four corners of the globe, religious practices are abandoned—and what visitors notice are empty pews and empty altars in huge cathedrals and churches in the West even on Sundays—the minor basilica of Quiapo that is dedicated to the Poong Nazareno explodes, as it were, with warm bodies and is flooded with high spirits.

The whole House of God is jam-packed and alive with hourly celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. And most remarkably, there are long queues for confessions—the Sacrament that Catholics believe washes away personal sins by the Precious Blood of the Savior. On the first days of January of every year, more priests make themselves available for this encounter with God.

On January 9, devotees come barefoot to continue a personal or a family covenant with God called panata. They appear to believe that the greater the pain they endure, the more fruitful is the panata. Global commentators and observers repeat year after year: “What a spiritual force to behold!”

Now a national religious-liturgical festival

Nazareno 2025 is special. Bishop-elect of Bataan and Quiapo rector Fr. Jun Sescon said that January 9, 2025, marks a national event that is to be observed in all dioceses across the country. We recall that the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines approved in 2023 a proposal that January 9, the Feast of the Black Nazarene, be declared a national feast.

The Filipino devotion to the Black Nazarene has a long history. This special devotion was once encouraged by Pope Innocent X, who issued a papal bull establishing the Confradia de Jesus Nazareno in 1650. In 1880, Pope Pius VII granted plenary indulgence to people who piously venerated the image of the Black Nazarene.

Speaking at the same Mediterranean Congress in France, the Holy Father said that “popular piety reveals God’s presence in the living flesh of history, strengthens the relationship with the Church and often becomes an occasion for encounter, cultural exchange, and celebration.” Pope Francis is supportive of popular devotion, definitely, but he also says there’s a caveat. He asks for discernment, new evangelization, and formation of conscience.

Q.Q.Q.Q. Is it a failure of religion?

The fact that over 6 million devotees join each year is indeed awesome. But after four centuries of the annual traslacion, accompanied by endless meetings and long homilies about Christian living and the imitation of Christ, the “quintessential question of quality over quantity,” or Q.Q.Q.Q., remains.

I cite Randy David, who writes, “We need to ask ourselves how we are able to blend so much religious fervor with a culture of corruption, or mix a manifest devotion to the exemplary figure of a selfless Christ with a life of greed, or Gospel values with hate, oppression, and selfishness” (Philippine Daily Inquirer, January 09, 2014).

After 500 YOC (years of Christianity) of being a “noble Church,” in the words of Pope Francis, that “stands among the great Catholic nations in the entire world,” after 500 years of Catholic education and catechesis, after 500 years of endless processions accompanied by shouting hala bira or Dios te salve, Maria, accompanied by millions of candles burned, we often hear it asked: Quo vadis, where are you going, Catholic Philippines?

Did our moral leaders fail to overhaul a morally broken system? Did they fail to empower the laity and fail to harness the awesome collective force of millions of Filipinos making panata on January 9 into an awesome power to gradually build a more God-fearing, decent, and prosperous society?

Archbishop Legaspi himself was questioning during the Second Plenary Council of the Philippine (PCP II) in 1991: “After almost five centuries of Christianization, why are the majority of our brothers and sisters still living in conditions of poverty?”

Was one beloved archbishop correct when, after reading the signs of the times, he declared in 2013: “It is the failure of religion to make morality and ethics the foundation of all human actions and endeavors, after almost five hundred years of Gospel presence?”

Is this closely related to the CBCP’s acknowledgment of their prophetic failure when our bishops admitted in 2019, “We have not been effective enough in our catechesis about the Faith?”

Quo vadis, Catholic Philippines?

José Mario Bautista Maximiano is the lead convenor of the Love Our Pope Movement (LOPM) and author of the book “Church Reforms 3: The Synodal Legacy of Pope Francis” (Claretian, 2025). “Church Reforms 1” and “Church Reforms 2” are available in Lazada and Shopee. Email: [email protected]