[REFLECTION] Idols of our time

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Once again, we are witnesses to what has been always labeled as a “phenomenon,” – this time seeing the death of a faded superstar being mourned, not just by that horde of loyal fans collectively known as “Noranians,” but virtually by a whole nation.  The glittering roster of celebrities, the showbiz colleagues, even the high and mighty of officialdom showed up, and so did the ordinary, nameless and now ageing fans who always trooped to the box office whenever Nora Aunor starred in a movie. 

 The wave of grief swept even those of us who mostly observed from the sidelines the career of this diminutive and dark-skinned girl who used to sell water in a train station in Iriga. 

Then within hardly a week, Pope Francis, spiritual leader of 1.3 billion Catholics in the world, finally rested in peace day after Easter, when he appeared for the last time in St. Peter’s Square. He called for peace in Gaza and the Ukraine, and once again spoke for the vulnerable and marginalized, particularly migrants:

“On this day, I would like all of us to hope anew and to revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands, bringing unfamiliar customs, ways of life and ideas! For all of us are children of God!”

What was it about these idols of our time that especially touches us, such that we mourn as if some vital part of our hard-bitten lives had been torn off and left us with a missing limb? 

Nora Aunor is celebrated not only as ‘the only superstar,’ with hordes of adoring fans,  but more so as an artist, starting out as an amateur singer to become, by sheer talent and intuitive artistry, National Artist. But perhaps she moves us much more as a human being, phenomenally rising from a poor and hardscrabble life and never ever forgetting where she has come from, a beacon of hope to those who seek to rise from the squalor and hopelessness of what looks like a never-ending poverty. From her colleagues and friends we hear story after story of her generosity, always giving until there is no more to give. 

Pope Francis similarly struck a chord among those who live in the “underside of history” as Latin Americans put it. Raised to the gilded throne of the papacy, he deliberately eschewed its opulence and pomp and lived as simply as he could within the confines of the ritualized demands of his office.

As head of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, he restored in some measure the trust of the faithful in an institution whose clergy have figured now and again in scandals. The hierarchy has been slow to discipline and defrock priests discovered to be pedophiles. Likewise, the church in recent history has been rocked by mysterious events that have put to question the provenance of its immense financial resources. 

With great empathy, he demonstrated sensitivity to the issues of our time. In ‘Laudato Si,’ his second encyclical issued in 2015, he called on the nations whose greed and untrammeled capitalism have caused environmental degradation to pay their ‘ecological debt.’  In 2020, he   issued his third encyclical, ‘Fratelli Tutti’, addressing the fragility of the global system and called for a politics of justice as a form of ‘fraternal love.’

He was an advocate of fraternal relations among the churches and other religions. In  2016 he and Kirill I, patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, held a first-ever meeting as heads of the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches. In 2019 he became the first Pope ever to visit the Arabian Peninsula, and met with the Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb, the head of Cairo’s Al-Azhar Mosque and one of the highest authorities on Sunni Islam. 

It was on issues touching the personal moral norms of Christians that the Pope stirred much controversy and surfaced the complexity of shepherding sheep raised in the traditional tenets of the church and those inculturated into secular liberalism.   

“If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” he was quoted as saying in his first papal news conference. In an interview by an Italian Jesuit magazine in 2013 he criticized the church for having been “obsessed” with issues such as homosexuality, abortion, and birth control.

This remark was taken as possibly a sign of a major shift in Catholic teaching on matters such as same-sex marriage and contraception. In the following year, however, he spoke out against same-sex marriage, defended the “traditional” family, and affirmed the church’s  opposition to abortion. 

Both liberals and traditionalists in the church criticized the ambiguity of the Pope’s stance on sexual and gender issues. He spoke sympathetically of women’s rights, and recently  appointed Sister Simona Brambilla, an Italian nun, as prefect of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, the first time in history that a woman was selected to lead a department of the Roman Curia. Yet he did not endorse the ordination of women as priests.

While the ordination of openly gay men to the priesthood was provisionally allowed, subject to the requirement of chastity, the Pope was twice accused of homophobic slur in privately referring to the high number of gay men in seminaries.

The ambiguity can perhaps be accounted to his being head of a church whose centuries of traditional teaching needs to be defended against the onslaught of moral relativism, while seeking relevance and cogency in an age of post-truth and constructed media myths. Quite early, he described his vision of what the Catholic church must be:  

“I see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle.”

Pope Francis gave a warm, human face to an institution that for so long has been viewed as distant, silent in the face of injustice and inured to human pain.  

Such nearness, the importance of proximity, Nora Aunor understood as a person. She was, to both fans and friends, madaling lapitan, ina ng laging saklolo. She was a complex, quite flawed human being, not exactly altogether a saint. There were rumors of drug dependency, broken relationships, unprofessional work habits that eventually led to the paucity of movie offers. She was, in her later years, dismissed as “laos na,” a dead star whose light has gone out.  And yet, as a grieving fan still believes, “Ate Guy, ikaw ang himala.”

The Pope likewise had behind him a history of alleged capitulation, if not complicity, with the perpetrators of the Dirty War in Argentina. 

Nevertheless, both lived incandescent lives that gave us intimations of another world, as if some bright star had made a touchdown, showing us that even a flickering light from beyond the borders of our knowing can light up the darkness that now surrounds us.   – Rappler.com

Melba Padilla Maggay is a social anthropologist and president of Culture Creatives and the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture (ISACC).