Tag Archives: wooden crosses

Philippine Catholics lash themselves in penance ahead of Easter

Filipino penitents bearing crosses on their backs lie on the street as they perform a ritual on Maundy Thursday in Mabalacat City, Pampanga province, Philippines, April 18, 2019. REUTERS/Eloisa Lopez

PAMPANGA (Reuters) – Dozens of barefoot penitents in the Philippines whipped themselves and carried large wooden crosses in sweltering heat on Thursday as they participated in a ritual ahead of Easter in Asia’s biggest Catholic nation.

Some of the men, wearing red robes with their faces covered and hands tied to the crosses, walked for hours along a highway in the northern province of Pampanga, about 88 km (55 miles) north of Manila, the capital.

Others were half-naked, using bamboo flails to hit their backs, which had been nicked with blades before the ritual. The groups stopped to pray at several places along their route, while women recited religious verses.

“It is difficult yet rewarding,” said sixteen-year-old Job Christian Ong, the youngest in his group of devotees, adding that he believed himself cleansed of sin after the event.

He volunteered this year to continue a family tradition, he said, taking over from an older brother who is now abroad.

The Easter penance aims to secure forgiveness for sins, cures for illness, or blessings.

“We always pray for strength, (good) health for our families, and thank God for blessings,” said Roger Aquino, a 59-year-old village official who was among the penitents.

“People should understand that what we do is a tradition (and they) should respect it.”

Re-enactments of the sufferings of Christ are a tradition in the Southeast Asian nation ahead of Easter, though the Catholic Church has always expressed disapproval of what it calls misinterpretations of faith.

(Reporting by Peter Blaza; Writing by Enrico Dela Cruz; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

Crosses in Arizona desert mark where ‘American dream ended’ for migrants

Artist Alvaro Enciso makes a cross to commemorate the death of a migrants at his home in Tucson, Pima County, Arizona, U.S. September 9, 2018. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

By Jane Ross

SONORAN DESERT, Ariz. (Reuters) – The brightly-colored crosses that Alvaro Enciso plants in the unforgiving hard sand of Arizona’s Sonoran desert mark what he calls ‘the end of an American dream’ – the places where a migrant died after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

The bodies of nearly 3,000 migrants have been recovered in southern Arizona since 2000, according to the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner. Aid group Humane Borders, which sets up water stations along migrant trails, said that may be only a fraction of the total death toll, with most bodies never recovered.

Humane Borders, in partnership with the medical examiner’s office, publishes a searchable online map, which marks with a red dot the exact location where each migrant body was found.

It was that map and its swarms of red dots that inspired Enciso, a 73-year-old artist and self-described ‘reluctant activist,’ to start his project.

“I saw this map with thousands of red dots on it, just one on top of the other,” he told Reuters at his workshop in Tucson in September. “I want to go where those red dots (are). You know, the place where a tragedy took place. And be there and feel that place where the end of an American dream happened to someone,” he said.

The red dots of the map are represented by a circle of red metal Enciso nails to each cross, which he makes in his workshop. He decorates the crosses with small pieces of objects left behind by migrants, which he collects on his trips to the desert.

With temperatures topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius), Alvaro and his two assistants, Ron Kovatch and Frank Sagona, hauled two large wooden crosses, a shovel, jugs of water and a bucket of concrete powder through the scrubby desert south of Arizona’s Interstate 8, weaving through clumps of mesquite trees and saguaro cacti.

They used a portable GPS device to navigate to a featureless patch of rocky ground – the place where the remains of 40 year-old Jose Apolinar Garcia Salvador were found on Sept. 14, 2006, his birthplace and cause of death never recorded.

They planted another cross for a second person who was never identified, one of 1,100 recovered from Arizona’s deserts since 2000 whose names are unknown.

Enciso, who left Colombia in the 1960s to attend college in the United States, considers the crosses part art project and part social commentary. He would like to see an end to migrant deaths in the desert and a change in U.S. immigration laws.

“We cannot continue to be a land, a country that was created on the idea that we accept everybody here. We have broken the number one rule of what America is all about,” he said.

(Reporting by Jane Ross, Editing by Bill Tarrant and Rosalba O’Brien)