EDITORIAL - Symptoms of a bigger problem

The music festival scheduled to be held on Black Saturday in the municipality of Sante Fe is, more than the controversy it generated, a huge eye-opener about failures in leadership where it matters the most. The rift it has caused between Santa Fe mayor Jose Esgana and Santa Fe parish priest Fr. Roy Bucag is a manifestation of such failure.

In the entire Christian world, Black Saturday is not supposed to be a time for merriment, and anyone who thinks it is either has not fully grasped its meaning or may have done so initially but has lost the meaning somewhere along the way. How and why the meaning got lost is something that, instead of being cause for finger-pointing, should be reason for serious reflection.

To hold a music festival on a Black Saturday is something new. Perhaps it is a safe guess to say that even just thinking about it, say five or ten years ago, would have been something that bordered on sacrilege. It was something the elder generations say would cause the heavens to part and let strike a huge thunderbolt on sinners of the earth.

But times have apparently changed. And along with them came changes in attitudes and beliefs. That a music festival is actually being scheduled on a Black Saturday is proof of those changes. And yet it is neither exactly correct nor fair to look at Mayor Esgana with dagger eyes and not realize his role in this hullabaloo is just circumstantial at best. It could have been any other mayor who could have thought similarly.

In other words, it is the times that have provided the right conditions for people to foster such previously unheard of thoughts as making merry on a Black Saturday. The better question to ask then is not why Esgana thinks the way he does but what drove him into thinking thus. And the answer to that, sadly, is that you see it all around you – the breaking down of institutions.

If nothing is sacred anymore, then we have to ask why. Leading a protest rally against Esgana by Fr. Bucag not only does not provide the answer, it actually leads away from it. More than Mayor Esgana, it is Fr. Bucag who needs to find the answer to why things have come to this? He can even ask help from the bishops. But maybe they are too busy politicking they failed to see the tiny cracks have grown into giant chasms.