EDITORIAL - Vidal put down indecency in the 1980s

In the early to mid-1980s, Cebu City was seized by a massive explosion of sexuality. Downtown moviehouses were showing sex movies that ranged from bold films to outright smut. Bars had strip shows that frequently featured imports -bold starlets from Manila who apparently felt more bold on stage than behind the cameras. Eventually, these bars went for the ultimate show, the live performance of the "real thing."

These live performances of real unadulterated sex boasted of an uncanny feature -the performers were locals, pickup girls probably hired from some brothel by the bar owners, and the same male waiters that after the show would go back to serving everybody's drinks, their knees still wobbly from the experience. Cebu City was earning, behind its back, the unsavory reputation of being the "sex capital" of the south.

Into this picture entered the new archbishop of Cebu, Ricardo Cardinal Vidal, who promptly decided to wage an unrelenting war against the lustful world he had inherited. At first Vidal waged his war from the pulpit, and in issuances to the media. But naturally soft-spoken and not given to strong words, it became apparent that his was a losing battle unless he changed his form of attack.

And so Vidal tested a different tack. He became more pro-active and organized rallies against sexually explicit forms of entertainment. But his most innovative and eventually most successful approach was to have different church-based groups hold pickets at the entrances of movie theatres showing lewd films. The presence of these church-based groups hovering at the ticket counters proved too much for prospective moviegoers.

Eventually, no one would watch these movies anymore. And when it became clear that Vidal was serious in his campaign, the police and the local government soon realized they do not want to be caught in the wrong side of the church campaign. A crackdown on strip shows followed and pretty soon ordinances were approved that banned smut on screen.

Whether the crackdown resulted in a real transformation of attitudes among Cebuanos toward sex is difficult to claim. But the ensuing absence of indecent shows in public held, not only for the duration of Vidal's term as archbishop, but well into the present day. This is one of the more concrete manifestations of what the late cardinal has done for Cebu and the Cebuanos, real acts that went beyond just mere words.