The vicar of San Isidro

Chapter 1

“Bless me father for I have sinned…..”

The priest heard a soft voice that was barely audible out from the left side of the confessional box that early Friday morning, the voice of a woman. She was saying she did not pray the rosary or visited the church as much as she used to, and that she even missed one Sunday mass because one of her children got sick and she had to take care of her.

A puzzled Fr. Ric Escario listened impatiently and was about to tell her to enumerate something more serious than her so-called ‘sins’ but he held himself back. He thought she probably wanted to say something else but couldn’t find the words to say it.  In any event, he had to end her recital as soon as possible. The line at the confessional that Friday morning was unusually long as it was nearing the Holy Week, and his undue tolerance of this woman would only further cause the queue to grow longer.

“For you penance, pray three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys. I absolve you of your sin, in the name…” Making the benediction, he whispered the absolution, then abruptly closed the shutters on his left side as he slid the one on the right open.

An old woman’s voice croaked as she recited her own list of ‘sins,’ the same ‘sins’ she recited the week before. She said she had cursed her maid at home and scolded her more than was necessary, and later regretted she did it. She was a familiar fixture, an old church cantora who believed in keeping herself pure for the afterlife. Fr. Ric was starting to conclude that older folk, the women especially, wanted to be in that state of grace as much as possible. After all, death could come sooner and it was good to be prepared. Many of San Isdro’s older folk were like that cantora who committed excesses on their unfortunate underlings, but afterwards regretted their acts and brought them to the confessional week after week.

Deborah Enriquez wondered why Fr. Ric suddenly closed the shutters after he hurriedly absolved her. She went back to her seat in the mid section of the church, kneeling as she said the Our Fathers and Hail Marys that were given as her penance. Was he turned off by her ‘sins’?

It was not the first time that he heard her confession, and he probably sensed it. Her last confession sounded like the previous one, but he could not have remembered. Or did he? she wondered.  She wanted to tell the priest about her worsening relationship with her husband who was working in Dubai. The last time he came home in June, they had clashed and had a cooling off period after that. She started to hate him because of his stubborn refusal to admit that their oldest boy was suffering from a melancholic depression caused by his absence. The confessional was probably not the venue for that. But where? She had to talk to the priest in person outside the confessional.

Fr. Escario could not remember the succeeding confessions that morning as he hurried up for the Holy Mass at 6:00 o’clock. Like all confessions he had heard before, they tended to be repetitive, rehashed, scripted, Didn’t all confessions sound that way? After six years of hearing similar confessions, the act had become routine. He didn’t expect to hear anything unusual. He heard them all and, in the name of God, had given them absolute pardon. Go in peace. God has forgiven you. As easy as that. Did God really give priests the authority to forgive sins? He often wondered. Why couldn’t sinners confess directly to God? His doubts lingered. Inside the confessional box, his doubts only magnified.

He did not finish the long line. They would have to return in the afternoon when he and his co-parish priest, Fr. Santi Toledo would be hearing them. He hurriedly left the confessional near one of the side altars in the 18th century church, going to the sacristy to put on his vestments for the mass.

He could sense a large portion of the gathering crowd looking at him. He seemed to look more than his 30 years because of his thick spectacles and balding forehead. Unlike his fellow priest, he did not have dashing looks as he seemed more like a university professor who was going to his lecture. So sometimes he wondered what people were looking at. Certainly, he was not handsome or good looking, he told himself. Years ago at the seminary, it was his classmates who enjoyed the attention of visiting collegialas. Not one of them gave him a second look, he remembered that.

Did they find him strange? Perhaps because he rarely ventured out or socialized in the small San Isidro poblacion. He politely turned down invitations to birthdays, preferring to read his novels, his most treasured possessions. He was a voracious reader, that he would admit. People probably thought he was a snob but he could not carry on a conversation, unlike the younger Fr. Santi Toledo who had plenty of stories to tell and had lots of jokes that he flipped out of nowhere. The guy was a fantastic conversationalist. That’s why they loved to invite him. But not Fr. Ric. Not the pensive and almost brooding Fr. Ric who rarely smiled.

Fr. Ric felt his obligations to the church ended inside its thick walls. Outside, he had his own life to live. He heard confessions, said his masses, shared his homilies and administered other sacraments. After six years of priesthood, these were getting to be routine, unexciting. He felt that his priesthood was going nowhere.

Fr. Santi took care of visiting the villages that ringed around  San Isidro, said masses on birthdays at private residences. A task that seemed to suit his outgoing personality perfectly. He seemed to like what he did. Socializing was the guy’s forte.

The mass that Friday morning took no unexpected turns. After six years, the liturgy was indelibly etched in Fr. Ric’s memory. But it was during the homily that the routine somehow stopped, and the liturgy became more interesting. He noticed people’s faces lighted up when he shared his thoughts. He was a good speaker when he wanted to, especially when he prepared his outline. The words flowed almost effortlessly, the logic simplified because that was what people understood. Nothing complicated in them except for the mysteries of his faith which he or Fr. Santi could not explain. Fr. Ric thought that was what made the church so attractive – its mysteries. Could anyone explain the mystery of the Holy Trinity? Or even the virgin birth?

Fr. Ric avoided those issues and focused on more worldly concerns because those were things that people understood. And he felt people listened to him because of that. This morning he talked about sin in its material meanings: sins against one’s neighbors, the sin of corruption, the sins of deceit and selfishness, the sins of omissions, sins of greed. He had plenty of examples for each of them, and these were not the sins he heard inside the confessional. These were things that people heard spoken about in radios and television.

His parishioners, Fr. Ric saw, were still under the spell of the older generation of priests who spoke in abstractions and spirituality and lived in the limbo of Church mysteries that left a lot of questions unanswered. That’s why his parishioners found him quite strange. He could sense some resistance to his homilies, especially from older members of the congregation. Maybe a few of them even frowned, he thought. He had different ideas of priesthood which did not conform to what they used to hear a few years ago, and it showed in his short homilies. His ideas did not conform to the traditional ways the Gospel was interpreted. Among several priests of the diocese, he seemed to be the odd one. He often wondered how long he could stay this way.

The line at communion time was just as long as that at the confessional earlier. They were mostly old women and a few younger ones. A lot of the faces were familiar. They were the usual churchgoers, and some of them members of the church organizations that held meetings in the convent on weekends. Many of them belonged to San Isidro’s  moneyed class who frequented the church in the hope of establishing closer ties to God, mused Fr. Ric. He often wondered what really transpired in their heads. When he saw them, he was always reminded of an insurance agent who tried to insure the convent against fire. Here, they seemed to be insuring themselves against the fires of hell.

Deborah did not receive the Holy Communion that morning. She felt she was not clean enough. She had lots of ‘sins’ to confess that were left out, and it troubled her. No, she stayed at her seat and instead wrote a note.

“The mass is ended, go in peace…” Fr. Ric intoned, relieved that the morning ritual was over. In his childhood, it was “Ite misa est.” He used to be his uncle’s altar boy, and in those times, the mass was in Latin. He missed them, missed the mysterious words that baffled him then. Today, it was in English and sometimes even in the vernacular. It seemed to have lost that air of mystery that clothed the Catholic faith.

Fr. Ric’s  altar boy Erin, a nine-year old son of his older sister Eva, walked ahead in their brief march to the old sacristy behind the altar and helped him take off his vestments. Erin Lucero was a fast learner, and made very few mistakes in his first few days in San Isidro 10 months ago. The way he was behaving, he seemed destined for the seminary. If he did, he would be the ninth in the Escario family. Fr. Ric was only the second priest of the Escarios, despite the fact that eight Escario cousins went through the institution. Except for Fr. Ric and his uncle before him, the rest had become ex-seminarians. He doubted if it was God’s will if they did not become priests. Something snapped when they were inside the seminary. He had witnessed a number of his classmates who were candidates for the priesthood but who suddenly turned away in the last few months before their ordination. That could not have been God’s will, he told himself. That was the usual convenient explanation. 

“Uncle Ric, here’s letter brought by a woman in a white blouse and black pants,” Erin said, handing a small white envelope with the words “To Fr. Escario” written by hand. Evidently, it was written while the mass was going on. They did not notice her come and go as both of them were engrossed in their own thoughts.

The priest tore it open, surprised to receive a letter from one of his parishioners.

“Fr. Escario, 

Can I see you this afternoon? Will you be free at 3:00 o’clock?”

Sincerely,

Deborah Enriquez”

The penmanship belonged to a woman. The one at the confessional? He wondered. Apparently, the matter was that important because why make an appointment that very afternoon? Yes, he would be free at 3:00 but only for a few minutes because he and Fr. Santi were resuming the confessions at 3:30. More people usually came for the afternoon confessions, free as they were from household chores.

What could the woman want to talk about?