The Translation of Christ from Theology to Politics
The West has much to learn from the Filipino Feast of the Black Nazarene
What follows is a reflection on religious and political meaning of the concept of translation. It is argued that translation of Israel in the new language of Christianity is the Church. But the West must return to the mystery of the ecclesia dolens, following the example of the Filipinos.
On 9 January every year millions of Filipinos take to the streets to participate in the Traslación, a procession which signifies the passage or transfer of the icon of the Black Nazarene.
The procession commemorates the transfer of the statue on 9 January 1787 from a church in Luneta Park to St John the Baptist Church, popularly known as Quiapo Church.
The statue was introduced to the Asian archipelago by the Spanish conquistadors in 1606. The sculpture which depicts a dark-skinned Christ carrying the Cross to Calvary was made by an unknown Mexican artist and introduced to the islands by an Augustinian priest. It is said to have miraculously survived a fire on the ship on the way to the islands. Filipinos claim the statue has been the source of many miracles.
Interestingly, St John the Baptist is completely effaced by the devotion to Christ in the procession of the Black Nazarene. In John 3.30 John the Baptist says, “He must become greater; I must become less.” That is unquestionably the case in the Philippines: John the Baptist church becomes a vehicle for the adoration of Christ.
To be in christo man must purge himself of all egotism. He must die spiritually to be reborn again in Christ. In the Feast of the Black Nazarene a deep theological precept is itself carried out, translated as it were, into the cultural domaine.
The Augustinian Recollects were the key religious order in the evangelisation of the Philippines. They emerged from the discalced movement within the Augustinian order initiated by Thomas of Andrada (Thomas of Jesus) in the 16th century. It would become a separate ‘province’ of the Augustinian order, emphasising a strict observance of the Augustinian Rule. Poverty and community life were at the heart of the Augustinian Recollects. Friars were to play an active role in the physical as well as spiritual construction of society.
The Augustinian Recollects played an indispensable role in building the Filipino nation, with significant contributions to industry and education.
St Nicholas of Tolentino was the first Augustinian to be made a saint. Patron saint of the Holy Souls in Purgatory and of children, the Augustinian Recollects in the Philippines had a special devotion to him. Hence from Thomas of Jesus to St Nicholas of Tolentino there is a common theme of the suffering Christ, the suffering church and the suffering souls of men. In his book Os Trabalhos de Jesus, the Sufferings of Jesus, Thomas of Jesus repeatedly talks about how Christ blessed the wicked who were incessantly trying to ensnare him. The blessing of the wicked?
Ecclesia dolens
St Nicholas of Tolentino is the patron saint of the Holy Souls in Purgatory. The Church has three divisions— ecclesia militans, the church militant, ecclesia poenitentes or dolens, the penitent or suffering church and ecclesia triumphans, or the triumphant church. These divisions correspond to Christs on earth, in purgatory and in heaven respectively. The widespread devotion to St Nicholas of Tolentino in the Philippines attests to the link catholics there have to the Suffering Church.
Although the feast of the Black Nazarene sometimes draws millions of participants, making it the most important event of the year and— arguably the most spectacular Catholic procession in the world— there is little of no attention shown in the West.
Most people in Europe and America have probably never heard of the Black Nazarene. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the Philippines is not an ‘important’ place, being as it is a poor Asian Third World country.
But there are cogent reasons to take an interest in this religious procession. For it has much to teach us, not so much about the Philippines, but rather about the moral and cultural conditions necessary for any viable multicultural society.
The Three powers of God
The Black Nazarene is often referred to as Nuestro Senor Jesus Nazareno de las Tres Potencias, Our Lord Jesus of Nazareth of the three powers.
The crown of thorns on the head of the Black Nazarene has three protrusions which represent the three powers of God. These distinctions come from the three main words used in the Greek New Testament for power. Exousia refers to God’s intangible, and positional authority. Dunamis signifies God’s tangible power of redemption and healing, while kratos God’s strength.
The paradox of God’s weakness revealing his divinity, his blackness revealing his sanctity, holds a lesson for our time. If in this era the Church is indeed going through a spiritual and mystical Passion, then it is fitting that it should in a sense horrify us.
Yet contemplation of the three powers of God should console by reminding us of God’s infinite wisdom and omnipotence.
Fiducia Supplicans and the Black Nazarene
The Vatican’s recent publication of Fiducia Supplicans which reaffirms the traditional Catholic teaching on marriage has caused controversy due its teaching that sinners can be blessed. It does not condone gay marriage, nor does it condone the blessing of same-sex unions. It simply says priests can bless homosexual couples.
The document is, of course, full of the usual ambiguity that has come to characterise many post-Vatican II encyclicals. And it will most certainly be used by sodomite priests to bless sodomite couples. The document should have reminded the faithful that sodomy is one of the four peccata clamantia, screaming sins, sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance!
If the Cardinal Fernandez had intended to educate his flock, he might have done a little sociology and explained how the other three screaming sins of homicide, defrauding workers and oppression of the poor are all related to sodomy. The Churche’s teaching on sodomy is not too dissimilar to that of Marx and Engels who referred to it as bourgeois decadence. Sodomy, murder and unbridled capitalism are all part of the same social disease. But that is not what we have come to expect from Fernandez.
That said, the document does not seem to contradict the magisterium of the Church. However, judging from some of his private publications, Cardinal Fernandez, Prefect for the Dicastery of the Faith, appears to be an evil pervert.
But the Church has always had evil elements in powerful places. Yet it perdures. Thinking about the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ in terms of the current crisis, one might say again that the Church is undergoing a mystical Passion. If that is indeed the case, then Christ should appear as sin or rather, as a sin-offering. In 2 Corinthians 5:21 St Paul says, ‘For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’
Paul does not mean that Christ became sin itself. God cannot become the opposite of himself. Rather, Christ made himself into a sin-offering to atone for our sins. In the ancient Hebrew religion, sin offerings were mostly burnt offerings. Thus, they would have had a blackened appearance.
Thinking again about the idea of a Black Nazarene, one might pose the question, Is the Black Nazarene not the image of the Church in our time? The mystical body of Christ, blackened and fallen from the weight of our sins?
But look at the Filipinos Catholics! The procession often begins at 5 am and can last for up to 22 hours. This year’s procession was the shortest ever, but still lasted for 14 hours. Many of the faithful accompany the icon barefoot. Perhaps there is a lesson here to be learned about what one might term in quasi-Marxist terms as Catholic praxis.
Cultural anthropologist Nestor Castro says “the majority of Filipinos are poor Filipinos. And they can identify with the sufferings of Jesus Christ because they too suffer on a daily basis. So, we need to understand that in the Philippines the suffering Christ is more popular than the risen Christ. We don’t have many celebrations about the risen Christ because many Filipinos feels that we’re not there yet. We’re still in the age of suffering.”
The faithful know that Church teaching cannot change. Fiducia Supplicans actually reaffirms the traditional teaching on marriage. But it introduces sufficient ambiguity so as to be interpreted by perverts as advocating the blessing of same-sex unions. The Church blesses sinners all the time but it does not and cannot bless sin. The distinction between sin and sinners is important here.
The devotion to the Black Nazarene might be a useful food for thought. If the suffering Christ was blackened by sin as he trudged to Golgotha, so must the Church be in its Passion. Yet, the Church is not sin. The Church has taken on the sin of the world and is partly unrecognisable. There is much debate about the origin of the colour of the Black Nazarene. The traditional view is that it was saved from a fire. Another view is that votive candles caused the dark hue. Current received opinion says that the statue was carved from mesquin wood. Yet, it is the miraculous interpretation which has invested this story with so much power.
Liturgy of the poor in spirit
The liturgy of the Feast of the Black Nazarene commences with Numbers 21:4-9, which is taken from the Bronze serpent story. I will recount the story in full here in order to place it in our contemporary religious and political context. As the Israelites are crossing the desert, some of them are taken captive by a Canaanite king.
The Israelites make a covenant with God saying, ‘ If you will indeed give this people into our hands, then we will utterly destroy their towns.’ The Lord consented and the place was renamed Hormah, Place of Destruction. Allegorically, the Canaanites represent sin which must be utterly destroyed. So, there is a political context here of a conquering people who make a pact with God to destroy another people in exchange for liberating hostages. Sound familiar? We can no doubt assume Rabbis in Israel today quoting such passages as justification for their barbarian genocide in Gaza — a new Hormah.
The Israelites through the grace of the God had destroyed sin (Canaanites) and the works of sin, (towns of Canaan) God had promised his people great rewards for his devotion. As the Old Testament is a typology of the New Testament, Augustine tells us that ‘ In the Old Testament the New is concealed and in the New the Old is revealed.’ The Zionists have never understood this statement. Instead, blinded by pride, they see only themselves and not Christ in the Old Testament, and use it ruthlessly to enslave and murder their neighbours.
Spaniards of the 16th and 17th century were also given great rewards for their devotion to Christ. Thus mass conversions followed the relatively easy conquest of the Asian archipelago. But greed weakened the empire and destruction followed. After the conquest of Canaan the Israelites began to complain about the misery of their material conditions. So God sent serpents to bite them. In the book of Genesis the Serpent represents Satan. ‘The people came to Moses and said, “ We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” As Moses is a type of Christ, we should think of the Church when they say “speaking against you.’’ What lessons are there to be learned from this today?
Then God orders Moses to make a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. ‘So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.’ This is a prefiguration of the Crucifixion. It is in a sense, Christ ‘becoming sin’.
The responsorial psalm is taken from psalm 78.32-38, where God punishes the Israelites again for their wickedness.
‘When he killed them, they sought for him; they repented and sought God earnestly. They remembered that God was their rock, the Most High God their redeemer. But they flattered him with their mouths; they lied to him with their tongues. Their heart was not steadfast toward him; they were not true to his covenant. Yet he, being compassionate, forgave their iniquity, and did not destroy them; often he restrained his anger, and did not stir up his wrath.’
The second reading is taken from St Paul’s letter to the Philippians.
‘who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.’ Philippians 2: 6-11
The final reading of the Black Nazarene liturgy is taken from the gospel of John:
‘No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.’ John 3: 13-17
The different meanings of ‘translation’
There are a few things to consider here. One is the notion of transfer or translation itself. The Feast of the Black Nazarene is not just a transfer or ‘solemn translation’ of an icon of Christ, it is also a translation and transfer of Spain’s golden Catholic age in Asia. The ruling class in Philippines are more influenced by the Judaeo-protestant ideology of greed and individualism introduced by US imperialism than the working class. The only thing that remains of Imperial Spain is that which allowed it to thrive in the first place —faith.
Catholic Philippines is proud of its Spanish heritage. It is not attempting to cancel or erase the beautiful churches and municipal edifices constructed by the Spanish. The nation still bears the name of its great patron King Philip II of Spain. The archipelago was largely conquered and evangelised by New Spain, present day Mexico.
And over half of the 500 Spanish colonisers were mestizos and native Americans. When the conquistador Lopez de Legazpi set sail in search of the Spice islands on 20 November 1654, he named his four ships the St Paul, St Peter, St Luke and St John. He was accompanied by six Augustinian missionaries. The seeds of Christianity had already been sown by Ferdinand Magellan who set sail in search of the spice islands in 1521. He had presented the King of Cebu with an icon of the Infant Christ, the Santo Nino, which is the oldest and most venerated icon in the Philippines. The Spanish empire did not conquer by force alone; it conquered by its fidelity to the gospel. Hundreds of years of Judaeo-protestant scholarship have done much to obscure that fact.
This was the first great era of globalisation. But it was a very different form of globalisation. It spread the one true faith. And it sanctified the family, as a reflection of the Blessed Trinity itself. The Spanish conquered through the images of a divine child and a suffering man-god. The concept of man suffering for the salvation of others is anathema to the new counter-civilisation promoted by contemporary globalisation. Thus, the virtues of simple labour, family and church have been superseded by hedonism, individualism and mass media.
St Thomas Aquinas defines effeminacy the condition in which a man is unwilling to forsake a good on account of difficulties which he cannot endure. The unwillingness to undergo suffering is pervasive in our culture. The degeneration of western man was already visible in the affluent 1950s America. Archbishop Fulton Sheen wrote:
‘I believe that the whole political and religious situation of the world can be summe up in terms of the divorce of Christ from His cross. Put the Cross-less Christ on the right side, and the Christ-less Cross of Christ on the Left. Who picks up the Crossless Christ? Our decadent Western civilisation. Christ is weak, effeminate, with no authority to derive buyers and sellers out of temples, and never speaks of self-discipline, restraint and mortification. Who picks up the Christless Cross? Russia and China, where there is a dedication to a common ideology, the use of discipline and authority to keep peace and order. But neither can heal.’
Today, the proletarian Left has degenerated even further. Now, the leaders of the left are more interested in changing their sex and saving the planet than the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Just as God’s covenant was passed from the Jews to the Gentiles, the Church becoming the New Israel, what was true and good in Imperial Spain passed to the Philippines. If the country remains poor economically, it has much to do with the Judaeo-Protestant ideology imposed on it by US imperialism since the late 19th century, where kleptocrats from Marcos Senior to Marcos Junior have ruled on behalf of US interests, to the detriment of the working class. US imperialism is currently attempting to normalise sodomy in the Philippines. And it looks like the current incumbent will attempt to subvert the nation’s culture to spread this filth.
A major factor in the subjugation of the Philippines to US interests was played by Freemasonry. All the 19th century nationalist movements such as Katapune were run by members of the Spanish Orient lodge.
The Philippines was conquered and administered by New Spain, the former name for Mexico, under the aegis of the Spanish Crown. Spanish sovereignty was established in the Philippines in accordance with the Discovery Doctrine, which stipulated that all lands discovered by Christian monarchies came under their sovereignty. This was clarified by Pope Alexander VI in his 1493 letter Inter Caetera to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain.
That document stipulated that the Spanish conquest of the new world was to serve the evangelisation of its barbarous inhabitants:
‘that in our times especially the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.’
The Pope also exhorted the Spanish monarchy to send the most fervent Christian missionaries for the education of the natives.
‘you should appoint to the aforesaid mainlands and islands worthy, God-fearing, learned, skilled, and experienced men, in order to instruct the aforesaid inhabitants and residents in the Catholic faith and train them in good morals. Furthermore, under penalty of excommunication late sententie to be incurred ipso facto , should anyone thus contravene, we strictly forbid all persons of whatsoever rank, even imperial and royal, or of whatsoever estate, degree, order, or condition, to dare, without your special permit or that of your aforesaid heirs and successors, to go for the purpose of trade or any other reason to the islands.’
Today it is claimed that the Augustinian Recollects played a key role in the nationalist movements of the 19th century. What is rarely pointed out is that by then many religious orders were heavily infiltrated by Freemasonry.
Pope Alexander VI is widely considered to have been a wicked man. But he was a legitimate pope. And from a Catholic standpoint, his documents are still valid. We should bear this in mind when considering the scandals of the Pope Francis pontificate. As protestant historian William Scott points out, Pope Alexander VI was more motivated by the desire to secure family marriages and alliances with Spain than anything else when drafting Inter Caetera. But again from a Catholic perspective, that does not mean that the document did not have divine approval, as there is nothing contrary to Catholic teaching in it.
The fervency of Philippine Catholicism shows that while Freemasonry may have usurped the legitimate sovereignty of Spain, it did not usurp the sovereignty of Christ the King.
Conclusion
But more and more young people are turning out each year to participate in the Solemn Translation, while the West spiritually resembles the Hormah, the Place of Destruction, symbolised tragically in the annihilation of Gaza. The connection between the two is of course the Jews and the perennial conflict between Synagogue of Satan and the Church of Christ which is the driving force of history.
The Synagogue of Satan wants to destroy the Christian family. The Synagogue of Satan wants to destroy the Christian man by rendering him a weak, effeminate creature incapable of suffering and of procreation.
Translation in the literal sense was a critical practice for the early Spanish conquistadors. The Spanish preserved all the was good of indigenous cultures, sublimating them in the new text of Christian culture. They even preserved many ancient mythologies. Yet, most contemporary historians speak of the ‘imposition’ of Christianity, ‘forced baptisms’ and ‘cultural imperialism’ and ludicrously, ‘genocide’ whenever the Spanish conquistadors are mentioned.
The Catholic policy of diligently learning foreign languages was continued by St Ezekiel Moreno Diaz (1848-1906). This Spanish saint spent many years in the Philippines preaching in Tagalog.
In the figurative sense, translation is vital if Christianity is survive the war being waged against it by the Synagogue of Satan because many of the texts published since Vatican II contain so much ambiguity that the kind of hermeneutics required to understand them in the light of Christian tradition almost amounts to translation.
The scandals in the Church are attempts to prevent Catholic praxis, so that people spend more time reading about corruption than engaging in prayer. The Synagogue of Satan wants to turn the world into a spiritual Hormah through the total inversion of all Christian values. From the Latin trans, beyond and latus, carried over. In Hormah there is nothing but rubble left to carry over because the Jews have already broken the covenant in their hearts. The world they rule through high finance and the mass media is a place of destruction, a world of rubble culture, a global Hormah.
It should not surprising that the Pope appears to be Satan. Did not Christ himself call Peter Satan? But Catholics would do far more to further the truth of the gospel by debunking the leyenda negra, the black legend of Spanish history, recounted by Judaeo-protestants which consistently demonises the Spanish conquistadores as ruthless conquerors. The Jews want a New World Order, a centralised global plutocracy under the control of a ruthless Talmudic rabbinate. Catholics want a Christian World Order, ruled in accordance with the principles of solidarism and subsidiarity.
As the Black Nazarene arrives, St John the Baptist must decrease. His church loses its name and becomes the temple of Christ, just as Spanish culture is translated to the Philippines and the Hebrew world is translated into the Greek of the New Testament. Without translation, the Hebrew world is barbarism. Christ was born to be translated from Nazareth to Golgotha. Nazar in Hebrew means branch and Golgotha means Place of the Skull— Adam’s skull. The crucifixion takes place over Adam’s grave. The Son of Man, that is to say, the Son of Adam becomes the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the fruit of that tree. And the translation of the branch to the place of the skull is re-translated into the Eucharist during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which is itself a translation of the Crucifixion.
The Feast of the Black Nazarene is important because it shows that translation is merely the essence of human culture but perhaps even the essence of Christianity itself. Shortly after he was born Christ was ‘translated’ to Egypt, the flight into Egypt is a translation because it represents how Christ is to find safety in the land of the Gentiles, who are to become the new chosen people.
The virility of Filipino Catholicism is manifested by the men who carry the icon, many of them barefoot. The scourge of modernism gave us an effete and effeminate Church. Modernist priests rarely even mention the Four Last Things — death, judgement, heaven and hell. When denouncing from the pulpit the free Masonic liberalism that was attempting to destroy the Spanish empire and the Church, St Ezekiel Moreno said Catholics needed to be fight, as he put it, ‘with a Remington in one hand, and a machete in the other!’ Catholics have the right to self-defence.
As leftists and right-wing atheists are predominantly sodomites and degenerates, it is up to Catholic men to wage war against the modernist cancer in our society and in our church. An assiduous student of Pope Pius IX Syllabus of Errors, St Ezekiel Moreno said that he wanted one phrase of his to be remembered after his death: el liberalismo es pecado, liberalism is sin. He would later die of cancer, becoming the patron saint of that malady. It is said by some physicians that cancer is a type of parasitic fungus which progressively takes over the body. Is that not what liberalism is in the church? The only way to fight the cancer in the church is to name its carriers, the Jews. They domination of media and economics has turned the world into a spiritual Hormah.
In the aforementioned book Os Trabalhos de Jesus, Thomas of Jesus describes how the Jews continually set snares for Christ, conspiring against him on every occasion. They still conspire against him. The very existence of Judaism is a conspiracy against Christ.
The Jews want to see Catholics splinter into different groups over the controversies of the papacy. But it is the perpetuity of Catholic praxis, the quotidian holy sacrifice of the mass, that constrains the Synagogue of Satan’s power over the Gentiles.
Excellent piece God bless you🙏