Coincidence and Consequence: Marianism and Mass Media in the Global Philippines

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COINCIDENCE AND CONSEQUENCE: Marianism and the Mass Media in the Global Philippines DEIRDRE DE LA CRUZ University of Michigan

FAILURES OF MEDIATION The time is July 2004, nearly three years after September 11, 2001, and the Philippines is a member country of the “coalition of the willing” in the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. On July 7, Angelo de la Cruz, an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) who drives trucks for a Saudi-based firm, is abducted near Fallujah. On July 8, a videotape is released showing de la Cruz surrounded by masked men calling themselves the Khaled ibn al-Walid Brigade. The men threaten to behead him should the Philippine government refuse to withdraw its 51 military personnel within 72 hours.

In response to the kidnapping, Philippine Presidential Spokesman Ignacio Bunye declares that Malaca˜nang (the name of the presidential palace and shorthand for the administration) shall be resolute in its original plan to keep the Filipino troops in Iraq until August 20, the mandate’s original expiration date. The soldiers are instructed to remain on active duty. Under the orders of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Philippine Labor Secretary Patricia Santo Tomas puts an immediate halt to processing any contract workers destined for Iraq.

On July 10, the last day before the deadline, the television network Al Jazeera broadcasts a video of de la Cruz making his “final plea” to the Philippine government to withdraw their troops. Although the administration does not disclose any further details of the kidnapping to the public, late in the night of the same day, in a national television newsflash, Santo Tomas announces that de la Cruz has been released and is en route to Baghdad. Although the source of this information in unnamed, and C 2009 by CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 24, Issue 3, pp. 455–488. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. ! the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.01037.x

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the release of de la Cruz yet unverified by the Department of Foreign Affairs, President Arroyo confirms the news with a text message sent to de la Cruz’s family in the province of Pampanga, assuring that their father will soon be home.

Both leaders have spoken too soon.

Within hours, de la Cruz’s captors, balking at the international media frenzy surrounding the premature announcement, state that he is still in their custody.

Although they extend their original deadline an additional 48 hours and change their demands from immediate withdrawal of troops to a promise to remove all personnel before July 20, their threat to take de la Cruz’s life still stands. The government refuses these new conditions, insisting that it will maintain its original pullout date of August 20. The next day, the kidnappers report that de la Cruz has been moved to the place of execution.

Caught between Washington, D.C., and a nation clamoring to have its native son return, Arroyo issues an ambiguous commitment to the Iraqi group: they will order the removal of Philippine troops but give no specific date as to when the actual departure will take place. Then, desperate to avoid further diplomatic humiliation and citing the extreme delicacy of the situation, Malaca˜nang institutes a news blackout on all their dealings with the hostage crisis.

On July 14, the very day after this blackout is imposed, there are reports that 250 kilometers north of Manila, in the Baguio City Cathedral, a statue of St. Therese is shedding tears of blood. The first to witness the weeping image is a young man named Christopher Fergis, who noticed the trickle the day before as he knelt praying the Rosary before it. Although the cathedral was not his regular parish, Fergis tells reporters that he was drawn there after dreaming of the Virgin Mary for several days in a row. Although it is unclear, according to his statements, if Mary imparts any specific messages in these appearances, he does claim: “When I was in front of the St. Therese statue, I heard voices coming from nowhere . . . telling me we should pray for unity and pray for our leaders” (Sun.Star Network Online 2004).

Fergis is not the only one who draws an overt link between the hostage situation and the alleged miracle. Other witnesses to the bleeding image confess that they also spent recent days praying for de la Cruz’s release. So too does the mainstream press make a connection between the two events, with such lead-ins as: “While Catholic devotees prayed for divine intervention to help save the life of truck driver Angelo de la Cruz, a 26 year-old man reported seeing blood drip from the statue of St. Therese of the Child Jesus at the Baguio Cathedral” (Cabreza 2004). Even in the layout of several newspapers’ front pages the miracle of the

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bleeding statue appears to intervene in the political drama, taking up column space alongside news reports originally filed by Al Jazeera, features on nationwide protests and vigils, and editorial analysis of the administration’s actions (see Figure 1).

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FIGURE 1. Even in the layout of several newspapers’ front pages, the miracle of the bleeding statue appears to intervene in the political drama. Philippine Daily Inquirer, July 14, 2004.

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It is not infrequent that religion, including extraordinary events of a putatively religious nature, makes the news. But there is something remarkable in this instance that deserves our consideration, in the familiar format of the newspaper’s front page and the lead-ins of its articles no less than in the sensational feature itself. For what we see here in the timing of the miracle is an interaction between religion and the mass media that is structured not by a stable relation between content and form (i.e., the utilization of the mass media for the dissemination of religious or religion-related content) but, rather, by substitution: where the mass media is silenced—and moreover, political mediation fails—religious mediation appears in its place.

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The miracle of the bleeding statue and the attendant visitations of Mary in this context of crisis represent a moment of convergence of centuries-old figures of religious mediation and modern technologies of the mass media. What makes this possible, I argue in this essay, is a certain commensurability that is the result of historically particular conceptualizations of the force (or social value) and function of mediation: here religious mediation is fantasized to bring about a certain influence or communication in a way compatible with those imagined to be the charge of the government and the mass media. Although religious mediation and the mass media everywhere entail structures of perception and recognition, belief, and reception, their varying conjunctions and overlap constitute especially fruitful points of entry into specific sites of social and cultural production and understanding.

The interaction between forms and figures of mediation, or an “intermedium relationship” (Mazzarella 2004), can tell us much about those practices of social and political negotiation that are most valued as “efficacious.”

This is not the only reason why mediation and convergent media are particularly good to think, however. For “mediation” (in the post-Hegelian sense)1 draws attention to the processual nature of social life, its production and reproduction, and therefore precludes any ontological assertions, witting or unwitting (Mazzarella 2004). It presumes alienation, dialecticism, and dialogism, and thus always proffers a nonidentitarian and antiessentialist agenda (even if “identity” or “essentialism” may be our object). “Mediation” does not easily submit to conceptual shorthand the way that other more determinative, semantically laden categories (such as “capitalism,” “globalization,” “religion,” etc.) may. At the same time, “mediation” provides a common denominator that enables us to envision relatedness across seemingly unlike phenomena, bringing into relief nexus of forces and

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effects both near and far that may engage temporalities of past, present, and even, future.

Convergent media, meanwhile, can serve as alternatives to the binary categories that have so driven contemporary ethnography and social theory, categories such as the particular and the universal, the local and the global, and especially relevant to this essay, the secular and the religious. Moreover, because thinking first in terms of mediation may all too easily generate tangles of relevance, convergent media draw out more meaningful specificities of instance, context, and motivation. Regimes of mediation may conspire or unexpectedly coincide, their convergences may produce effects both intended and unintended, and perceived commensurability can mobilize everything from the simple instrumentalization of a media form, to the fantasy of perfect substitution in a relay of failure and recovery, as we saw in the crisis around Angelo de la Cruz.

In this essay, I take up these matters via a few events involving Filipinos at home and abroad. The materials drawn on for this analysis revolve around the Virgin Mary (who in the Philippines is one of the most important figures of divine mediation), devotional practices to her, modes of divination (i.e., prophesy), and their interactions with the mass media. At the same time, as evidenced by the opening scene of crisis, the purview of this essay cannot help but be the present situation of the Philippines and Filipinos in the world today, one in which religion and the mass media (both respectively and in conjunction) are heavily imbricated with the extensions of labor, transnational movement, global geopolitical conflicts, and the ever-present shadow of U.S. imperialism that help define it. Indeed, by the end of this essay I will have brought into some relief, through seemingly unrelated events, several connections in the complex web of international alliances, national allegiance, and media spectacles that held Angelo de la Cruz hostage in its threads—even as one group alone claimed responsibility for his kidnapping.

Rather than provide a strict account of what led to the hostage crisis, however, I use a lens of Marian religiosity, again one of the most prevalent among Filipino Catholics, so that one might appreciate the associative paths that generate popular interpretations of crises and danger (such as that involving de la Cruz and that which he faced), as much as the strategies of power and control to which those paths give rise.

I single out crises and danger here for it is frequently in such contexts that Marian apparitions and robust devotion is found.2 This linking of Mary with danger is by no means a new valence accorded to her in Filipino Catholic religiosity, however; one can practically write a history of conflict and perceptions of threat in

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the Christian Philippines, from the early Spanish colonial period to the present, by reading off the shields forged by Mary’s protective or preemptive interventions— in other words, by attending to when and where she appears, and by whom she is invoked. Yet the same can be said throughout the modern Catholic world, and thus we must consider the distinctness of Mary as she has appeared in the Philippines and to Filipinos. The first section of this essay briefly outlines several of these features.

From there it turns to a 1999 festival celebrated in honor of the Virgin Mary’s birthday to illustrate in some detail the variety of ways in which the mass media and figures of religious mediation interact. Although the ethnographic treatment of the celebration may at first appear as just an exemplar of the sort of convergence of media with which I am concerned here, it will eventually reveal itself to be another junction in the state of affairs that include the kidnapping of Angelo de la Cruz.

The essay concludes, then, where it began, in the space opened up by miraculous intervention, where the kidnapping of one Filipino “everyman” is just one incident in the hostage crisis of global proportions, suffered by people of countless devotions and sustained by numerous convictions and creeds, that continues to define our present.

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SOMETHING ABOUT MARY Marian devotion in the Philippines takes as many forms as there are versions of the Blessed Mother herself. Still, there are strains of similarity where the appeal of Mary for Filipino Catholics is concerned, including that of her central— if not superlative—status in the devotional order of things. For the origins of this favoritism one may turn to the history of the late 16th and 17th centuries and the introduction of Catholicism to the lowland communities inhabiting the archipelago. By many accounts, women (and sometimes feminine men) in these societies maintained high social status owing to their many roles, best characterized as intermediary in function and form. From midwives to shaman (baylan or catalonan), women negotiated or fulfilled both the temporal life-cycle and spiritual needs of the community (Brewer 2001).3 When the Spaniards unpacked their pantheon of saints and the figure of Jesus Christ, performed their panoply of strange rites, and attempted the inculcation of monotheist dogma utterly alien to the populace, it was the Virgin Mary that bore the closest structural resemblance to any figure that had previously existed (Brewer 2001:78–81). Here we are talking about translation, broadly construed, and it is to this legacy of conversion as translation (Rafael 1988) that what is often perceived as the undue supremacy of Mary among Filipino Catholics can be, in part, attributed.

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Yet, although this might provide a convincing explanation for how strong Marian devotion was engendered in the Philippines, it is primarily among scholars and historians that one will find these connections explicitly articulated.4 Far more illuminating for understanding the popular importance of Mary is the predictable frequency with which, in settings both formal and informal, one particular New Testament scene is cited. This is one of the few scenes in the New Testament where Mary makes an appearance,5 and is known as the Wedding at Cana: On the third day there was a wedding in Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.

Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding.

When the wine ran short, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.”

(And) Jesus said to her, “Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come.”

His mother said to the servers, “Do whatever he tells you.”

[John 2:1–5]6 For many theologians and biblical scholars, the importance of these few brief lines is that of seminal revelation: the first demonstration of Christ’s power to perform miracles (Hengel 1987). In the many times I heard this story in a Philippine context, by some contrast, exegesis of the episode emphasized the role of Mary as coconspirator in Christ’s miraculating mission. In one public talk, for example, the Filipina visionary Teresing Castillo makes this plainly clear: How did Jesus show love for his mother? The first miracle. When was the first miracle? Cana. Jesus said then that it was not yet his time. But through the words of the loving mother, the miracle of the wine took place. So if there is no Mary, there will not be any miracle at all of Jesus. Just remember that!7 The lesson Teresing draws from the Wedding at Cana is that Christ’s first miracle was above all a sign of love for his mother, and not the inaugural pronouncement of his messianic mission. This has been echoed by several Filipinos with whom I have spoken, who noted further that the wedding scene itself resonates powerfully with the familiar experience of the duty to uphold the appearance of abundance in social rites or festivity. As one friend put it: “Yikes! They ran out of wine! Mama Mary was so embarrassed!” From this perspective, Mary intervenes 461

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because of her empathy for the shame (hiya) she anticipates will befall the hosts should they not provide enough wine. Embarrassed on their behalf, Mary requests that Jesus ensure this not happen. Ignoring his rebuke (“Jesus said then that it was not yet his time”), because she knows not only her son’s power but her influence over him, Mary instructs the servants to ready the six stone pots.

Here the connection between Mary and the miraculous is explicit. Although at the beginning of her lesson Teresing refers to the first miracle as a sign given by Christ to Mary, the emphasis quickly shifts to Mary as the precondition for that sign: no Mary, no miracle (“just remember that!”). This is not to say that Mary herself performs the miracle, however, for it is “through the words of Mary”—that is, through her mediation—that the miracle takes place. Here beneath the exuberant appreciation of the affective bond between mother and child lies a peculiar and subtly subversive thaumaturgy: that Mary, and not Christ, is the primary agent of the miraculous; and yet this is so not simply but precisely owing to her power of mediation.

It is with this paradox in mind that we can begin to understand the affinity among Mary, in that capacity best captured by one of her most popular monikers, the Mediatrix, and other bodies and forms of mediation (see Textbox). These may be enduring institutions (such as the Catholic Church, which has often in its history been figured in her image; see Warner 1976), performance and practice (such as those long the object of anthropological inquiry, e.g., ritual), or newer modes of reproducing and transmitting presence and information that comprise the mass media. For certain, where it concerns the last of these, such affinity is by no means the privilege of the Mother of God. One sees similar structures of commensurability and mutual influence between religions and technological media taking place throughout the world (Hirschkind 2006; Meyer and Moors 2006; Morris 2000; Vries and Weber 2001; Zito 2008; among many others). Whether one understands the so-called “return” of religion as an atavistic reaction to the secular modern, the accommodation of religiosity among certain publics, or a kind of haunting of Enlightenment reason by its own expunged origins, the role of the mass media in facilitating this “return” is beyond refute, even for those who will not cease to be surprised by its implication.

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The Mass Media and the Worldwide Revitalization of Marianism

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The modern revitalization of Marianism is inextricably tied to the efflorescence of apparitions of Mary in the 19th and 20th centuries. Until recently, historians and social

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scientists had tended to understand this burgeoning of visionary phenomena and attendant Marian devotion as constituting sites of resistance to the onslaught of changes wrought by the volatile formation of nation-states, the industrial revolution, the ascendancy of secularrationalist thought, and, later in the 20th century, total war; in short, as a popular response to social and material crises (Bax 1991; Blackbourn 1993; Turner and Turner 1978; Warner 1976). With a few exceptions (see Christian 1996), the development of the mass media in modernity and its role in these events have been mentioned only in passing, as that which facilitated and accelerated the movement of news and pilgrims across distances.

By the 1980s, however, the continuing proliferation of Marian apparitions and the steadfast visibility of Marian religiosity demanded that observers consider other factors and influences beyond those that could be easily explained via functionalist paradigms. The mass media could no longer be seen as simply providing technological form for religious content (although this certainly remained one of the most important ways that apparitions and devotional practices could be compared and shared across distances), but, rather, needed to be examined in its capacity to mirror, restructure, and possibly produce, religious phenomena and experience.

Even a cursory glance over the past 50 years reveals the variety of ways in which technologies of the mass media have played a significant role in apperceiving Marian phenomena and the establishment and growth of Marian communities. In the apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bayside, New York, in the 1970s, photography was seized on not only for its documentary capabilities but for what was believed to be its deeply revelatory power: referred to by the devotional community as “Polaroids from Heaven,” photos taken during apparitions served as instruments of divination, offering prophetic messages and insights (Wojcik 1996). The trope of “serial” visions of the Virgin Mary, occurring at a regularly scheduled time over months or years, as is the case with the apparitions in Medjugorje, in the former Yugoslavia, arguably owes itself to the habit of television viewing (Apolito 2005).

Such examples themselves seem quaint once one turns to the overwhelming impact of new media and the internet in radically reforming devotional practice with such innovations as virtual pilgrimage and the ability to email prayer petitions to “Our Lady” at any number of Marian shrines across the globe.

Yet it is not only as a resource facilitating the propagation of devotion, a metaphorics for articulating perception and experience, or a conduit enabling the instantaneous connection to sacred sites that the mass media has had its hand in ushering us into the postsecular age. For in so far as religious practices, artifacts, institutions, and doctrine are always mediatic, it is well worth inverting the question of how the mass media has contributed to the so-called “return” of religion to ask how certain religious traditions and imaginations may have given rise to, or even anticipated, the possibilities fantasized by the makers and users of media technologies.

To take two of the examples cited above, it could be argued that photography’s power to arrest time in an image or render the invisible visible was prefigured by the iconographical tradition seen in such relics as Veronica’s Veil or the Shroud of Turin (Wojcik 1996), while repetition and seriality have long been deemed a crucial element in bringing about the desired

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effects of Rosary prayer (Grignion de Montfort 1965). What we witness now in the religion and mass media dyad is less the conditions of possibility for religion’s “return” and more the affirmation of its nondisappearance, along with a symbiosis that continues to create new ways of apprehending and experiencing the sacred.

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WORLD FLUVIAL, NOT GLOBAL FLOWS On a bright fall day in September of 1999, at the south tip of Manhattan on the grounds of Battery Park, a few hundred Catholics convened for a celebration of the Virgin Mary’s birthday in an event called the “World Marian Peace Regatta.” There was a stage set up on the west edge of the green that was occupied by musicians, people leading the recitation of Rosary prayers, visionaries swearing testimonies to what they had seen, priests, theologians, and other Marian devotees. Throughout the day the crowd held its own steady rhythm, expanding during times when whoever stood center stage could not quite hold collective attention, contracting toward the stage when there appeared someone or something that could. Off to the side of the stage there were tables where one could purchase all sorts of religious items and browse through books with titles like In Our Days: Mary’s prophesies on the last years of the 20th century; Satan’s Answers to the Exorcist; and A Scientist Researches Mary Mother of All Nations. Displays were set up before which one could ponder images of angels and saints, the unborn, and Pope John Paul II leaning on his staff, digitally superimposed on a misty forest background, among a candy-colored field of tulips, or at the edge of the Grand Canyon.

The main feature of the celebration, that which gave the event its name, was a fluvial parade of images of the Virgin Mary. The images came from all over the world—France, Holland, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the Philippines, among other countries—some by boat, some by car, one even by plane, I was told, taking up an entire row of business class seats. It was a most incongruous scene, this pageant of Marys (see Figure 2), each one perched on a single pedestal, dodging shadows cast by New York City’s financial district. When the time came they were carefully loaded onto speed boats and leisure crafts. Lined up in flotilla formation on the Hudson River, they proceeded around the tip of Manhattan to the United Nations. There, the icon of global citizenship was consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

The Marian images brought, flown, and carried to Battery Park doubly signified. They were iconographic signs of the Holy Mother, at the same time that they also indexed their nationalized places of origin: Our Lady of Guadalupe from Mexico, Our Lady of La Salette from France, Our Lady of Akita from Japan,

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FIGURE 2. A pageant of Marys. Photograph by Loren Ryter.

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and so on. As such, the procession of Marian images along the tip of Manhattan appeared as much an envoy of national emblems as a parade of religious symbols.

The floating parade of Marian images was both spectacular and specular, calling attention to the images of Mary as both objects to be seen in their own material right, and reflecting national identifications convening together in a cosmopolitan sphere. Furthermore, the great effort it took to bring these images together (often mentioned by the speakers at the event in terms of hardship), the distance these images and their caretakers had to travel, and an emphasis on the images and participants’ journey, suggested a pilgrimage of sorts, one that projected a particular world picture (Heidegger 1977) that privileged the United States as a singularly significant destination.8 But whose world picture was this? Despite the centrality of such symbolically significant sites as the United Nations to the stated aspirations of the celebration, it was not in New York, but Manila, that I first learned of the World Marian Peace Regatta. In the Philippine Daily Inquirer there appeared a brief article announcing the celebration a few weeks before it was to take place. The regatta was dreamed up by a woman named Maria Luisa “Baby” Nebrida, a Filipina born, raised, and currently residing in Manila. The event itself was entirely planned and executed by

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Ms. Nebrida’s devotional organization, the M.A.S.S. (Mary’s Army to Save Souls) Media Movement, also based in Manila. As I would later note at the celebration itself, the participants and attendees of the celebration were not all Filipino or Filipino American, but the salient presence of Filipinos was often remarked on.

Thus, for all its global pretenses, the World Marian Peace Regatta unwittingly called attention to the somewhat unique attributes of Filipino Catholicism. By presenting a very particular picture of the world within which nations appeared representable by figures of the Virgin Mary and the United States existed as its “center” (in the words of the head organizer herself ), the event took place not only as a religious celebration but as the articulation of a certain Filipino imaginary.

This imaginary is deeply class based, rooted in a history of the migration of professional, middle-class Filipinos to the United States from the mid-1960s through the 1980s, and the transnational networks comprising immediate and extended kin that ensued.9 Ms. Nebrida’s own life history reflects this, as the last 30 years has been spent, in several large blocks of time, going back and forth from the east coast of the United States to Manila for employment opportunities and advancement, family, and love. During an interview in Manila, two years after the World Marian Peace Regatta, Baby Nebrida recounted her adult life as a flurry of jobs and professional achievements, relationships that were made and broken, and a faith that would wax and wane. She also noted the dangerous environment of martial law under the Marcos regime that led her to seek political asylum in the United States in the 1970s and ultimately migrate. This was one of the more intriguing dimensions of Nebrida’s devotion to Mary: that it was in the wake of the People Power revolt that deposed the regime in 1986—often heralded as a “Marian miracle”10 —that she experienced her conversion. Indeed Nebrida is just one of several people—notably women—who in the years following the revolt turned their oppositional politics into conservative devotional movements, and had the resources, networks, and experience to propagate these movements using the instruments that they knew best: the mass media.

The “turning point” in Nebrida’s conversion took place while on a pilgrimage tour to the shrine to Our Lady of Montserrat, in Spain. Kneeling, she said, at the same spot at which St. Ignatius of Loyola had nearly 500 years before her, she heard a voice telling her, “FIGHT FOR ME.” “That’s when the army thing came,” Nebrida affirmed, “that we have to start an army, we are Mary’s Army, because the commander in chief, the one that’s going to crush the head of the serpent is really Mary.”11 We are at war, she interpreted the mysterious locution to have declared, “when you wake up in the morning, there’s a battle, a spiritual battle all

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the time.”12 Having spent most of her professional life working for the press, as a screenwriter, or in media production, Baby knew, then, that her role to play in this war would be that of propagandist.

Thus was born the M.A.S.S. Media Movement, and then, the World Marian Peace Regatta. Any incongruity or contradiction between the mission of the movement, to wage battle, and the event, to promote peace, was overlooked, and perhaps reasonably so, given that the former is believed to take place in the realm of the spiritual and the latter in a worldly domain. At the event in Battery Park, however, it was not immediately clear how Baby’s vocation of utilizing the media for devotional work was to intersect with the more traditional format of the religious procession. This conjugation of religious mediation (in the replicated figure of Mary) and the mass media I would later discover toward the middle of the celebration, when, seeking brief refuge from the World Marian Peace Regatta crowd, I headed toward the periphery of the congregation. The mass of devotees did not thin out to a grassy respite but instead gave way to the conspicuous presence of equipment and a few small clusters of “techies.” Typically blas´e, these technicians had spent the entire day perched on clunky scaffolding, supervising, and operating the cameras, lights, and speakers that had been taking in the scene. They were documenting the entire World Marian Peace Regatta as it took place in New York, and beaming it live via satellite back into the Philippines.

One the one hand, thus, we had the symbolism and world picture I outlined before, each image representing a nation, converging at the “center” of the world, the big deal made of the distance they needed to travel, the importance of the physical location of New York City, and so forth. On the other hand, the deployment of the mass media undermined at the same time that it portrayed the temporal and spatial continuum that dictates these symbolic movements. The conventional form—straightforward motion in space and time—that held the procession of images in place was itself held in place by another frame, one that in its technical actuality opposed that very conventional form. Here, the ambiguous ontology of the media and all it renders was brought to the fore, registered as a doubling, or play on words: moving images. But that was not all. For the capture of the images and the event on video secured their transmission to posterity. The images of the Battery Park event could and would play again. Someday. And this in fact they did, in the wake of an event that would happen at the same place and on the exact same date as the World Marian Peace Regatta (see Figure 3), only two years later, when the twin towers of the World Trade Center fell on September 11, 2001.

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FIGURE 3. World Marian Peace Regatta, September 11. Photograph by Loren Ryter.

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PARABLES OF THE PROSTHETIC In the set up and execution of the World Marian Peace Regatta, we witnessed an interaction between Mary and the mass media that comes closest to that of instrumentality: the media is not yet the message. Yet it was not only in the simultaneous transfer of the religious images and messages of the event via satellite that the technological reproduction and transmission operative in the mass media was utilized. In this next section, I turn to one segment of the celebration that illustrates the capacity of mass mediated transmissions to actually intensify, if not provoke, religious experience. To fully appreciate these effects, I must first provide the backdrop against which this enabling of divine presence to manifest itself could take place. This backdrop will take the mode of communication common to Filipino Christian practice: the inspirational talk.

So, to begin again, it is September 11, 1999, and the World Marian Peace Regatta is underway on the grounds of Battery Park, at the south end of Manhattan.

Fr. Jerry Orbos has just taken his place at the podium before the crowd. Highly charismatic, deep-dimpled, with a voice like a DJ on the midnight shift, Fr. Jerry is extremely popular among Marian groups in Manila, and familiar to the middleclass readership of the Philippine Daily Inquirer for his weekly column, Moments.

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He is exemplary of religious leaders who preach by appealing to sentimentality, professing a relationship to the Virgin Mary that is far more personal than theological or doctrinal. The parables he employs in his homilies and inspirational talks about Mary are always emotional stories of mother love and sacrifice in which congregants can see themselves reflected as either mothers, or children, or both. His mode of transmitting scriptural messages is thus one driven by the imperative to provoke identifications between his listeners and the Blessed Mother, mediated by the subjects of his parables.

On this particular day at Battery Park, Fr. Jerry cheerily began his talk by giving praise for being “still alive at this moment.” He then asked everyone in the congregation to turn to their neighbor and tell them, “I’m happy you’re here, I’m happy you’re alive.” Throughout this first part of his address he frequently paused, requesting that the listeners give rounds of applause to “Mama Mary.” At these moments he didn’t refer to any particular image but merely “her presence” that we the congregation found ourselves “in.” After a few more brief acknowledgements, and, having warmed up the crowd with his informal jocularity, he began to tell a story:13 This is a story about a little girl who was born minus one—minus one ear.

And this girl was growing up, she was very shy because she was very insecure because of that defect, and people were always laughing at her. She was always hurt but there was also one person who was always hurt seeing that little girl.

This of course was, the mother. I mean which mother would like to see their child hurt? And according to this story, on her eighteenth birthday, the mother said, “my dear child, everything is ready, we’re going to the hospital.” And according to this story, the girl had an ear transplant operation, according to this story. And it was very successful, according to this story. And from that moment on, she became a very happy person, she met the man of her dreams, and, to cut this story short, she was getting married. The night before the wedding, she went to her mother—she was old already—and then she said, “Mama, tomorrow I’m getting married, and things are unfolding so beautifully in my life!” And according to this story, she embraced her mother so tight, but when she embraced her mother, she felt something very strange. For the first time she found out that her mother no longer had one ear!

(Small gasps resounded throughout the crowd.)

And she never knew. And she said, “Mama you never told me it was you who gave your ear to me, and there was so many times in the past I hated you, I

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shouted at you, I took you so for granted, I never knew how much you have sacrificed for me.”

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(At this point an elderly Filipina turned to me and, placing one hand on my forearm squeaked, “That’s the love of a mother!”)

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Dear friends, especially you mothers who are here, you know how it is like to love a child and how painful it is when the child grows up, hurting you, shouting at you, cursing at you. This is the story of each and every one of us, in many ways, towards our own mother Mary.14

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The use of the word “parable” is my own designation of genre. What was obvious was the status of this parable as “story.” Making constant reference to this mode of enframement, Fr. Jerry elevated the story to the level of the general, rather than the particular. The effect of this elevation was that the truth of the story was immaterial. One need not wonder if there really was a girl out there with no ear, her surgical grafting procedure, her mother’s sacrifice. This is not to say that the details of this story were unimportant, but that bringing into constant relief the story frame converted these details into terms for which one could substitute similar details, indeed owing to which one could begin to identify similarities. This is the strategy of all effective homilists, that of establishing structures that enable resemblances, so that, as Fr. Jerry declared, one can ultimately apprehend this story as “the story of each and every one of us.” In this case, the “I” of the listener could substitute him or herself into this story frame—as the parent or the child of the story, or both—as well as perceive his or her relationship to Mary as bearing the constitutive elements of another story, their own story, just like this one. Driven by the imperative to provoke identifications, we might imagine that Fr. Jerry’s oral performance encircled its listeners in a narrative hall of mirrors. Yet this was not the only way in which substitution asserted itself. For let us not forget that this was, after all, a story about a transplanted ear. Read closely, the story reveals as much about the limits of substitution as its possibilities.

The daughter of the story bears a foundational defect. And although a certain degree of restoration could be performed by grafting her mother’s ear onto the place where the daughter was once without, the corporeal unity of the daughter would always be supplemented by this foreign flesh. The grafted ear may make the daughter appear, and perhaps even feel, whole, but it would always stand as a reminder that she once was not. Even if the mother gives with neither desire nor possibility for return, her sacrifice is incapable of bringing about a total reversal of her daughter’s condition. Put another way, the mother can give up the ear for her

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daughter, but she can never give in a way that takes away her daughter’s once having been without an ear. Hence the ear, although one object of sacrifice, nevertheless locates the limits of sacrifice in the uncanny overlay of imperfect substitution (Derrida 1995).15 The congenial will never take place of the congenital, no matter how much they look alike.

The prosthetic ear draws attention to another implicit fact. The daughter, although earless, was never hearless. She never lacked the auditory sense of perception. Bearing this in mind, we can see the grafting procedure as (re)marking an already denaturalized relationship between sense perception and the physical organ of the perception. Moreover, we can see how this alienation had in fact been exacerbated by the transplant, whereby the cost of the fleshly protuberance was precisely the failure, if not of hearing, then of receptivity, in this case to the mother, who henceforth suffered her daughter’s hatred and neglect. The moment the daughter realizes the identity of the donor—that is, the moment she properly receives the gift through recognition—is the moment receptivity itself is restored.

By receiving the gift, the prosthetic nature of the ear is realized, as an artificial instrument of reception, instead of the natural organ of hearing.

As previously noted, the intent to provoke identifications between the listeners of Fr. Jerry’s tale and its characters effectively doubled the effects of what lay solely within the story frame. The surprise of the discovery, recognition, and the restored receptivity to whatever might be signified by “mother” was not merely the daughter’s, but our own. We who listened to the story that day could only have had our attention drawn to our own ears and the figurative deafness that might afflict us in relation to another’s generosity.16 With heightened awareness of this particular mode of perception, ears burning, passive hearing became active listening, which became more than just paying attention. Our ears like receivers tuning in, listening became a mode of anticipatory response to sounds and signals—most especially from the mother—yet to arrive. And arrive now she would.

For here was what happened next at Battery Park. Having thus declared that the story told was our own, Fr. Jerry concluded by asking the congregation once again to acknowledge “Mama Mary” by giving her a big round of applause: Thank you Mama Mary for being here!

Dear friends, I would like to end with a simple prayer for all of us. There is a song from Mama Mary for all of us here. And she’s asking all of us to pray.

Right now, I’d like to ask you all to bow your head in prayer, and I invite you now dear brothers and sisters, to put your right hand over your heart, and 471

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close your eyes in humility, let Mama Mary bless you now, in a very special way. Listen and pray, listen to your mother.

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About midway through this final benediction, music faded in over P.A. systems that were placed along the perimeter of the congregation. It was a simple tune, a lone woman’s voice accompanied by a single acoustic guitar, singing: “I am here.

I am your mother. Do not fear, for I am here.” The discursive mode had shifted radically from that of narration to one of mimesis. Whereas Fr. Jerry’s strategy was to surround congregants with a narrative hall of mirrors, one intended to provoke identifications, the initial effect produced by being enveloped by Mary’s voice was the foreclosure of reflexivity. Of all the music performed that day, it must be noted, this song was markedly different. Unlike all others, there was no musician or singer on stage. There appeared, in other words, no body to which this sweet voice could properly belong. This absence is what lent the voice its distinct quality of being everywhere and nowhere locatable, producing a field of sound. I watched as the crowd grew silent and contemplative, lulled by the disembodied voice of this female “I” that came, truly, from out of the blue. At first, during Mary’s lullabye, the response of many people in the congregation seemed to be one of introspection.

Having followed Fr. Jerry’s instructions, congregants sat with their eyes shut and hands over their hearts, giving physical gesture to this containment.

Weeping is the utmost expression of emotional ambivalence. When a number of women and men started weeping silently, it was impossible to know at the time whether or not this response was generated out of blissful relief found in the voice of Mary, or expressed mournful acknowledgement of its simulation (Ivy 1995). Like the transplanted ear of the girl in Fr. Jerry’s story, the audiotape-recorded voice of Mary that enveloped the crowd marked the limit of fully realizable presence.

Although the song voicing a first person “I” enabled a certain appearance of the Blessed Mother, it also bore within itself traces of dissimulation and inauthenticity.

Still enveloped in Mary’s “I am here!,” those who were weeping began crying aloud. I watched one woman, whose red hair and pink sweater had earlier exuded a cheery disposition, lift her head as her mouth dropped open, wailing openly, her shoulders shaking. For her and others who began crying audibly, something of a crisis seemed to arise, a rupture in their own sealed, interiorized experience. The externalization of weeping into crying out loud gave expression a more articulate, more explicitly mournful, form. But again, what was being mourned—the fantasy of the maternal voice (Kristeva 1980, 1987; Silverman 1988), or the momentarily lost subject, was impossible to determine for sure.

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It was difficult to make sense of this outpouring of emotion until I took note of what happened next, when Father Jerry stepped in, as if to rescue the congregants from their freefall in this gap of indeterminacy. Drawing from his authority, Fr. Jerry brought the affected and distressed congregation back into the realm of the individual and the orderly by introducing, as he had done with the inspirational talk, a reflective field by means of which congregants could safely reestablish positions of subjectivity: before the song had ended, when the expressions of many of the crowd became audible, their outbursts of grief unbearable, Fr. Jerry began echoing the voice of Mary, his own now responding with “I am here!” Over the song he then asked the congregation to turn to one another and declare “I am with you. I am your brother! I am your sister! Do not fear, I am here!” Following his instructions, congregants turned to one another and began to announce, “I am here! I am your brother (or sister)!” The weeping and wailing died down. The “I”s of the individual devotees established among them the symbolic frame by which the mournful separation away from the Mother’s voice was accomplished (Lacan 1977:1–7).

The outcome of this was wondrous. No longer enveloped by Mary’s voice, the congregants opened up as recipients of external signs from Mary. Led by Fr. Jerry into singing “Immaculate Mother” (a traditional Marian hymn), the entire congregation was on its feet, raising their handkerchiefs high in the air, waving at the sky. There was a small commotion in the crowd as a couple of women started jumping up and down, heralding with cries and shouts the visible and miraculous sign sent by Mary—the “dancing sun” that spun and shook. Exorcised by the Father, the interior voice generated by technological fidelity cast itself out from the intimate realm of sound far away into the distant dominion of sight.

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PROPHESY AND THE ASSURANCE OF PROTECTION

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D new york n washington bombings were planned long ago nd d FBI now knows d mastermind. Dey r now hunting down NOSTRADAMUS.

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—Text message circulated in Manila after September 11

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“The current New York project is Mary’s Army’s [the M.A.S.S. Media Movement’s] biggest. The World Marian Peace Regatta is a prayer rally for peace in a world suffering from 40 wars at present. It strives to achieve peace through the protection of the Virgin Mary” (M.A.S.S. Media Movement 1999). The souvenir program of the World Marian Peace Regatta articulates this mission in several 473

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different ways, as it was the primary motivation stated for the ceremonial procession of Marian images and consecration of the United Nations to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It was also one of the justifications for holding the event on September 11, three days after the conventional date celebrated as Mary’s birthday, and three days before the opening of the general assembly at the United Nations as it was to take place that year of 1999.

Exactly two years later, the realization that might have seemed evident to many—that the ritual procession (mediation, yet again) intended to invoke and secure Mary’s shield of protection had catastrophically failed—was itself preempted by what was perceived by one Manila based community of Filipino Marian devotees as evidence to the contrary: locutions and visions now interpreted as irrefutably prophetic, revealed by several internationally known European visionaries.

This community was organized around a weekly Rosary prayer meeting. My introduction to the group was first facilitated by several of the participants’ own involvement with the World Marian Peace Regatta, but my enduring interest was in that this group represented all that seemed to have fallen in the blind spot of scholarship on Filipino Catholicism. Young, urban, professional, educated, uppermiddle and upper class, this group was the antithesis of the “folk” figured by “folk Catholicism”—the paradigm that has long-dominated studies on Filipino Christian devotion and experience (e.g., Cannell 1999; Ileto 1979; Lynch 1975). Many of the regular participants were as likely to have made a pilgrimage to Lourdes, say, as they were to have frequented Marian shrines in the Philippines. They closely monitored missives on prayer and doctrine that were dispatched by the Holy See, at the same time that their devotional practices and spiritual exercises were strongly influenced by charismatic Catholicism. It would not have been unheard of, for instance, to witness at one of these meetings a participant getting “slain by the Holy Spirit,” followed later by an in-depth dialogue on how the latest encyclical letter from the Pope might affect the worldwide campaign to declare the fifth Marian dogma.17 Our prayers were in English, although the lingua franca of the group was the hybrid known as Taglish (Tagalog–English), with varied inflections that betrayed the elite schools that many members of this group had attended. The format of the prayer meetings always began with the recitation of the Rosary, preferably kneeling for all 30 decades comprising ten Hail Marys and one Our Father that were organized into “mysteries,” events that narrate the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ. On completing the long cycle of prayers there might be readings from the thick tome referred to as the “Blue Book,” a compilation of messages given by

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Mary to an Italian priest named Fr. Gobbi via the mode of divine communication known as interior locution,18 followed by the singing of popular church songs in both Tagalog and English. The devotional part of the evening would conclude by saying Grace for the often elaborate meal that would follow. At this point the gathering would take a markedly convivial turn of joking, tsika (small talk) and tsismis (gossip).

At one of the meetings after September 11, however, the light conversation that usually concluded our gatherings was replaced by exegesis of the recent events. One of the most active members of the group, whom I shall call Joel, had brought along to the meeting a hefty book entitled True Life in God, comprising daily entries written by a Greek Orthodox woman named Vassula Ryden.19 These entries are based on messages Ryden claims to have received, also via interior locution. Opening up to a page that was a photocopy of her handwritten diary, dated September 11, 1991, Joel read: “the earth will shiver and shake—and every evil built into Towers will collapse into a heap of rubble and be buried in the dust of sin!” He went on to talk about how the date for the World Marian Peace Regatta was chosen not only for its being a weekend falling conveniently between Mary’s celebrated birth date and the opening of the UN assembly, but because the famous Irish visionary, Christina Gallagher, received a message from Mary in July of that year saying that the event had to be on September 11, 1999. He then relayed the oft-repeated vision that appeared to Gallagher in 1992, during her first visit to the Philippines, where she saw Mary, perched on the globe, crush the head of a black serpent. This vision would be tied to the divine message that Gallagher received at the end of her visit: that the triumph of Mary’s Immaculate Heart would begin in the Philippines and then spread throughout the world.20 Even snippets from popular culture could not escape prophetic suggestion.

Backing down from his own intensity with a chuckle, Joel added: “even the scene in Godspell the movie, where Jesus and John are singing ‘All for the Best.’ The camera pans out to show that they’re on top of the World Trade Center.” He then broke into song, “Some men are born to live at ease, doing what they please, richer than the bees are in honey.” Here, Joel was mapping out a constellation of foreboding signs, as we listened with rapt attention. In the wake of the cataclysm, he was providing an interpretative framework that would have already accounted for its occurrence. The impact of this retrospective reading was most tellingly registered when one young woman sighed into the conversation: “it is so nice to feel prepared, di ba (right)?”

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The recourse to prophesy in making sense of the destruction in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania was of course not limited to this context. Although told in a joking manner, the text message that circulated among Filipinos after September 11 was just a local version of the broader circulation of what many entertained as the realization of prophesy. What is of interest to me here is the particular path of associations tethered to prophesy that was drawn by this group, and the power that this configuration of connections exerted to sidestep the question of efficacy in the World Marian Peace Regatta. To repeat an earlier formula, where one form of mediation failed (here ritual), another media—other mediums, rather—appear in its place: a woman who claims to serve, quite literally, as Christ’s instrument, and a visionary to whom Mary’s mantle of protection over the Philippines had long been revealed. Especially suggestive is how this latter vision provided a symbolic inversion of the World Marian Peace Regatta. Whereas the celebration at Battery Park presented a Filipino imaginary of the world and the representability of its nations, the Irishwoman’s vision acts as an extranational agent (Rutherford 2008), proclaiming to (certain) Filipinos the place of the Philippines in a global order, divinely authorized, of Marian redemption.

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OVERCOMING COINCIDENCE With the three vignettes revolving around the World Marian Peace Regatta, I have attempted to illustrate some of the ways in which various forms of religious mediation and the mass media reveal their affinities, at times enabling or intensifying one another’s efficacious transmissions and capacities for signification, at others rescuing one from the consequences of a breakdown in mediation. The way this worked in detail I found to be mercifully explicable. At the Marian event that took place in New York City in 1999, the imagined efficacy of Mary’s capacity to mediate peace and provide protection to the world was intensified and to a certain extent enabled by the power of the mass media to extend the reach of those images beyond their physical location.21 In the vignette of Fr. Jerry’s sermon and the disembodied singing voice of Mary, we witness how technologies of sound reproduction enhance—if not produce—religious encounter and experience. And in the prayer meeting post-9/11, we see how some Marian devotees associated with the World Marian Peace Regatta managed the possible implications of ritual failure via recourse to the prophesies of other divinity mediating figures, notably foreign to the Philippines.

Yet haunting these descriptions is a force that I found much more difficult to contain. The coincidence of dates and locale between the festive celebration

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and the mass destruction of the attacks on the United States produced a shock that at once fed back into the mechanics of production and modes of reception I outlined, and exceeded them (Pemberton 2003). In this milieu of unsettling repetition, Marian devotion of the sort I have been describing would always retain a power of preemption, of prior appropriation of the meaning of events. This preemptive power should not be reduced to a mere providentialist orientation, nor worse, to the culturalist assertion that Filipinos simply believe in a highly interventionist God. It is, rather, a deeply social and politically concocted claim for oneself and one’s community of what I term privilege of preparedness—to draw from the comment of the young woman in the prayer group. Part of this privilege comes from participation in what I shall call Marian internationalism: access to engagement and the exchange of religious knowledge and media with Marian groups all over the world, resources to travel to congresses and shrines abroad, and time free from labor to dedicate to propagating devotion. But in the context of the global Philippines, whose emblem is the OFW, part of this privilege comes from enjoying a fundamental exemption from harm the forms of which are all too familiar: abusive employers, discrimination and alienation, and, most recently, getting caught in the unpredictable violence of war.

The connection, thus, between the World Marian Peace Regatta and the kidnapping of Angelo de la Cruz is not just the field of interlinked dates and consequences—links many of which, as we know, were forged by gross prevarications advanced by the George W. Bush administration—that bring them into relatedness. It is rather that the phenomenon of transnational labor emblematized by the latter serves as the enabling Other of the former. The harrowing vision of the abducted de la Cruz burst forth onto the Philippine mediascape as a reminder of the possibilities for peril which the state—with its massive bureaucracy dedicated to smoothly facilitating the movement of Filipino workers worldwide and remittances back home—continually suppresses. The Marian world conjured by the staging of the World Marian Peace Regatta represented an alternative vision of international movement that I would argue was unimaginable without the history of the migration of Filipino citizens, including the astounding acceleration in the past 20 years of the deployment of sojourning workers around the globe. Yet the lure, and perhaps efficacy, of this alternative vision depended on its being an idealization, one that disavowed the movement of biological bodies across time and space by putting in their place images of Mary, a figure of perfect humanity, precisely invulnerable to violence and decay.22

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IMMACULATE TRANSMISSION, OR THE PROMISE OF PRAYER Although of a kind with the mediating capacities of Mary that I have examined in the World Marian Peace Regatta, we will recall that the miraculous appearances of the bleeding statue and the dream vision of Mary in the wake of the abduction of Angelo de la Cruz urged a different response to the crisis. Although you still saw the logic of substitution assert itself—where the mass media, and moreover, political mediation failed, religious mediation appeared in its place—perfect substitution was not fulfilled. The bleeding statue was an openly indeterminate sign, and the dream apparitions of Mary did not relay messages that specifically informed of the hostage situation. What both visions conveyed or were interpreted to convey, rather, were injunctions to perform another kind of communication altogether, that of prayer.

And pray everyone did, so it seemed. There were local and nationwide vigils.

There were special Masses. On at least one television network, there was a public service announcement–type interlude that ran between every regularly scheduled program during which a lone male voice beseeched the Lord while the words of the prayer—in Tagalog—scrolled up the screen:

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Lord, we pray, protect Angelo de la Cruz from being beheaded. Touch the hearts of his captors, that they may be overcome with pity (awa) for Angelo.

Free his family’s hearts from fear, so that they may withstand this ordeal.

Merciful Father, guide each step of our government, of our president, in deciding how to achieve Angelo’s freedom. Angelo represents (kumakatawan) the hardships endured by the Filipino worker abroad. Please don’t let him meet the same fate as Flor Contemplacion, eight years ago. Please don’t abandon all of our family members in Iraq and in other dangerous places in the Middle East, we beseech you.

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This prayer does not mince words. Although the language retains some flourishes of more formal prayers, it states blatantly and upfront the present danger: the beheading (pagpugot) of Angelo de la Cruz. The prayer is not coy in declaring what is at stake in this potential act of violence: in using the word kumakatawan, one that draws on the literal image of the body (katawan) to describe Angelo’s relation to other OFWs, the prayer extends a single circumstance of danger into a general condition. The prayer refuses forgetting, finally: in invoking the name of Flor Contemplacion, the Filipino domestic worker who, accused of murdering a fellow domestic worker and her ward, was executed by hanging by the Singaporean state in 1995, it provides a grim reminder of the reality that has troubled

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the state-produced narrative of OFWs as the nation’s “New Heroes” (mga bagong bayani). Indeed, we might see the prayer as a script for the viewing—and notably Tagalog-speaking—public to directly voice a comprehensive commentary on the situation, at the same time that it served as a religious response to it; a response, furthermore, that in addressing itself directly to God suggests a desire for transcendent immediacy, or perfect transmission: transmission without the fear of mishearing or missed connection, such as that which had so bungled the hostage situation.

Three days of the media blackout passes when Arroyo finally breaks her silence, ordering the immediate departure of all Filipino troops from Iraq. Within a couple of days every Filipino of the peacekeeping mission returns home. On Tuesday, July 20, more than two weeks after he was abducted, Angelo de la Cruz is released.

When at last Arroyo speaks to the press, one of the reasons that she herself provides for her decision is that of divine assistance. It is to Mary, and in particular, to Our Lady of All Nations, that Arroyo herself prayed during those three days during which her administration kept silent. Her supplications to this particular patroness had precedent: in 2001, she asked Our Lady of All Nations to help with the release of several vacationers kidnapped by the bandit group the Abu Sayyaf, and “shortly after that,” Arroyo noted to reporters, “the release (of the hostages came). And so now, we’re praying to her again” (Cabacungan et al. 2004).

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CONCLUSION: ALL ARROYO’S INSTRUMENTS The national approval Arroyo received for the decision to withdraw the Filipino troops from Iraq was short-lived. Already poised to undermine her legitimacy at the time of the hostage crisis were accusations of fraud in the May 2004 elections that returned her to power (something that undoubtedly plagued her deliberations as she prayed to Our Lady of All Nations), and in the years between the hostage crisis and the present, criticisms of her administration’s abuses of power have increased. Political repression has worsened and extrajudicial killings have multiplied as students, journalists, activists, and workers are targeted by several of the administrations’ “counterinsurgency” and “antiterrorist” programs (Karapatan [Alliance for the Advancement of People’s Rights] 2007). Corruption scandals have exposed the unscrupulous business practices of several of the government’s highest-ranking officials—including members of the First Family. Rifts in the military, long in the making, have deepened, giving rise to at least one mutiny and recurring speculation over coups d’´etat. A state of emergency has already once been declared in response. In this milieu of deteriorating conditions—not infrequently compared to the martial law period of former President Ferdinand Marcos—the desire for

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immediacy that we saw in the televised prayer to God has taken another form: the demand for transparency.

Emblematizing this demand is “truth,” now the watchword for opponents of the Arroyo administration. In the lead up to several large rallies in February of 2008 calling for Arroyo’s resignation, unending references to “truth” issued from the lips of the diverse participants, including formerly ousted president Joseph Estrada, members of the Catholic clergy, activist leaders, and leftist groups (Aurelio and Aning 2008). In the face of this mobilization, some of Arroyo’s provincial supporters decided to stage counterdemonstrations against what they claimed was just “political noise . . . isolated in the so-called imperial Manila” (Guinto 2008). Who should become a part of these counterdemonstration efforts but Angelo de la Cruz himself, who traveled by bus to Manila from his hometown of Buenavista, in the province of Pampanga. “The President saved my life,” one newspaper quoted de la Cruz as saying, “this is the time for me and fellow OFWs to show support for the President, who only has our welfare in mind” (Guinto 2008). Malaca˜nang’s office of the press secretary—now perfectly operational—elaborated in a statement reporting that “Dela Cruz [sic] said he went to Manila to send this message that it’s not the ‘time for us to be divided as a nation,’ but . . . the right moment for the Filipinos to stand firm behind the President who brings growth, development, and economic miracles for the country” (Office of the Press Secretary Online [Republic of the Philippines] 2008).

Having once represented the worst possible consequences of the Philippines’ participation in the U.S. war in Iraq, Angelo de la Cruz now gives a different spin on the idiom of sacrifice that so strongly resonates with the plight of OFWs. Whether out of a sincere sense of indebtedness or because he was outright enlisted, and whether these are in fact his words or those of the administration’s media machine, de la Cruz nevertheless lent his famous face to transmit the message that sacrificing dissent is necessary for the greater economic good. But this most recent expenditure of his symbolic value betrays another actuality: if he no longer stands in the crosshairs of the “global war on terror” (or whatever it shall ultimately be named by the current administration), there are others who have fallen in his place.

For although the decision to withdraw Filipino troops abroad might have been a momentary triumph of national interests against U.S. empire, the long-term set up of the Philippines as a “second front” in these operations, and the license that has been taken with it, means that violence and the threat thereof are continually executed—often at close range. Moreover, because the global economic downturn has resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs for Filipinos worldwide, zones of conflict

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are again emerging as possible destinations for overseas work: in February of 2009, it was reported that the Philippine government was considering lifting the ban against sending workers to Iraq that was instated when Angelo de la Cruz was kidnapped, five years before (Macaraig 2009).

I conclude with this epilogue to the de la Cruz saga because it gathers together in one last series of substitutions, albeit to inglorious end, the ideas that I have sought to interweave throughout this essay. Where there was recourse to foreign prophesiers in preempting questions of ritual efficacy, there is here the resurrection of a national icon to buttress against accusations of political ineffectiveness. Where it was Mary whose mantle of protection was sought in a time of “40 wars,” it is now the female head of state to whom credit is given for saving lives. And in the place of divine intervention, we witness here the propagation of belief in miracles of a different sort: the “economic miracle,” or burgeoning of value that may come from Filipino labor in a global economy. This is not meant to be as sequential a set of occurrences as it may read—and it is certainly not intended to suggest a telos of secularization. On the contrary, the publicity stunt using Angelo de la Cruz brings together such familiar idioms of Catholic mediation that it confounds any easy distinction between the religious and the secular. But if these are repetitions, they are not ones that shall give rise to marvelous coincidence. They are, rather, well-worn strategies for foreclosing the possibilities that may follow in crisis’ wake.

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ABSTRACT In this essay, I examine several events involving Filipinos at home and abroad that organize themselves around convergences of mediation: sites and events where figures and practices of religious mediation interact with modern technologies of the mass media. Illustrating these at the center of the essay is an ethnography of a festival celebrating the Virgin Mary’s birthday that was organized by a Filipino devotional group and took place in New York City. Framing this event in the essay is a seemingly unrelated incident: the kidnapping of an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) by a group demanding that the Philippine government withdraw its coalition forces from Iraq.

One extraordinary coincidence and the appeal for divine intervention immediately links the two. What further draws these two events into relatedness, however, is that they both entail imaginaries of the global Philippines that are rooted in a shared history of transnational movement, but diverge owing to significant differences in socioeconomic status and physical vulnerability. For the religious imaginary wherein the Philippines is firmly and safely situated in a worldwide order of Marian redemption betokens the privilege to assume preemptive control over dangerous worlds via particular frameworks of interpretation. Using Filipino Marianism first as a lens through which to understand

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the range of affinities between religious and technological mediation, I then examine the ways in which such intermedial relationships reveal the associative paths that generate class-inflected interpretations of crisis and danger, as well as the strategies of power and control to which those paths give rise.

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Keywords: religion, mass media, mediation, Virgin Mary, war on terror, transnationalism, the Philippines, OFW

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NOTES Acknowledgments. Support for this research was provided by a Fulbright-Hayes DDRA Fellowship, a Wenner-Gren Foundation Small Grants Award for Anthropological Research, and a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. In the Philippines, I owe a great debt of gratitude to the Philippine American Educational Foundation, the Asian Center at the University of the Philippines, and all of those who shared their time, space, and stories with me. I am grateful for the questions and constructive comments on this material provided by audiences at the Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Riverside; the Department of Anthropology and Center for Philippine Studies at the University of Hawai‘i; the International Graduate Program at Stockholm University; and the Department of English and Kritika Kultura lecture series at the Ateneo de Manila University. Special thanks are owed to the Michigan Society of Fellows, and to the members of the Anthropology and History reading group at the University of Michigan for their vigorous read of an earlier version of this essay. Finally, I thank the three anonymous reviewers for their clear and concise critiques and recommendations, and CA editors Kim and Mike Fortun for their close reads, perceptive questions, and invaluable guidance through the revisions.

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The concept of “mediation” has been puzzled over by philosophers and theorists since Aristotle, who understood a “medium” to be that which literally occupies the space between the senseorgan and sensed-object, without which perception could not occur. It was Hegel, of course, who in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) would delineate “mediation” as the operative movement in the anxious oscillation of mutual recognition desired and required for the formation of self-consciousness.

An excellent comparative overview in this regard could be gleaned from Claverie (2003), Turner and Turner (1978), Blackbourn (1993), Christian (1996), and Bax (1991). One groundbreaking study relating specifically to Marian apparitions and globalization is V´asquez and Marquardt (2000).

Carolyn Brewer’s feminist reading of women and early conversion, Holy Confrontation: Religion, Gender, and Sexuality in the Philippines, 1521–1685 (2001), is only the most recent treatment of this topic of perennial interest to Philippine historians, feminists, and scholars. Other studies include Infante (1975), Cullamar (1986), and McCoy (1982). Neil Garcia, well-known for being the vanguard of Filipino queer studies has examined the place of effeminate males in the spiritual universe of pre-Hispanic communities; see Garcia (1996:125–162). Neferti Tadiar, finally, in an excellent essay on the Filipina megastar Nora Aunor, has brought the historical figure of the baylan to bear on a critique (and subversive possibilities) of mass culture; see Tadiar (2000:225–260).

Although there is widespread knowledge of pre-Hispanic society (incl. female or feminized figures such as the baylan), thanks to the nativist slant often taken by history curricula, rarely have I heard this casually stated as heavily informing contemporary Marian devotion.

Given the importance of her cult in the history of Catholicism, it is remarkable that the actual mentions of the mother of Christ in the gospels of the New Testament are few and far between. For a thoughtful discussion of the disparity between the scant scriptural evidence and the subsequent development of a theology of Mary (or “Mariology”), see Pelikan (1996:7–21).

See Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (1991).

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Talk delivered by Teresing Castillo, Marian Research Center, Lipa City, September 1, 2001.

Ms. Castillo is the visionary of Lipa, Batangas, where it is believed that the Virgin Mary appeared to her over a series of days in the late 1940s.

To conceive the world as picture, according to Heidegger’s essay (1977), is a defining act of modernity, one of objectification that enables the apprehension of the heterogeneity and systematicity of the world, thus making everything immanently representable.

Known as the “brain drain,” this mass migration of Filipinos owed itself to the following factors: (1) the U.S. Immigration Act of 1965; (2) the shortage of nurses in the United States; and (3) the worsening social and political environment in the Philippines in the wake of President Ferdinand Marcos’s declaration of Martial Law in 1972. The hemorrhaging of Filipino labor at this time was not limited to the Filipino professional class, however. In 1974, Marcos laid the foundation for what would become the massive bureaucracy that manages Filipino overseas contract workers today. By creating new labor export policies and the office of the Overseas Employment Development Board, the administration institutionalized the processing of overseas placement and made mandatory the remittance of a certain percentage of workers’ salaries.

These new policies were a swift response to the oil and building boom in the Middle East, which became one of the most common destinations of sojourning workers (Guevarra n.d.).

Studies of globalization and its effects on Filipino migrants and contract workers have burgeoned in the last 15 years, along with a broader scholarly interest in the Philippine diaspora (e.g., Choy 2003; Constable 1997; Faier 2008; Guevarra 2006; Manalansan 2003; Parre˜nas 2001, 2005, 2008; Rafael 1997; Rodriguez 2002; Tadiar 2004).

Owing to the important role that the Catholic Church played in supporting the anti-Marcos groups and galvanizing mass action during the days of the standoff between the military dissenters and Marcos forces, as well to the visibility of religious clergy and iconography among the throngs of people that camped out along the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) highway, the revolt has often been referred to as a “divine intervention” of sorts. See the introduction in the edited volume by Ach´utegui and Loyola School of Theology (1986).

For an excellent critique of this characterization, see Tadiar (2004:185–225). For a sober, historically grounded study that provides the background to understand the Church’s role in the revolt, see Youngblood (1990).

This is a reference to the theology of Mary that understands her role as a kind of redemptory “second Eve” (Warner 1976).

Interview with Baby Nebrida, Manila, January 25, 2001.

I have transcribed this verbatim (in its original English), using punctuation to convey the dramatic pauses in Fr. Jerry’s speech. Talk delivered on September 11, 1999.

In using the phrase “minus one” at the beginning of this talk, Fr. Jerry is playing on the popular Filipino name for Karaoke.

In The Gift of Death, Derrida writes sacrifice supposes the putting to death of the unique in terms of its being unique, irreplaceable, and most precious. It also therefore refers to the impossibility of substitution, the unsubstitutable; and then also to the substitution of an animal for man; and finally, especially this, by means of this impossible substitution itself, it refers to what links the sacred to sacrifice and sacrifice to secrecy. [1995:58]

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Although this might be akin to what in her study of Fundamentalist language and culture Susan Harding calls “narrative belief,” or that place “between conscious belief and willful unbelief” (2000: xii), the primary inspiration for my reading of the power of narrative in this sermon derives from the very different understanding as described in James Siegel’s remarkable readings of L´evi-Strauss in Naming the Witch (2006).

The Fifth Marian Dogma, yet to be declared by Papal decree, has become one of the major issues around which Marian groups from around the world have rallied and thus established common cause. This dogma would confer to Mary the titles “Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix, and Advocate,” each of which refer to a particular role she plays in relation to Christ. The other four dogmas are: (1) That Mary is the Mother of God (Theotokos); (2) That Mary was 483

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a Perpetual Virgin (Aeiparthenos); (3) That Mary was Immaculately Conceived; and (4) That Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven (the Assumption; see Lane n.d.).

Interior locution refers to a mode of spiritual communication wherein a person, usually in a state of intense prayer, receives insights or messages believed to be from a divine source. It is most frequently cited in contrast to visionary phenomena or experience, although no less significant a type of divine encounter.

For more on Vassula Ryden see her website (1986).

For the full description of this and other messages Christina Gallagher received while visiting the Philippines see Gallagher n.d.

In her ethnography of El Shaddai, the charismatic renewal movement most popular among the urban poor in the Philippines, Katharine L. Wiegele similarly demonstrates the power of the mass media (namely radio and television) to transform the boundaries and scale of ritual space; see Wiegele (2005:41–58).

Here, I mean to invoke the third and fourth Marian dogmas: the Immaculate Conception, which, contrary to popular misunderstanding, does not refer to Christ’s birth but, rather, Mary’s having been born without original sin; and the Assumption, which declares that when she died, Mary was ascended into heaven with her body intact.

Editor’s Notes: Cultural Anthropology has published other essays on Filipinos in diaspora. See Lieba Faier’s “Runaway Stories: The Underground Micromovements of Filipina Oyomesan in Rural Japan” (2008), Nicole Constable’s “At Home but Not at Home: Filipina Narratives of Ambivalent Returns” (1999), and for an extensive list of Cultural Anthropology essays on diaspora, see http://culanth.org/?q=node/155.

Cultural Anthropology has also published many essays on religion. See particularly Omri Elisha’s “Moral Ambitions of Grace: The Paradox of Compassion and Accountability in Evangelical Faith-Based Activism” (2008); Brian Silverstein’s “Disciplines of Presence in Modern Turkey: Discourse, Companionship, and the Mass Mediation of Islamic Practice” (2008); Todd Ochoa’s “Versions of the Dead: Kalunga, Cuban-Kongo Materiality, and Ethnography” (2007); and Anne Meneley’s “Fashions and Fundamentalisms in Fin-de-Si´ecle Yemen: Chador Barbie and Islamic Socks” (2007). For a full list of Cultural Anthropology essays on religion, see http://culanth.org/?q=node/131.

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