Look de Caribbean Saints there!

By Fr Martin Sirju

I visited the Canboulay street theatre on Carnival Friday last. When I arrived at 4.30 a.m., the place was packed and I had to gently push my way through to get a spot from which I could get a good view, which I never did.

I wish I were taller that morning. Never mind.

I piggy-backed on the cell phone images of some folks who had selfie sticks. The view from the sticks was much clearer than the view from the large screen. It was striking to see half of that thick crowd comprised teenagers and young adults. They came to ‘church’ that morning.

One of the organisers of the event is the well-known Eintou Pearl Springer, who, formerly of Catholic upbringing, now practises as Orisha. This is not surprising.

I don’t think Catholicism in its present form caters to the full range of subjectivities of African peoples – their historical, psychospiritual and cultural experience – so many of them have to find it elsewhere.

At the end of the Canboulay re-enactment, Springer spoke several times of “the ancestors”. I wish that word would become more commonplace in our Catholic liturgical parlance.

We speak of “the saints” but we have no official ones on Caribbean soil. I don’t see how that can rest well with Catholics when the faith has been planted here for well over 500 years. I certainly don’t.

It explains my inhibition to call some of the names of the saints listed for feast days and memorias. I don’t think I am being racist just because most of them are white, whether from the east or west. I don’t think I am a cultural racist either, one that hates European or Mediterranean soil and values only Caribbean soil.

I feel slighted, also insulted, that the Church is only now beginning to develop the mechanisms to hallow our sacred ancestors in faith, those patriarchs and matriarchs who bequeathed to us an analogous corpus of the ‘Law and the Prophets’. Would Rome ever have the capacity to measure something like that? I am just beginning to think maybe.

I often think we don’t have officially proclaimed saints because at the time we didn’t need them. The Europe from which we inherited our Christianity had much to boast about and much to be ashamed of.

Those who brought the faith left a rich tradition of devotion, sacramental worship, unbelievable sacrifice in leaving family and country behind, some never to see them again, and inspiring stories of the saints and holiness.

But they also brought with them cultural contempt, racism, a myopic soteriology [salvation theory], a mentality of war, slavery, and its attendant cruelties.

They did not understand our local forms of mysticism, patterns of family life, cultural celebrations (especially Carnival) and that, as VS Naipaul pointed out, we were “transplanted populations”, brought here against our will, fighting to survive.

The late Rex Nettleford once said: “In Europe and North America people live side by side; in the Caribbean they live together.” We never suffered a Thirty-Year War nor an Albigensian Genocide.

The cruelty of the slavery system created a kind of Pax Caribbeana, where the enslaved and freed populations lived in relative peace, respecting one another’s ethnicities and religions. The soil was naturally saintly only to be despoiled by our current penchant for violence.

I always considered it the grand irony that European clergy accused common-law couples of “living in sin” when the very system of slavery engineered by the colonial masters, of which they were part, deliberately sought to break up family ties and marriage.

That we survived it all to become leaders in various fields of scholarly accomplishments worldwide indicates that that womb of cruel history was also a sacred gestation period secured by our own saints, mystics, and martyrs. The Church was staring saints in the face but did not recognise them.

Many revisionist historians regard some of our revered official saints as misogynist, sexist, anti-Semitic and whatever else. I am not too bothered by this because God writes straight on crooked lines.

Saints are to be judged by the overall corpus of their written works, personal life, and public impact. What are saints but imperfect perfections, in Europe as here.

I would nonetheless be delighted when Archbishop Anthony Pantin is declared a saint and will regard him as one even if he is not. I urge us to think of those words from the Spiritual Baptist and Orisha traditions – “the ancestors” – our saints.

I was told one of our Dominican priests, the late Fr Micky O’Connor, when doing Benediction, used to include other names in the Divine Praises.

Not only “Blessed be St Joseph her most chaste spouse” but also “Blessed be Tantie Mabel who bakes all the lovely bread” etc. He was along the right track. He saw what the institutional Church did not.

But my Church is my Church and I love it still. Alas, I have hope in the “world church” that Karl Rahner spoke about in 1979 and that Pope Francis seems to understand more than any other pope in recent memory.

Saints from every soil will eventually be proclaimed, not in my lifetime of course. In the meantime, I will comfort myself with an adage: “The Church thinks in centuries and plans for eternity.”