Naked truth: saving Carnival from its own excesses

By Fr Robert Christo

Vicar for Communications

Is Carnival time again in T&T and, as usual, it is turning out to be a feast for the senses, too. The rhythm of the steel and iron, the shimmer of sequins (or lack of), the smell of bake and shark drifting over the Savannah Grass. The laughter, the freedom, the flava near the Big Stage, the aerobic Soca pumping like a second heartbeat.

Yet, within that same sensory explosion, something deeper is happening. Something tender, beautiful, and extremely frightening all at once. Carnival is no longer only about Monday and Tuesday on the road. It is a cultural battleground for the human body and the human soul—as portrayed in Minshall’s 1985 costume Sacred and the Profane.

And our Calypso history has always known this tension. From Calypsonian Sparrow calling out society with sharp morality—”gone too far “, to Black Stalin reminding us not to “bring no sorrow,” to David Rudder lifting the nation with anthems of consciousness, Carnival has always held joy and sorrow in the same breath.

Over sexualisation and a new cultural line

In recent years, the over sexualisation of Carnival has moved from concerning to obscenely alarming. The beads are not smaller but near absent, the nakedness bolder, the hedonistic abandon louder.

But now we have dangerously crossed another line. Imagine sex toys are being placed in bags sponsored for ‘giveaways! Masturbation tools, and condoms are marketed as accessories of empowerment?

For teenagers, for young adults, for families trying to make sense of the time, how do we as concerned citizens address these hot issues? Something sacred has again slipped away. This is not prudishness. This is a confrontation with a cultural spiral that kills the dignity of the human person.

In 1962, The Mighty Conqueror sang in picong about the ‘Death of Sparrow’ to symbolically warn that the culture itself can die drastically. And this year Karen Asche, one of the contenders in the Dimanche Gras, ‘Nobody Wins’, echoes a deep truth. When sexuality becomes self-worship and self-absorption, nobody wins. Not our children. Not our marriages. Not our future. Certainly not our churches.

The Church’s own wound and the need for honesty

As a Church, we must be honest. We cannot speak about distortions of sexuality without admitting our own failures. Clerical sexual abuse, paedophilia, and the coverups that wounded so many are part of our own painful history.

Before we speak of salt and light as referred to in Matthew’s Gospel, we must speak of repentance and justice. There is no moral authority without moral humility and accountability. And yet, healing begins when truth is not hidden. Grace begins to work where honesty begins to breathe.

Calypso has always forced the nation to tell the truth. It forces the Church to do the same. When good people say nothing, evil wins. When salt loses its saltiness, everything becomes normal—and that is scary!

Salt, light, and the Gospel’s cultural alarm

Still, the Gospel gives us a mandate. Jesus warns that if salt loses its taste, it is thrown out. That is not a poetic warning. It is a pastoral alarm. A society without moral salt slides into tastelessness, a kind of cultural numbness. If you lose your Christian distinctiveness, you lose your capacity to transform anything around you. And Carnival, with all its beauty and peril, is exactly the place where salt must be rubbed in.

This is why we cannot bless sin. We can only bless people, bless culture where there is hope, and bless paths that lead to God.

Blessing the stage and rubbing salt into evil

Last year when I walked out on stage Dimanche Gras last year dressed like an astronaut to bless a Carnival event, some wondered what a priest was doing dey. But blessing a space is not blessing every action within it. It is an act of spiritual reclamation, a way of salting the very spot where evil tries to plant itself. Salt disinfects. Salt preserves. Salt wakes up the tongue. So too must the Christian disciple awaken the conscience of the culture. As Bunji Garlin would say in ‘The Road Man’, sometimes you have to walk boldly into the space, not run from it. As Machel Montano reminds us with ‘Like Ah Boss’, the Christian does not cower. And young artistes like Voice keep telling us in songs like ‘Far from Finished’ that hope can rise again inside the culture.

US Bishop Robert Barron reminds us holiness is not withdrawal, it is mission. Joy is not self-absorption—it is self-gift.

Theology of the Body vs the Sexual Revolution

St John Paul II’s The Theology of the Body teaches that the human body speaks a language. It reveals dignity, communion, and the capacity for love. But the modern sexual revolution has twisted that language into something transactional, self-inventing and self-serving.

Pleasure without gift. Nakedness without reverence. Desire without destiny.

And the irony is that self-absorption leads not to freedom but to pure misery. Every psychologist in Trinidad and Tobago can tell you that narcissism eventually collapses in on itself.

A masquerader who is only performing for and on themselves eventually gets lost in their own costume. One must remember that there is life after Carnival.

Even Kes, in the sweetness of ‘Savannah Grass,’ reminds the nation that joy is something communal, not something consumed.

A redeemed vision: The CARNIVAL acronym

So how do we redeem Carnival? How do we offer an alternative that is joyful, not judgemental? Caribbean, not puritanical? Catholic, not crushing? Here is a new acronym for CARNIVAL, a path to re-imagination.

C – Celebrate culture with dignity and moderation

A- Affirm the body and its parts as temple, not toys

R- Respect boundaries, yours and others

N- Nuture healthy relationships

I- Ignite joy through service, self-emptying and creativity

V – Value virtue over vanity

A- Adore God above all things and people

L- Live as real salt and light in d’mas

A final word of salt and wisdom

Maybe that is what we need this year. Not condemnation. Not withdrawal. But real blessing as contender Terri Lyons will deliver at Calypso Monarch Finals. And also, a new imagination to rub salt in the excesses for the Greatest Show on Earth. Carnival is a gift. But every gift needs wisdom. And wisdom tastes like real salt.