Evening Vigil Mass - Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church - May 3rd, 2014

     Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church is a smaller Catholic Church connected to a school. It is beautiful inside with the stations of the cross and life size colored statues of Jesus and Mary, as well as the Golden Eucharist holder and open Bible on both sides of the altar.

     Before I arrived and read the magazine they had for vocations. Apparently Vestel Virgins are a still a thing, you just have to talk to your Bishop...it only applies to women though, which again with the obsession with female sexuality that religion seems to have (like the native religion Cuzco where the Priestesses were kept locked away for their virginity to remain pure). 

    The congregation is old and when I arrived contradictory. Everyone who came sat in their own pew and had distance between them. It was private, though before I'd heard two people conversing about life and in one case what sounded like fighting. Once the service started everything settled down, and an older woman announced the theme as being a journey as we would be journeying with the apostles.

    The theme I got was different. First, before we get to the sermon. Besides the fact that sound carries (so the fighting was loud before the service as well as every conversation) the music wasn't my thing.

     Now for the pros. The priest was one of the most humble of men. His favorite quote was him admitting that he doesn't have what the congregation has. That the priest may be a stand in for the Sacrament but based off the readings...Jesus is where two or more people in relationship are. This was the story, which the priest saw as a metaphor since the town the apostles were heading to there is no archeological evidence for of it even existing and Jesus appearing and speaking to them (them discussing the Bible amongst themselves lead to them returning to the "City of Peace" Jerusalem, after the conflict and lost place they were. I think this shows that to do good and to live with virtue there has to be those who you are being or virtuous to. He expressed how this was important to him and his ministry as a priest. It was a powerful sermon and definitely the best part.

    I had to leave early to catch the next Church visit but I plan on visiting again...at the very least to talk to the priest who was definitely one of the most humble and smart men I've heard up on the podium.

A Tale of Submission and Resistance - Monastery of Saint Catherine of Siena - Cuzco, Peru - August 20th, 2013

                                          The Monastery of St. Catherine of Siena

     My visit to the Monastery of St. Catherine of Siena would be one of my favorite visits during the trip, at least in hindsight of the blog (and also being one of the most disturbing too). It was here that the face of colonialism was most obvious (one of the walls that makes up the Monastery used to be a place where Inca Women were kept who had taken vows of chastity).

     First, the Monastery is very beautiful. It is a collection of art that is almost Zen like in its simplicity in capturing the major events of the Gospel.
    
     Second, The Monastery itself has almost ceased to be one. It now functions as a museum showing how the members of Catherine's order lived. The immediate thing that became obvious was power dynamic. Much like the cloistered Inca women were beholden to the Inca Priests, so to the nuns. It was here that there was  tiny confessional tied to the wall so the nuns would never see a man or the man responsible for their souls and confession. The abbess may have had a lot of power within the Monastery, but the lowliest of Priest would still wield more power than her.

    In both cases it is complete control of a women's sexuality by men and seeing that them losing that will somehow lessen them. Purity becomes a form of control so great that an entire segment of a populace is cut off from the opposite sex. 

     This tangent is actually tied into a story that we were told the day before by Puma. There was a woman who wanted to become a medicine women, but the village elders rejected her. Keep in mind, before this they had done nothing as she suffered from an abusive husband too. They laughed her away and it was only when she'd faced the darkness and contemplated killing herself that she had the experience of the Spirits of the Mountains talking to her and teaching her, she came back and confronted the elders and today she is now respected as a medicine women in the surrounding communities.

     Saint Catherine also shows power within the Church as a teacher, even if she could never speak for Christ the way a Priest could during Mass. I guess for her era she fought for power as best she could. One does not become famous sitting down, a person has to be active and fighting in some way, even if it is by removing oneself from the game the way the Taoist and Buddhist Masters did, just like many of the Catholic Saints.

     The final bit is about Tupac II the last Inca King. It was today that I went to the museum and learned about his resistance against the Mita slave system that the Spanish had committed against the native population. His aims were extreme, but sadly I don't know what other alternatives were really available to a native man who had no power within Spanish society. Well, what does this have to do with Saint Catherine Monastery? Well the time the Church could have brought about peace rather than backing the oppressors, tehy back the oppressors. Saint Catherine Monastery gave a blessed Jesus figurine to clear the souls of the men who brutally executed Tupac, and the local Dies labeled Tupac and heretic and let that excite the mob leading to his execution.

      The Jesus on the Cross that was given to the exectuionors now sits in the Regional Museum of Cuzco. The Monastery out of guilt refused to take it back and so it as people realized what Tupac II had been trying to do to change an unjust system (even if it was in an immoral way). People, and the Monastery at least realized they'd been immoral doing nothing and allowing the slavery of the native populace to continue leading to Tupac's revolution in the first place.