Chapter 46
Sister Lolita Joanna Sanchez: Activist Nun w/
A Mission to the Poor
I met Sister Lolita Joanna Sanchez in
1999. I was then Vice President of the Convention of Philippine Baptist Church.
I think, by then Sister Lolita Joanna was involved with Gabriela Women’s Party.
I met her again in early 2005. We have a very wonderful sharing of our
ministries..
I invited her to visit me at the
Convention of Philippine Baptist Churches, where we have started a small
printing and publishing shop, under Alternative Resource Development Center,
Inc., (ARDC), an NGO that prints and publish small books and pamphlets for
pastors, development workers and people involved in advocacy works.
We were holding our small office shared
with Western Visayas Ecumenical Council (WVEC) at the ground floor of the new
CPBC building.
I would like her to meet my wife,
Hesther, who was editing the small books and pamphlets we print and published.
During that time, we also produced some
sermons and messages on Cassette
Tapes, CD’s and VCD’s. I Sister Lolita Joanna Sanchez to
interview for an article, we would like to include in our small books,
PERSONALITIES IN OUR TIME series, that will be published that year. We would
like to share her life story with our readers. We we plan to publish our new book in 2006.
During that time, Sister Lolita Joanna Sanchez was 62 years old.
She looked frail. But inside that frail body was a strong mind, a hardened
spirit, raw courage, strong determination to continue the fight for the cause
of poor and struggling Filipino peasants and farm laborers, helping build a society with equality, freedom and justice for
all.
In the 1980’s, during the darkest days
of President Marcos’s martial rule, when the Bill of Rights in the Constitution
was trampled by the agents of the dictatorship, Sister Lolita Joanna, against
the order of her Congregation was at the front, educating and organizing the
peasants and sugar workers in Negros to assert and reclaim their God given
rights.
Often, she was seen standing at improvised bamboo platforms in small villages
in the countryside, at the front of a thousand farmers and sugar labourers, as
she condemned martial law and demanded the return of freedom, God’s precious
gift to all people.
Her wisdom and voice, in earlier years,
were used to teach children of the
elites in schools run by the Dominican Sisters.
Now, she facilitated the education of the poor peasants and workers, teaching
them knowledge needed in the struggle for liberation and national democracy.
Sister Lolita Joanna entered the
Dominican congregations thinking, in the religious life, she can served God and people. She entered the congregation
without telling her parents of her decision.
In her teens, before the Vatican
Council, she said, she feared attending services of non-catholic churches. They
were taught that “outside the Catholic church there is no salvation.” These
thoughts were planted deep and stocked in her minds for years.
In 1969 she took her perpetual vow. She
was assigned to teach in schools run by
her congregation. She was sent to different schools to teach-–in Bacolod City,
Iloilo City and Antique. Years later she was sent to the United States to teach
in the schools run by her congregations in United States. But she said, she was confused with the mission of her
congregation.
She said: “Most of the congregation do not serve the poor. Their ideas of
serving the people were through prayers, visiting the rich, teach schools were
students are mostly children of the rich. The poor, marginalized, oppressed and
exploited were not in the churches and schools.”
She joined the Blessed Virgin
Missionaries in Bacolod City. The congregation was a split from the Carmelites
Mission in Mindanao. The sisters cannot work anymore with Carmelites and they
went to Bacolod City. They were able to convince a rich landlord to allow them
to use one of the buildings in the city.
For some years, the Blessed Virgin
Missionaries were not accepted by Bishop Antonio Fortich of Bacolod. For years,
they worked without the blessings of the Bishop. But, eventually, the Bishop , after more than
5 years accepted them as another missionary workers of the church.
The Blessed Virgin Sisters worked in
several slums in Bacolod City. She said: “The
slums were heavily crowded and congested. They huts they people lived in the slums
of Bacolod City were not suited for humans to live.”
In this slums, she witnessed the inhuman kind
of life suffered by many Filipinos. She witness these in their hardest forms.
She cannot believed that life could be hard as these, for many people of
Bacolod City.
She said: “The elites and rich members of the churches sat on the pews every
Sunday, as if they have not seen or heard the hardship and sufferings of poor people around them.”
In the 80’s Sister Lolita Joanna started also working with
political detainees in Bacolod City. Marcos military agents had thrown many
promising young men and women into jails. Here Sister Lolita Joanna began to
have conversations with the political prisoners, young men and women where in
prisons, not for criminal offenses but for their political beliefs.
They were imprisoned for they expressed
and exposed the farce Philippine
independence and the bankruptcy of the elitist democracy that chained majority
of Filipinos in poverty, nearly a hundred years.
She submerged deep into the political
struggles. She. worked in the slums, teaching, organizing, facilitating,
mobilizing slum dwellers for mass actions, demonstrations and people’s rallies.
She was sometimes assigned to the
countryside, in the CHICK areas of Negros Occidental, where rebel forces were
concentrated and waging a deadly battle with the government forces.
She experienced the hard and painful
military hamletting, in Sipalay town and other towns that brought people down, and concentrated
them in camps, wheres situations were unfit for human life. She worked for
several months, working with other sisters
helping the victims of hamletting,
living in that unbearable situations.
After working 20 years as a Dominican
sister and 15 years participating in the people’s struggle, Sister Lolita
Joanna decided to change the pattern of her life. She left the sisters’ congregations. She changed her nun’s habit
with ordinary clothes of a working woman.
She worked with a legal organization
that pushed stronger the struggle for social, economic and political change of
society.
She feel in love. She fall in love with
a fellow fighter for national democracy.
They decided to get married. On
May 30, 1984, she and Jose Mabayag made their vows of love and fedility to each other in service to
the masses. Jose Madayag was a former fighter in the liberation struggle.
They lived as a
family. They have a son, who they cared and trained to pursue the task they have committed their
lives-- the freedom and liberation of the Filipino people from the farce
democracy we were made to believe.
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