An Unusual Holy Week

As I mentioned in a post on another blog (No Via Crucis in 2020 ) this has been an unusual Holy Week in Philippines, in general and our community in particular as we try to deal the the covid19 pandemic. In our province, we are under what is being called an Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ). Churches have been closed for several weeks. Holy Week began without distribution of palms on Palm Sunday. No Maunday Thursday observance and of course, no Via Crucis on Good Friday. This was the first Good Friday Via Crucis I've missed since moving to Sibulan.

Coincidentally, even our idea to watch The Passion of the Christ was not quite like we'd planned. We have a copy of the film on DVD which I purchased in the U.S. several years ago. While not exactly a family tradition, we do watch the film on the occasional Good Friday. We wanted to do that this year.

Even after a few moves, I was able to locate the DVD faster than I expected. Around 8:00 PM last night, my wife, my son and myself gathered by the PC to view the film. Unfortunately, the DVD hasn't held up. There's some sort of damage and we were not able to view it.

We still wanted to watch the film and I began looking online for an option. My first choice was a search on Netflix, but the film is not available. Youtube wasn't even an option. The film is under copyright restrictions so Youtube won't allow anyone to upload the film to their website.

Still, we were not completely without options. There is a Russian website (OK RU) which I visit to watch films. Being a Russian site, copyright laws are merely suggestions. The site has quite a few copies of the film. In The Passion of the Christ , the characters speak the languages common to Jerusalem at the time of Christ, so subtitles are important for those of us not fluent in Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic. We were unable to find a version on OK RU with English subtitles. Arabic - yes, Russian - likewise, but no English. In the end, we choose a version that had no subtitles what so ever. Our family is sufficiently Catholic, however, to understand the story without necessarily understanding the spoken language.