FACT-CHECK: Carmelite nuns of Jaro, Iloilo did not watch ‘Maid in Malacañang”

CLAIM: Carmelite nuns of Jaro, Iloilo watched “Maid in Malacañang”

RATING: FALSE

Vincentiments, the Facebook page of film director Darryl Yap, claimed in a post that two Carmelite nuns of Jaro, Iloilo watched his controversial film “Maid in Malacañang.”.

This is FALSE.

No less than the Carmelites of Jaro, Iloilo posted on their official Facebook account that the sisters in the photograph are not members of their community nor are they professed members of the Carmelite Order.

The nuns also stressed that they “do not support any distortion of Truths, fake news and people who are using us for their own gain.”

The Discalced Carmelites of Jaro, like the Discalced Carmelites of Cebu, are cloistered nuns who do not go out of the monastery to watch movies. 

Only a select few can go out, like the prioress (the superior of the monastic community) and the extern sisters who are “engaged in the external service of the monastery in order to allow the cloistered nuns to maintain an entirely contemplative way of life.” 

According to Article 182 of the Constitution of the Discalced Carmelites, the extern sisters are the only ones allowed to leave the confines of a monastery so they can fulfill their unique vocation of meeting the “external requirements of the monastery” such as paying the bills, purchasing goods and groceries, and other similar tasks.

The Iloilo Metropolitan Times, in a Facebook post, identified the two sisters in the photo, wearing brown habits, as members of the Missionaries of St. Therese (MST) of the Child Jesus (MST) in Pavia town, the same town where the news organization operates.

Earlier, the Carmelites of Cebu denounced the film for implying that they were playing mahjong with a woman in yellow, alluding to the late democracy icon, former President Cory Aquino. 

Monastic nuns do not play mahjong as a form of recreation. The nuns also denied that they were playing mahjong with Aquino when she sought shelter in their monastery during the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution.  

Cebu Gov. Gwen Garcia, whose mother frequented the Carmelite monastery to pray, and the Conference of Major Superiors in the Philippines, also came out in support of the nuns. – Rommel F. Lopez

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