A group of some ten women stood away from everyone else in a corner of the church as Sunday Mass progressed in San Lorenzo parish, in the hilly tourist district of Loakan in the Philippines.
The women belonged to the Igorot tribe in Mountain Province, a landlocked province in the Cordillera Administrative Region. They looked reluctant to speak with other members of the congregation even after the Mass was over as they were not comfortable conversing in English or in the popular Tagalog language.
They said they would live to participate in things a bit more but have been left with the sense that they do not really fit in.
“We tried to join several parish activities before but we were never voted or even nominated as members of the parish pastoral council. I think those seats were reserved for those who are rich and be of more use to the church in a material sense,” said Manang Trining, who spoke for the group.
The isolation that the Inibaloy people feel in parishes is reflective of their social exclusion within the Church itself and wider society, their leaders say.