Vision Told Him How to Atone : Philippine Killer Does His Penance Yearly on a Cross

MUNTINLUPA, Philippines —  Before he found God eight years ago, Gerardo Calubag had already killed at least three people, stabbed dozens of others and ended up on Death Row.

Then came the vision one night in 1980 while Calubag was asleep in his cell at the maximum-security New Bilibid Prison in suburban Manila, a concrete warren full of those who have been involved with illegal weapons, drugs and street gangs. The vision was of the eye of God atop a pyramid, Calubag recalled Friday, and it “beckoned to me to change my life.”

“On that very morning, I went to church, knelt down and asked the Lord for his instructions,” he says. “It was then that I saw the crucifix in my mind. That was the word of God telling me to follow in his footsteps, to follow the example of Christ.”

And so on Friday afternoon, as on every Good Friday for the past six years, Calubag carried a 20-foot-long, 50-pound wooden cross through the prison compound for more than an hour. Then he lay still on the ground as fellow inmates pounded 4-inch nails through his hands and feet and hoisted him into the air on the cross for a quarter hour in the broiling sun.

Although neither officially sanctioned nor encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy in the Philippines, human crucifixion and self-flagellation remain Easter weekend institutions in Asia’s only nation with a Catholic majority.

“Part of the reason is our macho male culture,” noted one Filipino Catholic priest, who asked not to be named.

For Calubag, who has spent the last 20 years of his life in prison, his past sins form the only motivation for his annual penance.

“This is a very private moment,” the 43-year-old inmate, known as Ranger, told a reporter.

Perhaps more than Calubag’s 3,600 fellow inmates, Diomides Dador, prison security chief, knows how radical the inmate’s transformation was. Dador, who describes himself as a born-again Christian, recalled that when Ranger arrived, “he was the worst--one of the baddest inmates we’ve ever had. He killed three inmates, stabbed many others. My God, we hardly knew what to do with him.”

Calubag was sentenced to death for the killings, but his fate remains uncertain as Congress debates whether to reinstate the death penalty.

The change began when Catholic missionaries started a Bible study course in the prison in 1979, and Ranger, a poor fisherman’s son and street tough, read the Bible for the first time.

“I realized my mind was filled with only anger and hatred,” he recalled. “It wasn’t working right. When I found God and he taught me how to repent for this, my mind became clear.”

Since his last crucifixion in 1987, Ranger has taken a wife, Virgie, who winced as she listened to his description of what it would feel like Friday afternoon to have his hands and feet nailed to the cross.

“I feel no pain,” Calubag said calmly, smiling. “In a way, it feels good. I feel contentment and peace with myself.”

Sitting beside him in his tiny cell, Virgie Calubag confided, “I am nervous to watch it.”

But when the 15 minutes on the cross ended and the bloody nails were being carefully removed by fellow inmates, she said it had been no more painful for her to watch than it was for her husband to endure.

“In a way, I liked it, too,” she said. “I feel proud. I love his devotion.”