Pope’s envoy to Church forum to visit Cebu’s ‘dancing prisoners’

International Eucharistic Congress stamps released by PhlPost, as the Philippines hosts this year’s IEC in Cebu City. 
INQUIRER FILE PHOTO/ MARIANNE BERMUDEZ

CEBU CITY—The Burmese high churchman sent by Pope Francis to the 51st International Eucharistic Congress (IEC) here will visit the Youtube sensation  “dancing inmates” of the Cebu  provincial jail, IEC officials said.

Cardinal Charles Maung Bo, archbishop of Yangon, Myanmar, will also visit a vocational school in Pasil, one of Cebu’s poorest villages, said Cebu Archbishop and IEC president Jose S Palma.

The dancing inmates are known as the CPDRC Dancers, or dancers of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center. They have been performing mass choreographed dances as physical excercises since the last decade. 

Their morning exercise of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was filmed by a British TV crew and became a Youtube sensation in 2007.

No date has been set for the visit but Palma said Cardinal Bo will meet a select number of prisoners in a private audience on Jan 26.

“He will visit a detention center,” the Cebu prelate said. “He will meet a small group of prisoners.”

On Sunday, during the Mass opening the IEC on Plaza Independencia attended by 350,000 people, Cardinal Bo told the crowd, “Pope Francis loved you, especially Filipinos.”

He called Cebu “the cradle of Christianity” in Asia and praised Filipinos for being predominantly Catholic and “the light of Asia.”

Referring to the large migrant Filipino communities abroad, Cardinal Bo noted: “In some parts of the world, Catholicism means Filipino presence.”