https://www.youtube.com/live/VMx8g-91j3g
In the closing days of the 2025 St. Francis Xavier Novena, Fr. Albano Fernandes stood before thousands in Old Goa and preached a great sermon on the visible shift in the way we celebrate and live married life. But a certain person who had a large bridal entourage that numbered twenty took it personally when there was no reason for the same. Fr. Alban did not question whether the 20 or any other number of persons who form the bridal entourage are disciplined or misbehaved. It was about how such a number stands with our Catholic values.
The people present recognized the gospel values that the sermon was pointing to, and the live video went viral, manifesting the moral recognition of the content of the sermon. Tens of thousands nodded approvingly and shared the said sermon.
It appeared that one man, however, did not. That man a few days later uploaded about a four-minute Instagram video that has since ricocheted through Goan Catholic groups. The video declares war on the priest’s contestation of worldly display and grandeur. Discipline was never an issue. Unfortunately, the man concerned reduced or confused it to be an issue of numbers. The real ethical failure lies in excess itself, which smacks of grandeur and a culture of display. The man concerned thus completely missed the point of the sermon. He never leaves the aesthetic plane, it confuses ethics with a new form of discipline, and, most damagingly, it forgets that ethics is finally about values, not about headcounts.
The aesthetic captivity that is manifested is for pure digital teatr. It converts a solemn marriage into a spectacle. It makes us feel that we deserve the glare because one marries only once in life and fully deserves the attention that is manufactured through the staging of a spectacle. This is why the man concerned offers only a critique that is heavily embedded in his aesthetic moorings and forgets deeper ethical analysis. Indeed, the medium has swallowed the message in the instant it had.
The conflation of ethics with discipline has to be integrated. The content of the sermon was not about discipline alone . It was about the values of simplicity that do not convert the marriage celebration into a spectacle. It was never about control but about choice of values . Ethics, properly understood, does not stop at drawing a new boundary line; it inquires into the anxieties that push people across the old one. Most poignantly, we cannot forget that ethics is rooted in values rather than in behavioral compliance or numerical caps.
There is a deeper Goan tragedy playing out here. The bridal entourage is not just decor . It is a public ritual where an entire village (Catholic, Hindu, rich, poor, local, and NRI) comes together in shared joy. Such solidarity on the threshold of great transitions in life is common in all societies. In a society increasingly fragmented by migration and social media, such a solidarity ritual is profoundly important. Fr. Alban’s point of the sermon was not to send it into invisibility, which risks killing the togetherness we cherish the most.
A genuinely ethical approach would ask: How do we preserve the communal, embodied joy of a Goan wedding while living the gospel values of simplicity and humility? This question demands imagination, not indignation. It seems the man concerned created a monster of his misunderstanding and aesthetic orientation and killed it by scapegoating Fr. Albano Fernandes. Ethics reduced to aesthetics, discipline, and sheer arithmetic leaves us exactly where we started—horns blaring, pointing fingers at one another while the deeper gospel values that could guide us home remain unspoken. Until that conversation begins, we will keep counting heads instead of converting hearts.
