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Friday, March 29, 2024

The arrival of Christianity

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"The Spaniard introduced not only their religion—but their language, culture and way of life."

 

I was a first-year high school seminarian at the Sacred Heart Seminary when our local archdiocese of Palo in Leyte celebrated four hundred years of the evangelization of Leyte, which began with the establishment of the Jesuit mission in Carigara. The islands of Leyte and Samar were at first assigned to the Jesuits until their expulsion from the Spanish colonies, after which it was transferred to the Augustinians, then to the Franciscan friars. It was such an important event then, that the high point of the celebration was the mass celebrated by the pope’s representative in the country, Archbishop Gian Vincenzo Moreni, at that time, Papal Nuncio to the Philippines. The throngs of people coming from the different parishes of the region and the presence of both civil and ecclesiastical dignitaries was an overwhelming sight for a12-year-old like me who was just about to begin years of formation to the priesthood.

While I did not make it to the priesthood, the memory of that event, the personalities, pageantry and protocol instilled in me a great love for the institution that is the Catholic Church in the Philippines. The Church’s long history is intrinsically intertwined with that our own nation, and its moral and doctrinal teachings has influenced much of our social and cultural values. Its contributions to the education of the youth, the healthcare of the sick as well as its numerous charitable initiatives cannot be denied.

That explains my own personal excitement in anticipation of the quincentennial of the arrival of Christianity in the Philippines, which we will celebrate in 2021, two years from now. By then, it would have been five hundred years since the Portuguese navigator, Ferdinand Magellan “discovered” our country and claimed it in the name of His Catholic Majesty, the King of Spain. Until recently, that date connoted the beginning of Philippine history as we know it, and it was followed by three hundred years of Spanish rule, the longest period of colonial rule that Spain ever had. Those three hundred years shaped much of who we are as a nation – including making out of these many tribes, languages and islands – one of the first Westernized civilizations on this part of the globe.

But even the upcoming celebration of the quincentennial of the arrival of Christianity to the Philippines is not without controversy. President Rodrigo Duterte, with his usual staunch nationalistic rhetoric, has expressed his desire to shift the focus of the celebration away from the arrival of the Spanish colonists, and instead on the bravery of the early Filipino hero, Lapu-Lapu, the defiant chieftain of Mactan. In fact, even on the Church side, there has been some discussion on what the focal date for the celebration should be—a choice between March 31, the day of the first Easter Sunday Mass in the Philippines or the baptism of Cebu’s Raja Humabon on April 14. As a result, many of the local stakeholders, both church and government, have been on a wait-and-see mode, on the lookout for a more precise guidance as to the heart and tenor of the celebration.

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Many of those who would prefer to play down the celebration deplore the fact the arrival of Christianity to the Philippines also marked the beginning of Spanish colonial rule in these islands, and the centuries of injustice and oppression that followed. But to say that the quincentennial mean is no more than just the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores is to have a poor, if not flawed, understanding of the historical, political and economic significance of this episode in our nation’s history.

The truth that cannot be ignored is that—with the arrival of Christianity came about the birth of Philippine civilization as we know it. It is often said that if the Spanish came later by a few decades, Islam would have been a dominant religion, at par, if not more than Catholicism. Without the Spanish colonists, these seven thousand islands would have become one nation, and we would end up becoming a loose alliance of barangays, sultanates and rajanates, much like the islands that made up the Federation of Malaya before the British forced them into becoming modern-day Malaysia. If the Spaniards did not come, Tagalog, Bisaya and other Filipino languages would sound just any other variant of the Bahasa of Malaysia and Indonesia.

But Spaniards did come, and by planting the cross on our soil, they also introduced not only their religion – but their language, culture and way of life. They established cuidades and pueblos and taught the Filipino people not only the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, but also the arts, agriculture and sciences. They established schools and universities, for which reason Manila is home to the oldest university in Asia, the more than four-hundred-year-old University of Santo Tomas. They taught our forebears how to cultivate crops such as tobacco, cotton, sugar and cocoa, industries that until to our time are at the core of our agricultural economy. They did not only planned cities and towns, they built roads, bridges, forts and aqueducts. While abuses and injustices during that time are of historical record, little attention is given to the fact that the Spanish government reformed the nobility and the indigenous class system and outlawed slavery in the country, thanks to the consistent prodding of the early Catholic missionaries, in contrast to how other colonial powers actually encouraged or to say the least turned a blind eye to the slave trade or at least exploited the existing caste system to ensure political control over the natives.

It may be unpopular a proposition, but the Spanish were among the most benign of the colonial powers of that time. The fact that they stayed for 300 years and their innumerable contribution to our culture, language and even national consciousness cannot be ignored, not even when at the end of those three hundred years, the fight for freedom began, only to be nipped in the bud by another colonial regime, that of the United States.

Celebrating the Quincentennial should encourage all Filipinos to learn how the past has shaped the past and how it will inspire our country’s future. Close to five hundred years after the arrival of Christianity, it is interesting to note how our roles have reversed. Recently, a Filipino, Fr. Gerald Francisco Timoner, OP, was elected to head the Dominican order, one of the very first Spanish Catholic missionary orders to work in the Philippines. Just a few weeks ago, Pope Francis appointed a Filipino archbishop, Most Rev. Bernardito C. Auza, who was once served as the permanent representative of the Holy See to the United Nations, to be his apostolic nuncio in Spain. Finally, millions of overseas Filipinos now fill up empty churches in Europe, from whence came the missionaries who constructed the prized Baroque churches in our country.

The failure to give the Quincentennial the focus, fanfare and funding that it requires is not only a huge opportunity loss for tourism and heritage development, it is will also result in a grave historical injustice to the fact that without that fateful event in 1521, Philippines would not become the nation that it is now, and we would not become the people that we are today.

After all, as Filipinos of Las Islas Filipinas, our people bear a name that will for always immortalize the memory of Spanish king.

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