The quincentennial celebrations in 2021 will be about the “faith” that Filipinos have embraced, not colonialism.
This was Caloocan Bishop Pablo Virgilio David’s immediate response to President Rodrigo Duterte, who on Friday questioned why the government needed to pour in resources for the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christianity in the Philippines in 2021.
David, vice president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, pointed out that Filipinos have long embraced Christianity as a gift despite the fact that it was first introduced to the islands by Spanish colonizers.
“The mere fact that we eventually repudiated colonial rule but continued to embrace the Christian faith even after we won the revolution could only mean that the natives did not equate Christianity with Colonialism. At some point, the faith that they had embraced was no longer alien to them. It had succeeded in taking root on the fertile ground of our innate spirituality as a people,” the prelate wrote in a Facebook post.
David cited the influential work of Reynaldo Ileto, “Pasyon and Revolution,” which showed how the chanting of Christ’s suffering during Holy Week “had inspired our heroes to offer their lives for the redemption of our country—at the cost of their own blood, sweat and tears.”
David said Filipinos were “intelligent enough to accept what was good and reject what was evil in what the Spaniards had brought with them when they came to our land. They also eventually learned to distinguish between the missionaries who had totally allied themselves with the colonial politics of the conquistadores and those who were critical of it, those who had the courage to defend the rights of the natives against the abuses and cruelties of the colonial masters.”
“Let us therefore make it clear: what we will celebrate in 2021 is not colonialism but the Christian faith that the natives of these islands welcomed as a gift, albeit from people who were not necessarily motivated by the purest of motives. God can indeed write straight even with the most crooked lines,” he said.
In Cebu, a province in the thick of preparations for the quincentennial as the site of the planting of the cross of Ferdinand Magellan in March 1521, President Duterte again lashed out at Catholicism.
“Why would I give something for the celebration?” he said. “When Magellan came here, he brought the cannon and the cross. But because the cross is there, the natives immediately embraced them.” (PressONE.ph)