Magellan shifts again from being missionary back to being his mercenary self, playing the patron to Humabon and insisting on his port tax-exemption in exchange for an empty promise to fulfill Humabon’s political ambition to reign supreme over his fellow chieftains, including the insubordinate Lapu-lapu of Mactan. Soon Magellan’s hubris brings him to his nemesis, when he gets deceived by the treacherous gift of two goats from the other chieftain of Mactan, Rajah Sula. And his overconfidence leads him to a trap that makes him fall tragically in an ambush on April 27, 1521. Soon, even the Malay slave Enrique, who used to serve as their loyal interpreter, would turn around and become their enemy. He would turn from a facilitator of dialogue to a reinforcer of conflict when the survivors refused to grant him the freedom he claimed he deserved after the death of Magellan, his master.
TREASURE IN EARTHEN VESSELS
How accurately Paul has expressed it in his second letter to the Corinthians, “We hold this treasure in earthen vessels, so that it may be clear to us that its surpassing power comes from God and not from us.” (2 Cor 4:7) The treasure of the Christian faith came to us through the earthen vessel that was Spain and its own unique brand of Christianity in the 16th century, which was both noble and ignoble, sublime and treacherous, missionary and imperialistic. The bearers of the icon of the Cross of Christ soon also brought with them another cross, the cross of colonial rule, which we eventually repudiated. We found the reason to throw away this cross of oppression precisely because we embraced the true cross of liberty, the cross of redemption, the cross of God’s unconditional love, the cross that gives us human beings our true dignity as sons and daughters of God.
SIFTING THE GRAINS FROM THE CHAFF
We therefore look back and say to ourselves, despite all the pain that we have had to go through, we will forever be grateful for this cross. After all, we received the Christian faith as a gift, not from Spain, but from God—albeit through these flawed but well-meaning Christians from Spain and Portugal. And since we count it as grace, we also presuppose that God knew well enough to endow our ancestors with the intelligence to accept what was good and reject what was evil in what the Spaniards had brought with them. We must humbly admit though, that, humans as we also are, we have obviously not always succeeded in that endeavor.
It took centuries for our ancestors to be able to discern the mixture of mercenary and missionary spirits in all the human and earthen instruments that served as bearers of the precious gift of the Christian faith. Eventually, they also saw the difference between those who came as true shepherds and those who acted as wolves in sheep’s clothing, those who truly cared for them and those who were cruel and abusive to the flock entrusted to their pastoral care.
Here we are, five centuries later, we continue to learn to sift the grains from the chaff. But the fact that we continued to embrace the Christian faith even after we rejected colonial rule must mean that our ancestors did not equate Christianity with the treacherous economic and political agenda of the colonists. At some point, the faith that we had embraced was no longer alien to us. It had succeeded in taking root on the fertile ground of our innate spirituality as a people, with our own unique gifts and charisms from the one Spirit that we received at baptism.
THE NEXT FIVE HUNDRED YEARS
The true reason why we prepared for 2021 was the Second Plenary Council that happened in 1991, whose 20th anniversary we celebrated in 2011. It was after that celebration that the CBCP decided to launch a nine-year preparation dedicating each year to a particular theme: Year of Faith (Integral Faith Formation) for 2013, Year of the Laity in 2014, Year of the Poor in 2015, Year of the Eucharist and the Family in 2016, Year of the Parish as Communion of Communities in 2017, Year of the Clergy and Consecrated Persons in 2018, Year of the Youth in 2019, Year of Ecumenism, Interreligious Dialogue and Indigenous Peoples in 2020, and Year of Mission in 2021.
We have also resolved in the CBCP to commission a research in partnership with the Research Center of the historic first Catholic University in Asia, the University of Santo Tomas, in order to get us to understand the Present State of Catholic Christianity in the Philippines. We hope to be able to discuss the result of this extensive research work in our next plenary assembly, hoping that it would serve as a good basis for deciding as a Conference, whether or not it is opportune to call for a Third Plenary Council of the Philippines, that would set our missionary agenda as a Local Church in the next 500 years ahead.
We therefore enjoin all our faithful to actively participate in our simultaneous commemoration of the First Mass celebrated in our country on Easter Sunday, April 4, 2021. Let it also be the occasion for the opening of a jubilee door in every cathedral in the whole country, as well as in select Churches during the rest of Easter. As regards the commemoration of the First Baptism, aside from the national celebration on April 14, 2021 in Cebu, we enjoin all the active bishops of the Philippines to also have their own commemorations by celebrating the Sacrament of Baptism, either on April 14 or on the Third Sunday of Easter, April 18, 2021.
Let this year be a year of looking back in history so that we can understand better who we are in the present as communities of disciples, and an opportunity also to look forward in the next 500 years with the same missionary zeal that made it possible for us to receive the Christian faith. What we received without cost is also what we give without cost. Cardinal Tagle expressed this so well when he said “The gift must continue being a gift. If it is kept for oneself, it ceases to be a gift. By God’s mysterious design, the gift of faith we have received is now being shared by the millions of Christian Filipino migrants in the different parts of the world.” It is their zeal that must move us who have stayed in the homeland, to ask ourselves how we are sharing this gift—to repeat the words of the Holy Father, how we are caring “for those who are hurting and living on the fringes of life.”
For the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, on this 23rd day of March 2021,
+ ROMULO G. VALLES, D.D.
Archbishop of Davao
President, CBCP
