‘San Pedro Calungsod’

Almost a dozen years after he was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2000, Blessed Pedro Calungsod is set to become the second Filipino saint after San Lorenzo Ruiz de Manila. Through a unanimous vote, the cardinal-members of the Holy See’s Sacred Congregation for the Cause of Saints determined that the 2002 recovery of a woman, who had been clinically dead for two hours, was a miracle attributed to the intercession of Calungsod, to whom her doctor had reportedly prayed. Now, Beato (Blessed) Pedro Calungsod will soon be “San Pedro Calungsod.”

What’s the difference between a Blessed and a Saint? The Spanish Dominican historian Fr. Fidel Villarroel, the most prolific saint-maker in the Philippines who did the “positio” or historical legwork to have Lorenzo Ruiz canonized, explains that beatification is “a declaration of the Church that a dead person, judging from his or her heroic life, is proposed to Christians for local veneration or limited cult as a model of virtuous living and as an intercessor and advocate for them before God.” While a miracle is needed to be attributed to a person who died naturally and is proposed for beatification, no such miracle is needed for a martyr. Martyrdom automatically elects the martyr to the beatitude of heaven. Beatification is expected to lead to canonization, in which the cult of the blessed is widened so as to include the universal Church. Therefore canonization means a wider veneration for Calungsod.

Notwithstanding the prospects for a wider—and more universal—veneration for Calungsod, we should not miss out on the fact that he hailed from the local, from the Visayas, in fact, where three provinces and ethnic groups claim him as their own—Cebu, Bohol and Iloilo.

It is only right for the Visayas to finally have a canonized saint; after all, Christianity is older there than in Manila by nearly half a century. The head start was provided in 1521 when Humabon and his people welcomed Magellan and the Spaniards and underwent Christian baptism; his wife was re-christened after Queen Juana of Spain and received for a gift the image of the Holy Infant of Jesus—the Santo Niño. What happened between the time the remnants of Magellan’s fleet left to return to Spain in what became the first circumnavigation of the globe and the time the Spaniards, led by Legazpi, came back to the Philippines in 1565 is what Nick Joaquin calls as “the most tantalizing period in Philippine history.” Upon the Spaniards’ return, they found the image of the Santo Niño in an altar among several anitos, perhaps the first recorded evidence of folk Catholicism.

Today the Santo Niño of Cebu, together with the Santo Rosario of Peñafrancia, La Naval de Manila and Manaoag shrines, is the biggest Catholic devotion in the Philippines. The fact that the devotion has spread from Cebu to Manila (witness the Santo Niño feasts every January in Tondo and Pandacan) should indicate the catholicity of popular Catholic liturgy and religious pilgrimage.

Too often, Catholic feasts have been derided by liberals and secularists as a waste of time and resources. But Joaquin and another National Artist for Literature, the late Alejandro Roces, defended the fiesta as an “accurate barometer of progress” and the engine for nation-building. Fiestas, after all, celebrate the milestones in a community. “With births, marriages and deaths recorded, Filipinos began to see themselves as historical beings,” Roces writes. “The town was the nation in embryo. This explains why the Filipino word of town, ‘bayan,’ is also the word for nation. The Filipino saw his nation as just an expansion of his hometown . . .” Similarly, Europe became Europe because of the ancient annual great pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela of Spain.

The examples of Calungsod and Lorenzo Ruiz should indicate that the “hometown” has grown to embrace as well the globe. Both of them earned the palm of martyrdom abroad—the latter in Japan, the former in what’s now Guam. They may as well have been the first Filipino OFWs! And although they died with clerics (Calungsod with the Jesuit Fr. Diego Luis de San Vitores, and Lorenzo with several Dominican friars), they were laymen, an indication of how Christianity had really taken root among the Filipinos. Their martyrdom having sown and watered the seed of Christianity elsewhere, they’re veritable ambassadors and embodiments of the catholicity of the Catholic faith. They’re the Philippine Church’s gifts to universal humanity. They make us proud to be Filipinos and Christians.