| The underside of Sto. Niņo's odyssey |
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HISTORY is often told from the viewpoint of the dominant class. And domineering Tacloban City remains mired with this burden as it celebrates the 114th edition of its June 30 fiesta in honor of the Sto. Niņo.
Tacloban's version of the odyssey of its Sto. Niņo image has been told through generations. Folklore has it that the original fiesta of Kankabatok was celebrated on the third Sunday of January, the regular feast day of the Child Jesus. Kankabatok was the name of Tacloban when it was still a barrio of Basey town across the San Juanico Strait.
However, a series of extraordinary events altered this tradition.
In 1888, plans were afoot for an elaborate fiesta in 1889. As part of the preparations, the image of the Sto. Niņo was brought to Manila for some retouching and change of vestments. Unfortunately, the boat carrying the image back to Tacloban caught fire at sea between Mindoro and Romblon.
To save the ship, the crew threw out some cargoes, including the crate containing the image. Without the image, the fiesta for 1889 was not celebrated as scheduled.
Luckily, the crate was retrieved by local fishermen off Mindoro and eventually shipped to Tacloban. Its arrival on June 30, 1889 was met with much jubilation and was claimed to have miraculously controlled a raging cholera epidemic there.
Thereafter, the people of Tacloban reset to June 30 the date for them to pay homage to the Sto. Niņo.
Unfortunately, there is a shady underside of the folklore, one that has yet to be fully told. We refer to an obvious act of frontal thievery of a religious icon away from its rightful owners.
The late Justice Norberto Romualdez's "Sto. Niņo han Tacloban" or Imelda's "Sto. Niņo de Leyte" does not belong to both places. The image originally belongs to the Buscada Church, at the present entrance to the poblacion of Basey, Samar.
To the uninitiated, the Buscada Church is a long-neglected and crumbling coral stone structure with a Jesuit-inspired faįade, catacombs for walls, and a cemetery for its yard. It is presumably older than the present church of Basey, a mammoth structure with a Franciscan-inspired faįade that overlooks the town from the top of a hill. (The Franciscans replaced the expelled Jesuits in Samar in 1768.)
Tacloban's folklore suggests that the parishioners of Buscada meekly gave up their religious icon in exchange for a smaller one.
We seriously doubt this patronizing claim, which looks like a barefaced yarn. Indeed, we suspect that a lot of animosities beclouded the transfer of Buscada's image to Tacloban.
There is a documented parallel somewhere.
Dr. Bruce Cruikshank, in his doctoral dissertation on Samar, wrote about the 1882 Dapdap Incident. That event was a civil unrest (that required military intervention) associated with the decision of a Spanish Franciscan priest to transfer the poblacion and church altar from Dapdap (the Jesuits' old church site) to Tarangnan in Samar.
The same Franciscan policy was probably also enforced on Buscada in favor of Tacloban. And since Basey's poblacion was already in an ideal location, it was the Jesuit-favored Sto. Niņo image that had to be banished in favor of the Franciscan's San Miguel de Arcanghel as the town's patron saint. And this could have caused unrest among the Baseynons, similar to what happened in Dapdap.
We doubt that Tacloban's Sto. Niņo image will ever be returned to Buscada Church. After all, powerful takers do not run out of excuses to hold on to their sacred loot.
Like the thieves of the Bells of Balangiga across the Pacific Ocean, or of the Marcos loot closer to home.
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