The other Sto. Niño

(First of 2 parts)

There are persistent stories that the Sto. Niño de Cebu was not found right at the basilica that bears the image’s name now but in Pasil.

Led by an important crop of heritage buffs and writers, especially the renowned D.M. Estabaya and Manuel Enriquez dela Calzada, this view decided that the image was found where the church of San Nicolas now stands. Now a barangay of Cebu, San Nicolas was for a long time a separate town often called Cebu El Viejo (Old Cebu) to differentiate it from the new Cebu (initially called Villa San Miguel) developed by the Spanish conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legazpi in 1565 out of the old burned settlement of Raja Tupas. The latter roughly corresponds to where Plaza Independencia, Magellan’s Cross, Colon Street and the estero of Parian are located.

Astrid Sala-Boza, a scion of the old Spanish Sala family in Cebu and a doctor of anthropology, has carefully studied this controversy. In 2006, she published her findings in the “Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society,” the social science journal of the University of San Carlos. I would like to share with readers some of the more important tidbits in her splendid work titled “The Contested Site of the Finding of the Holy Child: Villa San Miguel or San Nicolas (Cebu El Viejo)?”

How did the controversy begin? Apparently, it started with an interpretation of a line in the “Relacion de las Islas Filipinas” by the Jesuit Pedro Chirino (first published in 1604, English translation in 1904-1913) on page 181-182 that states: “Each year it (referring to the image) is borne in a procession from the church of St. Augustine to the spot where it was found, where a chapel has since been erected.” The church of St. Augustine is no other than the basilica today, which, for the longest time during and even after the Spanish period, bore the name of St. Augustine, and not Sto. Niño.

The late D.M. Estabaya saw this line and in 1983 wrote about it, thus starting the argument of its finding in San Nicolas: since the image was not found right at the basilica, then it must have been at San Nicolas. This has been bolstered of late by the annual reenactment of the finding carried out in San Nicolas every April 28, the day the image was found. Then Dela Calzada, a native of San Nicolas, and a prolific keeper of oral traditions there (he has published important works in Cebuano and English), even came to the conclusion that Magellan did not land near where the cross that bears his name is now found on Plaza Sugbo, but in Banawa, which was then a part of San Nicolas.

These views soon captivated even some priests who also wrote about this, bolstered even further by the annual tradition of bringing the Sto. Niño of San Nicolas to the basilica to take the place of the Sto. Niño de Cebu when it is borne in the fiesta procession, an event that will happen this Saturday.

An aside to this story, but nonetheless also a piece in the controversy, is another historical view that Sto. Niño was found not where the basilica is now but right at the Cebu Metropolitan Cathedral. Sala-Boza cites the Augustinian prior Juan Medina and some unnamed Augustinian priests who say that the church was built in a place other than the site of the finding since that site was now in the grounds of a major church, what would later become the Cathedral.

These then are the supporting factors that evince the possibility that indeed the finding of the image was elsewhere. But is this correct? In next week’s column, I shall write in detail the findings of Dr. Sala-Boza.