THE CALASIAO Church remains standing to this day after going through natural disasters until 1990 when a powerful magnitude 7.7 quake struck northern Luzon and sent the church tower falling on the street. RAY ZAMBRANO/INQUIRER NORTHERN LUZON
CALASIAO, Pangasinan—Msgr. Luis Ungson was at the convent of the Saints Peter and Paul Parish Church here when the earth started shaking around 4 p.m. of July 16, 1990.
The priest ran upstairs to check on his elderly aunt. They rushed out of the convent to the church’s patio. The nearly minute-long earthquake seemed to last forever, and when it stopped, a large section of the 27.3-meter-high brick tower, famous for serving as shelter to Spaniards during the American invasion, is scattered in pieces on the road below.
Ungson said he was thankful that the section of the tower fell when no one was around the area “or many would have been crushed by the tower and at least five huge bells that also fell into the street.”
The Saints Peter and Paul Parish Church was one of the historical structures heavily damaged when the earthquake struck northern Luzon 23 years ago. The baroque structure’s façade was cracked and the 10 posts that held its roofs broke and tilted.
Church closed
“We had to close the church,” said Ungson, who has since retired. “We held Masses at a vacant lot of the town government for months,” he said.
The 1990 earthquake was not the first calamity to rock the 425-year-old church established in 1588 by Dominican missionaries. Records showed the church was burned during the Palaris Revolt in 1763 and was again hit by fire in the early 1840s and 1852. Earthquakes in 1890 and 1898 also damaged the church.
Ungson said rebuilding the church after the 1990 earthquake posed a problem.
“As the parish priest, I faced a big challenge: Where to get the fund to restore the church and the tower into their original glory,” he said.
But miracles do happen, he said. A parishioner handed him a check for P25,000 and other donations started pouring in. Soon, a fund-raising activity was in full swing and the restoration work was started.
Tree trunks
“First, we put tree trunks to prop up the church’s posts so the roof won’t collapse while we hold Masses inside,” Ungson said.
He said a structural engineer, Rudy Mencias, helped in the restoration.
“We fortified the brick posts by surrounding them with steel bars and concrete. Then I looked for photographs of the tower, making sure that the design, look and measurement were same as the original,” he said.
The tower was rebuilt using hollow blocks because adobe bricks, the original material, were hard to find. Two of the bells were not reinstalled in the belfry and are now displayed in a corner of the churchyard.
“The restoration was a slow process, and each post was done as funds arrived,” Ungson said. The new tower and the church were inaugurated by then Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Oscar Cruz.
Ungson retired in 2001 after 20 years as parish priest of Calasiao and left the church he served in its “good, old condition,” something he is proud up to this day.
“You can’t deny that churches are our heritage, with our forefathers investing their blood and sweat to establish them. It is our duty to keep them in their original, glorious state,” he said.