Macabebe honors Filipino Jesuit ‘donado,’ installs marker
MACABEBE, Pampanga—Catholics in this coastal village honored on Sunday a Filipino Jesuit donado (layman) on his 400th birth anniversary, which fell on the same day as the beatification of Pope John Paul II.
The National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) installed a historical marker at the church’s ground at the request of the parish of San Nicolas de Tolentino to honor Felipe Sonsong.
The Parish Pastoral Council (PPC) here submitted the cause for Sonsong’s beatification to the Archdiocese of San Fernando after a recommendation by Holy Angel University’s Center for Kapampangan Studies.
“He’s another source of pride of Macabebe and Pampanga,” Mayor Annette Flores-Balgan said. Other notable Macabebe sons, she said, included warrior Tarik Soliman and National Artist Vicente Manansala.
Born of noble origin in Macabebe, Sonsong fought on the side of Spain against the Chinese in 1639 and in the 1660-61 Kapampangan Revolt against forced labor. He became a widower and left his property to his only son, Jeronimo, before retiring to a religious life, first with the Augustinians, at the age of 56 in 1667.
<strong>Marianas mission</strong>
Devoted to the Our Lady of Mount Carmel, for which he wore a scapular until his death in 1685, Sonsong spent 18 years of service for the Catholic conversion of the Marianas Islands (now Guam) in a mission led by Blessed Diego de Sanvitores starting 1668, research by Dr. Luciano P.R. Santiago showed.
Fr. John Schumacher, a history professor at Ateneo de Manila University, said a document in the Cartas Anuas (letters) provided “perhaps the most extensive contemporary account of the life of any Filipino before the 19th century.”
“It gives a view of 17th-century Filipino religious attitudes and practices, at least among the more Hispanized Pampango and Tagalog principales in the vicinity of Manila Bay,” Schumacher said as an introduction to his English translation of a Feb. 1, 1686, letter possibly written by Fr. Lorenzo Bustillo, one of the original companions of Sanvitores and Sonsong.
A Jesuit father, Francisco Mallari, obtained a complete copy from the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, Spain. An incomplete copy is in the care of the Micronesian Area Research Center in Guam.
<strong>Vows of missionary</strong>
“Though no Filipino is admitted to the Society [of Jesus] as a full-fledged member during the Spanish regime, Sonsong was admitted as a donado who, without actually entering the novitiate of the society, was in a permanent way committed by vows to sharing in the work of the missionaries,” a part of Bustillo’s letter read.
Sonsong, it added, was “apparently unique in several respects, not only in the fact that he was the only Filipino of whom we have records, but also in the fact that he was admitted to a kind of membership in the Jesuit community which could scarcely be distinguished from that of the Spanish Jesuit lay brothers.”
“Not only did he receive a Jesuit habit… but he is also listed in the Philippine Jesuit catalogue for 1681-1682 assigned to the Jesuit community of the Marianas mission,” went the letter.
It was when Sonsong was assigned by the Augustinians to carpentry work with the Dominicans that he met Santivores, who was moved to take in the Filipino layman.
In the Marianas, Sonsong served and behaved like a “slave,” sewing and mending clothes for the mission’s members and natives, adorning the altar, constructing churches, houses, altars and chairs in “excessive labor” and “boundless charity.”
<strong>Defender of faith</strong>
During uprisings on the islands, he took arms to defend the Catholic faith and its preachers.
Rebels caught Sonsong, then 73, on July 23, 1684, leaving him for dead after inflicting severe wounds on his throat, head and left eye. He died six months later.
“In doing well the ordinary things of every day, both spiritual and external, and of his tenacity in this regard, and in seeing other extraordinary ones which presented themselves, we have already spoken,” the letter said.
It said Sonsong lived a life of “great poverty” and “angelic chastity.”
“He seemed in every respect an angel in a mortal body,” it said.
Two men in the mission, Sanvitores and Pedro Calungsod, a Filipino from Cebu, were beatified in 1985 and 2000, respectively.
“The Pampangos of the Philippines played a major role in the effective colonization of the Marianas by the Spanish, both on the political and on the missionary fronts,” said Dr. Augusto de Viana of the NHCP in a paper published in the Micronesia Journal of the Humanities and Social Science in June 2005.
“Their role in facilitating change has often been overlooked in the traditional histories of the Spanish colonization of Guam,” he said.
