Butuan marks 487th anniversary of ‘First Mass’

BUTUAN CITY – With more scientific evidence to prove that the first-ever Catholic Mass in Philippine soil did happen here 487 years ago, historians, the private sector and the city government commemorate it today at the Buod promontory.

A giant cross was built here to mark the first Mass officiated by Fr. Pedro Valderrama, chaplain of the Spanish expedition team headed by Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, on March 31, 1521.

This August, the National Historical Institute will reopen the case lodged by the Butuan City government and the local private sector on their claim that the first Catholic Mass was held here, and not in Limasawa, Leyte, where a landmark touting the historic event was built in the 1970s during the Marcos regime. The late strongman’s wife, former First Lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos, hails from Leyte.

From the 17th to the 19th century, foreign historians, particularly from Europe, considered the Mazaua islet here, now Barangay Pinamangkulan, as the place where the first Mass was held in the Philippines, said Greg Hontiveros, president of the Butuan Historical and Cultural Foundation Inc.

A local historian, Hontiveros authored two books – “Butuan in Thousand Years,” published in 2004, and “A Fire on the Island,” which bared a supposed breakthrough in the study on the controversy over the country’s first Mass.