Augustinian Recollects: 400 years in Cebu!

Today is a historic day for the Augustinian Recollects in the Philippines. For me, I know them as our fathers running the former Colegio, turned University of San Jose-Recoletos (USJR) as I am proudly an alumnus of the CSJR, where I got my Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (BSBA) way back in 1972. But 400 years ago, 13 Augustinian Recollects left Sanlucar de Barrameda in Spain and boarded the vessel Espiritu Santo in February 1606, passed by Mexico and landed in the shores of Cebu on the 12th of May 1606. Since then, those who came here never left. In fact two thousand more priests came to Cebu to bring the Good News of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ to the people of this archipelago.

If we are Catholics today, it is due to the sacrifice (why don't you try crossing the Pacific Ocean on a sail boat so you'll know how hard it is?) of the Augustinian Recollects, who served God so far and away from their home country. A great number of these priests have adopted Cebu as their host country and have fought their battles to keep Christianity alive in this part of the world. Almost all of them are buried in Cebuano soil.

I have always believed that in the early 1600s, Moro marauders would come and pillage the various villages of Cebu Province. The existence of the so-called "Bantayan sa Hari" (the Watch Towers of the King) are mute testimony to this fact. No doubt, there were several skirmishes or pitch battles between the Muslim marauders and Filipino Christians who fought and died for Christ. Unfortunately, if these battles were recorded, they must have been lost to time. Only the watchtowers that dot the eastern seaboard of Cebu are the silent witnesses to these would-have-been historic battles between two of the world's greatest religions.

Today, the Augustinian Recollects are still with us, fighting a different battle, one against creeping relativism that seeks to marginalize the Catholic Church, while the other is our constant battle against poverty of which we firmly believe can be won by better education. Perhaps because we've had the Augustinian Recollects for so many centuries here in Cebu, they have become a part of them, as we are a part of them.

Indeed, a huge majority of Cebuanos (as much as 90%) are Catholics and all this can be directly traced to the 13 Augustinian Recollects who evangelized our ancestors. This is why I have always maintained so proudly that the first Christians in Asia spoke Cebuano, not Tagalog or its sub-dialect called Pilipino! Thus in case we already forgot, allow me to thank the Augustinian Recollects for the 400 years of their service to the Lord and to the people of Cebu and the Philippines. Like their battle cry, we say, Adelante!

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That the annual population growth of the Philippines has gone down to 1.95 percent last year as proclaimed by the National Statistics Office (NSO) should be good news to those who continue to believe that our huge population is the cause of our poverty. But in truth, the world's population is now declining, and this is due to the pro-abortion policies of many nations, including the acceptance of gay marriages, which produces no heirs.

While this piece of news coming from the NSO is not yet alarming, let me point out that in Russia, no less than Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has already made this a national issue the other day… that the Russian population has declined so much… the government is scared that few Russians would care to join the military to defend their homeland.

A case in point is Singapore, which used to control its population, understandably because they are an island nation. But their population has declined so much that the Singaporean government is giving out big incentives for couples to have more than one child. The more children for them, the better for their country. Unfortunately, huge families were unwelcome in Singapore 30 years ago. Because of their population control policies, however, now they have realized that all that was a big mistake.

Once again, the Catholic Church is correct in condemning abortion, which happened by the millions or billions in China when they adopted their "one-child" policy, which I would like to believe is still in force today. Two years ago, when I was in Beijing, I got this information that often, men from the poorer provinces of China would come to the cities and kidnap even the prostitutes working there because there were very few womenfolk to marry in the provinces. With today's technology of finding out the sex of your child at a very early stage, those wishing for a boy end up aborting the female fetus, thus worsening an already worse situation of too many boys and no girls.

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