Town's mystery

In Bohol, this entire month of May, every day is fiesta. This is a religious tradition practiced and handed down from generation to generation. Although it has increasingly evolved in some aspects, its religious and cultural essence remains unchanged.   

Every time I chance to go to Anda, Bohol, be it semestral break or summer, going to the public cemetery is one of the things I don't have to miss. As if the visit to this place is incomplete. And going to the cemetery is just as deficient without visiting a chapel that is a common knowledge among townsfolk and popular for pilgrims-the chapel of Inday Potenciana.

For so many years that this chapel has been drawing flock of devotees, oftentimes truckloads of them, just to have a glimpse of her in a glassed topped tomb.

Year after year, her story has been featured in newspapers and even in national and international documentaries. But why such great command of media attention? For the faithful, because of her "saintly" life and the supposed healings she has done after it. That is why for them she deserves to be a saint. But for so long years, I have not heard of any effort by the church of recognizing her as a saint. If there were, I'd like to assume, these didn't prosper.

Born in Anda on 19 May 1927, after getting her teacher's degree, Potenciana Saranza was teaching in one of the elementary schools in Misamis Oriental. One day, while hitching a ride on a logging truck due to the shortage of transportation, the truck had an accident and caused her death.

Through dreams, after nine years of having been buried in Gingoog City, Potenciana asked her family and relatives to have her body brought to Anda. While at first they dismissed this, it was during a family reunion that her family and relatives were able to talk about it and found out that they had similar dreams.

Believing that because of her religiosity and piety, her body has remained intact and uncorrupted despite having died in 1953! This account and among few others that the present generation can refer to are just very limited that we can't profoundly trace her story as a daughter, as a teacher or even as a private citizen. Or do we still have significant stories about her? Because every visit, the story stays the same and no additional information or accounts about who she was.

But because she is believed to be a good person and that her body, for so many decades, remains uncorrupted, this they believe has a religious or supernatural explanation. And because there are accounts of healing, people continue to hang on to their faith. Indeed faith is or can be attributed to inadequacy or absence of available reasons. So they still flock to her chapel.  

With the small town's booming local tourism industry, this phenomenon has become an integral part of the town's unique story, as people continue to venerate her and so for their faith of the power that they can derive at.

Though Inday Potenciana was not acknowledged or declared saint by the Roman Catholic Church, which is a long and winding process, but devotion to her revived in Bohol and other parts of Mindanao. For the hundreds of thousands who make the pilgrimage to Anda each year, she is a saint. In fact, her devotees visit to pay their respects as well as to buy oil and candles. They offer prayers and ask favors which many attest to have been granted.

Unrecognized by the religious authorities as a saint, devotees and believers have never ceased to venerate her.

So the mystery lives on.