Santo Niño: Hope of the people

CEBU, Philippines - We have the gift of survival because we have in our midst the "hope."

Fr. Jonas M. Mejares, rector of Basilica del Santo Niño, reiterated this in his January 3 homily to remind us that this year's celebration of the feast in honor of the Holy Child is hoping on hope, and anchoring that hope on the Santo Niño.

The Santo Niño too had his share of survival. Had his burnt image not been uncovered in a scorched area on what is now the Basilica, we could have lost the essence of our veneration.

We knew the image could have come from Flanders (northern portion of Belgium). We learned from our deeply devoted grandparents that it was miraculous. History told us it was a gift to Rajah Humabon's chief wife, Humamay.

Accounts had it that the Santo Niño - the one handed over by Magellan to Queen Juana (the now baptized Humamay) - was found by Spanish mariner Juan de Camus on April 28, 1565 in a pine box among ruins of a burnt house (where the basilica stands today).

Camus, a sailor in Miguel Lopez de Legazpi's fleet, found in a modest house of the then village of Cebu the image of the Santo Niño, which at the time all agreed had been brought from Europe.

Deeply impressed by this finding and aware of its significance, Legazpi ordered an official inquiry. A document was drawn on May 16 of the same year and said to be still extant in the archives of the Santo Niño Convent of Cebu.

Testimony of eyewitnesses had it that the image was found inside a small pine box, preserved in almost perfect condition. It had on a little shirt and a cap. Two of its right hand's fingers were raised in a gesture of benediction, while the left hand held a globe symbolizing the world.

Aside from surviving the burning of a community - a tribal defense mechanism to ward off invaders, the image was found unscathed after a bomb fell inside what is now the Basilica during the Second World War.

Lately, the image survived a magnitude 7.2 temblor that devastated a portion of the church, including its belfry.

It was Legazpi who instituted a fiesta to commemorate the finding of the image, and although the original celebration still survives, Pope Innocent XIII moved the celebration to the Third Sunday of January to avoid conflict with Eastertide. This is why the feast is already on its 449th year (using an ordinal count, per advice of historian Ka Bino Guerrero, meaning you have to count beginning 1565 as the first year, and not 1566 unless it's an anniversary celebration).

In 1980, the Cebuano historian Domingo M. Estabaya (or DM) already expressed an assertion that only the image of the Holy Child in Cebu has survived among all the images brought to places that later became Spanish colonies.

Estabaya writes that when Francisco Pizarro invaded the Inca lands of Peru, Bolivia and Chile in 1527, Pizarro also had those images. To quote: "Peruvians, to this day, do ritual dance to their object of mass devotion, usually the Holy Child. It is not unlike our sinulog, . . . but their original image did not survive to this day."

He adds: "Even the Holy Child images brought along by other conquistadores and missionaries to North America and other parts of the world did not last to this day. Only the Holy Child in Cebu has alone survived, so that it has earned the sobriquet: Santo Niño de Cebu."