It used to be one of the beautiful places of worship in Samal Island, but on September 14, 1964, the Peñaplata Church, a Catholic edifice, was razed to the ground by a dawn fire that lasted only two hours. The mystery surrounding the blaze remains...
Then known as Hobangon, the settlement of San Jose de Samal, founded in 1882, was described in Jesuit letters as ‘the crown of thorns’ on account of the difficulties the priests had to face before achieving a peaceful arrangement with the Moros and the natives...
Father Pablo Pastells, S.J., co-founder of the Caraga mission, after his November 1887 reassignment to Manila to assume as vice superior of the Jesuits of the islands, opened a communication channel with Dr. Jose P. Rizal, the national hero who was then exiled in Dapitan....
Named after the hometown parish where Spanish conquistador Jose Oyanguren y Cruz was baptized, San Pedro Church, now a metropolitan cathedral, figured in two of the bloodiest postwar attacks, attributed by the media to religious strife between Christians and Muslims. On Easter Sunday, April 19, 1981,...
Conversion to Catholicism in the last decade of Spanish rule in Davao was intense, with the pagan natives and the Moros living in remote areas as primary targets. In Mati, the evangelization efforts netted more than what the missionaries expected. Fr. Juan B. Llopart, S.J., reporting...
In Samal, there’s a clan that carries the surname Uyanguren. The family name, however, has no genealogic relations to Don Jose Oyanguren, the conqueror of Davao City but ac-quired as a result of baptism assigned and entered in church records as official surname of the...
Two decades after the Americans took over the district of Davao—an event that also led to the arrival of American Protestant preachers four years later—the surviving Roman Catholic parishes organized by Spanish missionaries remained under the care of the Jesuits. Cartas y Noticias Edificantes de la...
The Spanish priests, authorized to appoint civil officials, also assumed the role of assigning names or appellations to missions they opened and helped sustain. The usual practice was to honor places in Spanish where the assigning cleric was from, especially when there were similarities in...
When the steamer Labuan arrived in Davao on March 9, 1899, to fetch the remaining Jesuits who were ordered to leave town on orders of the head of the congregation in Manila, it had just come from the Pacific coastal missions of Mindanao for the...
The late Jesuit historian Fr. Jose Arcilla, in his preface to the six-volume ‘Jesuit Missionary Letters from Mindanao,’ wrote: ‘One of the problems the Jesuits to contend with was the strong influence of the Muslims. Being strategically located, they were a force to reckon with. Occupying...