345. SAN ROQUE : Patron Against Pandemic and Pestilence

SAN ROQUE, Invoked Against Pandemic

 In these, the pandemic years, no other saint has been heard more often than SAN ROQUE as his name is included in the Oratio Imperata, specifically composed for  covid-19.

SAN ROQUE (“St. Roch” in France and “San Rocco” in Italy) was born in Montpellier, in southern France, near the end of the 13th century. It is said that Roch bore a vivid red birthmark on his chest, shaped like a cross. His father, a governor of Montpellier, as well as his mother,  died by the time Roch was 20, leaving him to fend for himself in Europe during the time of the Black Death, the plague which killed an estimated over half of the European population.

SAN ROQUE distributed his inheritance among the poor, gave the governorship of Montpellier to his uncle which he would have inherited.  With his few personal possessions, he headedfor Italy. In his journey, he encountered cities stricken by the plague. In Aquapendente, a village in Italy, he ministered to the plague-stricken citizens, healing them with the sign of the cross. He moved on to Cesena, Rome, Mantua, Modena and Parma,  curing people along the way.

DELICATELY PAINTED FACE OF SAN ROQUE

SAN ROQUE soon caught the plague himself; and like a “self-quarantined” patient in today's COVID-19 crisis, he sought a sanctuary, where he could be in prayerful solitude. A dog miraculously appeared to bring him food and sustenance every day. Surviving the plague, he chose to return to his France, but was imprisoned instead, as he was dressed like a pilgrim. He died after 5 years, but his identity was revealed when the cross on his chest was uncovered; he was given a holy burial. 

In 1414, when the city of Constaza, Italy was hit by a plague, people were called on to pray to SAN ROQUE for healing.  After their petitions and processions, the plague miraculously stopped.

This representation of the santo, in wood and ivory, depicts him as a pilgrim with his dog by his side. The head and hands are of fine ivory, classically carved, and outfitted with glass eyes. His boots are painted on.

SAN ROQUE, with original metal accessories

The saint is iconically posed with his right hand lifting his tunic, and his finger pointing at the festering wound on his knee. The other hand holds his original pilgrim stick in brass, with a metal flask tied on top.

The tunic and cape have been replaced using the original tattered garments as pattern for the new outfit, all re-created by Dr. Raffy Lopez. 

SAN ROQUE’s faithful canine companion is shown on his right, with bread in his mouth. The seated dog is made of painted wood. At first glance, the Angel –his other iconographic element—seems to be missing. 

Usually, the Angel is present bearing a scroll that proclaims the saint as the patron of pestilence victims, to be invoked for protection and relief  from their illness. However, a close inspection of the base shows no traces of nails or dowels that could have anchored the small figure on the base to complete the tableau. 

THE HEALING POWER OF SAN ROQUE

However, there are many representations SAN ROQUE that show him Angel-less, with just a dog for his companion. Besides, the reference to the Saint’s healing power is already written on the rectangular, stone-topped base. In Spanish, it reads: “Los que tocadas de la peste invocoven  mi siervo Roque se libraren por su intercesion de esta cruel de enfermedad.” (Those who are touched by the plague, invoke my servant Roque, and, through his intercession, you will be freed by his this cruel disease)

This SAN ROQUE was possibly made in the 1930s, as it came with a gothic-style wooden urna popular in the era. I have a special interest in the saint as I lived at the San Roque Rectory of the San Roque Church in Blumentritt, Sta. Cruz, Manila, the church that my late uncle, Msgr. Manuel V. del Rosario founded in 1958, and which he served until his retirement in the 1980s. 

309. A PRIVATE COLLECTOR'S TREASURE-TROVE OF SANTOS

In one of the exclusive villages in Makati is the residence of a private collector--an academician,  translator, author and professor, who has cultivated a taste for fine Philippine antiques. A fellow Kapampangan, I met this getntleman at our cultural study center, which attracts many scholars of history and cultural heritage workers like him. I had the privilege of being invited to his home, where I had a peek at his modest collection of local sacred art. These are mostly santos that run the range from folk to classical, simple to ornate, wood to ivory. Just look at the treasures that his house holds: 

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 A small, ivory Nino with a dressed manikin body, and housed in its own urna.This must have been a part of a Holy Family tableau.

 A folksy trio representing the Holy Family. The heads and hands are made from carved bone. The santos have primitive bodies with wire armature arms. In their original embroidered satin dresses.

 A very small polychromed Bohol Virgin with a replaced ivory head and hands, standing on a cloud base carved with cherubs. It is housed in an equally colorful urna.

 This is a large Santo Nino, darkened and reddened with age. Outfitted with glass eyes, it has a clownish expression and the carving style has a distinct folksy feel.

 I helped the collector acquire this beautiful  3-foot image of the Immaculate Conception by introducing him to an office mate whose fiance's family once ran an antique shop in Greenhills that has since closed down. Despite the crack on the body, the carving of this figure, and its original encarna, are superb.

 A wooden, painted icon of the Holy Trinity. It is painted on a thin, wooden board. Bohol provenance.

 This century-old processionl head of a Cristo for an Agony in the Garden tableau is an outstanding piece, finely carved with details like the high cheekbones, exposed teeth, deep nostrils, and the fine strands of hair on his beard,

 Crucified Christ rendered in ivory, hangs on a hardwood cross outfitted with silver accessories: cantoneras (finials), YNRI, rayos, Christ's potencias, and tapiz. Ot is housed in a glass dome (virina).

 A primitive Sacred Heart of Jesus. The moonface-figure has very little details as seen from the simple drapes on his vestment.

 Another wonderful example of a polychromed Virgen from Bohol enshrined in her own nail-less urna or altar, painted with still-vibrant colors.

 A forlorn-looking Christ the King figure seated on his thrown, missing a scepter and a crown.Such figures are enthroned in family homes, often in the living room.

 Sleeping Santo Nino in ivory. prized in many Filipino homes, Heirloom Nino Dormidos are often passed from generation to generation.

 A naif carving of San Isidro Labrador, patron saint of farmers and laborers. This small santo,with its trademark polychrome painting,  comes from Bohol.

A well-carved crucifix, with the corpus of Christ in wood. The dead Christ wears a silver loincloth, and his head sports silver tres potencias and a crown of thorns. The end finials of the cross plus the YNRI, are all made of silver.

300. MY FIRST SAN ROQUE

San Roque (St. Roch of Montpellier)-- along with  San Vicente Ferrer, San Isidro Labrador, San Jose--are perhaps the most popular santo devotions in the early days of our Christianization, this, based on the abundance of images carved in their likeness.  San Isidro was a natural choice for an agricultural country, while San Jose, well, he was Jesus’ father. The winged San Vicente was known as an “angel of the Apocalypse”, and angels, too,  appear in the iconographies of  San Vicente and San Isidro Could it be our fascination with heavenly winged messengers  that drew Filipinos  closer to these saints?

A more plausible explanation was that our islands and its people were prone to widespread epidemics. The cholera pandemic that killed a million people in Russia hit the Philippines in 1858. The great cholera epidemic would happened again in 1882 and from 1902-1905 that claimed over 200,000 lives.  In the course of time, we have had severe outbreaks of  smallpox , typhoid fever, malaria and tuberculosis.

Our Spanish colonizers, in order to facilitate their evangelization, introduced us to San Roque, his life and his works---how he ministered to the sick in plague-ridden Italy, until he got ill himself. He retreated to a cave where a dog came to bring him bread for sustenance, and licked his wounds that healed them. After his death, an angel was said to descend from heaven, holding a tablet which he laid on the head of the saint. On it was written a prayer, which declared that anyone who calls on San Roque will be spared from  any pestilence.

Because of this, the friars urged the Filipinos to invoke the saint against epidemics and “peste”, cholera, most specially.  People also dropped down on their knees to appeal to San Roque to cure their skin ailments, relieve the pain of bad knees, and keep their dogs healthy.

I can’t even remember what particular shop I brought my first antique San Roque. I do know that I got it in the early ‘80s from one of the stores in Mabini Art Center, then one of the ‘antique’ enclaves of Ermita. I paid exactly Php 170 for this primitive folk example,  which came complete, although its head seemed to have fallen off and then reattached at some point. I guess this was why I got it for that bargain price, as you can get a perfect set back then for Php 300.

The 12 inch., rather thin San Roque stands on a plain, rectangular base, adding ¾” of an inch more to its height. His head sits askew on its shoulders; I had thought it was due to the bad restoration, but I had the head properly re-attached since, and it seems it was really carved with an awkward tilt. The saint’s eyes are bulgy, the beard full, and the mouth is wide.

Wearing a pilgrim cape and a short tunic, San Roque is shown lifting the hem high to reveal the wound on his left knee. There is quite a distance between his pointing finger and the location of the wound though. Note also how rough the folds of the tunic are carved,

He holds a staff with his right hand—I lost the original staff when one of his fingers broke—the one that secured it in the first place. What he now holds is a replacement fashioned from a bamboo barbecue stick. In place of a carved water flask, I just hanged a tiny metal bell.

The unimpressive angel—carved from a narrow piece of wood—stands 7 inches, and no longer has its tablet. It could have been made of tin, on which a native ‘oracion’ would have been handwritten. The native dog has broken one rear and one front foot, but  it has still the ‘pan de sal’ firmly between his teeth.

I have kept this San Roque for some thirty years—unappealing it might be—primarily for sentimental reasons. I bought it at a time when I had the audacity to start a relatively expensive hobby, while struggling to make a living.  The thought of acquiring better quality santos was farfetched from my mind, I had no choice but to buy only what I could afford—often the headless, armless, imperfect ones--the kind Mabini dealers regularly pass up. In all those years that I’ve had San Roque with me, I have neverbeen visited by any pestilence nor  afflicted by a malady of the serious kind---except perhaps, antique addiction!

288. SANTO SIGHTINGS IN TIENDESITAS ON A RANDOM DAY, 2011

VINTAGE STA., VERONICA Processional Santa.

When Tiendesitas, a shopping complex located within Frontera Verde in Pasig on 26 Sep. 20015, it was met with much hoopla. After all, it was envisioned to be a budget-friendly shopping destination (“tiendesitas” means a cluster of little shops), with specialty “villages” that sold fashion, native food, pets, plants and other novelties.

VINTAGE STO. SEPULCRO

Of course, for santo collectors, the opening of the “Antique Village” was a welcome section of Tiendesitas, another happy-hunting ground for antique santos, all in one location.

VINTAGE CRISTO DE LA PACIENCIA

Indeed, the early list of shops that could be found there included well-known names like Sarimanok (Henry Wee), Laong-Laan Antiques (Yanga), Unang Panahon (Esposos), 888 Noble Antiques and Henry Babiera—who was instrumental in getting the shops together at the new shopping hub.

VINTAGE RESURRECION

The shops did not disappoint, as the prices were relatively reasonable (the shops were not air-conditioned and the location—along C5—was then considered very far). But when access and generation of traffic became major issues, the shops started to close—and the “antique village” shrank in size to give way to more lucrative businesses.

NEW IVORY-FACED MANIKIN SANTOS

Tiendesitas deteriorated to the point that the antique shops were reduced to a handful. Eventually, as the area became more developed commercially, Tiendesitas was upgraded by the developers in 2014, adding buildings, second-level shopping places, escalators and airconditioning. The business climate improved with its relaunch and today, Tiendesitas has 450 traders from all over the Philippines.

ANTIQUE SAN VICENTE FERRER IN URNA

However, the same cannot be said of the antique shops. The dwindling supply of quality items forced more closures and for the remaining shops to carry lower-quality antiques and reproductions—a sad statement that the glory days of the Philippine antique trade is really gone.

ANTIQUE SAGRADA FAMILIA IN URNA

In March 2011, a few years before its renovation, a walk around the antique village of Tiendesitas yielded these santo offerings from select shops still operating in the complex.

ANTIQUE SAN YSIDRO & SAN ROQUE

VINTAGE STO. ROSARIO IVORY

ANTIQUE IVORY PURISIMA

ANTIQUE STO. ROSARIO, now in R. Lopez Collection

ANTIQUE BONE SAGRADA FAMILIA IN VIRINA

OLD INMACULADA CONCEPCION

282. HOMETOWN BLUES AND 'APO TIAGO', by Blanche David-Gallardo

by Blanche David-Gallardo
Originally published on  @inquirer.net/ Inquirer Lifestyle/ 31 July 2016

SANTIAGO OF BETIS.

Last night I dreamt I went—not to Manderley—but to Betis again, the fiesta and holiday haunts of my youth and childhood and my father’s hometown where, like Manderley,  my grandfather’s house is “no more… ours no longer.”

At times looming larger than life, at other times dissipating like morning mist in the harsh light of everyday reality, memories of my grandfather’s Betis home float wraithlike, as ghosts from the past.

In the dim light of faulty recall, and through the idealized prism of advancing years acutely aware of time slipping away, I can still see the 19th-century bahay-na-bato, its stone front steps leading up to the wooden upper story living areas.

Branches of a giant chico tree loomed menacingly over the rail-enclosed balcony, occasionally dropping a fruit or two with a thud in the dead of night, confirming our childhood fears that indeed, kapres inhabited the tree and the nearby towering sugar mill. 

It was there we sat, my cousins and I, whiling away lazy afternoons when we outgrew childish pranks and games.

There I learned to love that magic time between day and night, the melancholy of twilight, and discovered the first stirrings of puppy love.

The balcony opens out, through double doors and carved lintel of Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) to a vast living room. To one side stood my grandfather’s bedroom, perpetually dimly lit with flickering oil lamps and votive candles.

 Velvet finery

There the family santo—Apo Tiago, St. James the Apostle— was kept in its glass case, dressed in simple cotton garment for everyday wear, until metamorphosed for delivery to the Betis church, elegant in his gold-embroidered velvet finery, wig in place, cheeks rouged to soften the pallor of its ivory face, and picked up by several groups of marching bands for town fiestas, Holy Week observances, and/or other special occasions.

Like the year waning into shorter days and longer nights, we of the twilight generation of Betis Davids rarely “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” but rather “go gentle into that good night,” notwithstanding Dylan Thomas’s poetic counsel to his father.

Once in a great while, however, we come face to face with a facet of the past—a moment of truth, as it were—that brings together present reality with fragments of ourselves that we have long lost, like pieces of a puzzle recombining to form a whole picture.

One such occasion came for me more than a decade ago. On the eve of the of Betis district fiesta, when a handful of us cousins, remnants of the David clan from the line of my paternal grandfather Pedro Lampa David, came together for a brief, and largely impromptu, family reunion.

The group included my London-based sister Marita, who was in town for the holidays with her Canadian-born husband and their daughter Teresa, and numerous US-based cousins, home for the holidays and the town fiesta, and to attend the wedding of a nephew. 

As well, there were those of us who, like me, were living in Manila or in Pampanga, many of us no longer carrying the David family name by virtue of marriage.

The reunion was held at the home of a cousin who, through the years, has maintained her residence in Betis, at precisely the spot where our grandfather’s house once stood.  The ancestral home is long gone, as are the once extensive family land holdings.

Erratic memories

Only erratic memories remain, along with larger-than-life perceptions of the elegant four-foot-tall ivory and wood image of the town patron saint—Apo Tiago—around which the remaining generations of our branch of Betis Davids found an inspiring rallying point.

We are all, they say, a product of nature and nurture. Nature is what we are born with—the genes we inherit from our parents and ancestors. Nurture is the superimposed layer upon layer of post-natal forces that help shape us as individuals— the milieu and culture into which we are born and raised, and the attitudes, views and influences that color our world view and continue to evolve and transform us through the years.

In our instinctive search for individual identity, we forget— and sometimes deliberately reject—the roots of our “nurture” which, paradoxically, has the power to draw us back precisely to the point of our true identity as an individual.

Spared from the devastation of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, the municipality of Betis adjoins Bacolor, a town so totally devastated by lahar, only the church steeple and a reconstructed portion remains today as a reminder of where the town once stood.

The fact that the lahar flows stopped just short of Betis is a miracle attributed by townsfolk to the intervention and protection of the town’s patron saint, Apo Tiago. To this day, people from neighboring towns and districts borrow the image from my cousin Violeta—for years the family custodian—whenever any of the nearby towns or villages find themselves threatened by floods, or any other natural calamities.

Whether the statue, imported from Spain, was acquired by my grandfather, or by his father before him, is a matter of conjecture among us. But my generation of Davids and those immediately after us, grew up with the familiar sight of the image housed in its glass case in my grandfather’s darkened bedroom.

 Ritual

Whether we were there for the three-day town fiesta, or the weeklong Semana Santa  (Holy Week), it was the first place we headed upon arrival, to touch the hand of the image upon our foreheads, even before we greeted our grandfather and touched his hand to our forehead.

Preparing Apo Tiago for his church sojourn and the religious procession that followed, and setting him upon the gilded carrosa, decked with flowers and lights, were part of the ritual of my growing up years, an intimate portion of our life, upbringing and family traditions.

Thus it was with a rediscovered sense of belonging and oneness that, a decade ago, our assembled kith and kin awaited the marching bands that were to fetch the image from my cousin’s house and escort it to church.

Listed as a national heritage, the St. James Church of Betis is one of the oldest in the country and the only one with wooden floors.  Built by the Agustinians between 1610 and1670 in typical mission architecture, with frescoes on the ceiling, murals on the walls, and carved, gilded wooden altars and pillars, the Baroque church is also one of the country’s most beautiful.

I have often watched with a tinge of nostalgia those Italian, and/or Spanish movies depicting religious processions wending their way through narrow, winding streets, “oompah-pah” brass bands setting the funereal pace, and masses of candle-carrying devotees following hard at the heels of saintly images borne aloft on carriages, or upon the shoulders of devotees.

These are scenes straight out of my childhood, and on that eve of the San Miguel district fiesta, reality and memory came alive in what I can only describe as a “moment of grace” when we, as remnants of a now scattered branch of a Betis David clan, candles lit in the fading light, joined the marching band and the “Coraldal” dancers in escorting our Apo Tiago to the Betis church. Faith in action, glorifying the Creator through an earthly ritual.

Every few meters, the procession stopped to allow the dancers to express their exhuberance and joy before the image of St. James in a mock routine of clashing swords and shields—a reference to the mythical James who fought and triumphed over the Moors.

All along the route, people lined the streets, greeting the approach of Apo Tiago with awed reverence, or a burst of firecracker salute!  It was as I remember the event from childhood, and yet different from what I remember! I was told that my memory regarding the “Coraldal” dancers was flawed, because when we were kids, the dancers were elderly, and not the young men who perform the “Coraldal” today.

Perhaps it is only in the twilight of our years that we can appreciate—or be reinvigorated—by our half-forgotten beginnings. But I do hope that one day soon, my own children (and grandchildren) will find the time—and the inclination—to join me on a visit to Betis on the eve of a town fiesta to discover for themselves an undying family legacy that will outlive us and our generation, as it did my father and grandfather before him.

Read more: 

Hometown Blues and Apo Tiago

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