The Epistle

The birthplace of President Gloria’s dad has so inspired the Kapampangans again because his daughter is our head of state. An offshoot of such pride is that the Holy Angel Academy has courageously lifted Pampanga’s educational system with the establishment of the Juan Nepomuceno Center for Kapampangan Studies. The university president Bernadette Nepomuceno has initiated efforts to retrieve, preserve and process materials of cultural and historical value, and make them accessible to the general public. As its director Robert P. Tanlique would say, an appreciation of Kapampangan heritage and contemporary art and culture could inspire the search for the truth in his province.

Holy Angel looks forward to handling workshops for researchers, artists and cultural workers and students. A library containing rare collections awaits anyone and a little theater for theatrical and musical genres and panel discussions was built for year-round plays or exhibits. As the once governor of nearby Tarlac, I had done this before and it gave the artists of Central Luzon a home to meet, draw and exhibit. But Bernadette went a step further by hiring a French geographer, Jean Christophe Gaillard who finished his dissertation in France on the Mt. Pinatubo Aetas. Jean speaks fluent Tagalog and sounds like a bird when he speaks Kapampangan just like the Aetas.

Bernadette has fielded her staff to document traditions, folkloric expressions and oral witnessing to historical events in Pampanga. The center’s staff are busy as bees in organizing historical societies, providing technical assistance to local researchers and sourcing funds for significant research work. Perhaps they would prove or disprove what Fr. Francis Colen, SJ wrote in 1660, which I accidentally saw in Blair and Robertson, Vol. 40:

"It is probable that the inhabitants would come to Borney immediately from Sumatra, which is a very large land quite near the mainland of Malacca and Malayo. In the midst of that great island of Sumatra there is a large and extensive lake whose marge is settled by many different nations, whence according to traditions, the people went to settle in various islands. A Pampango of sense (one of these nations) finding himself adrift and astray there through various accidents (and from whom I learned it), testified that those people of (Sumatra) spoke excellent Pampango; and wore old-time dress of the Pampangos. When he questioned one of their old men, the latter answered: ‘You Pampangos are descendants of the lost people who left here in past times to settle in other lands and were never heard of again.’"

There goes a challenge so tedious to embark on – are the Kapampangan-Pampangos from Sumatra?

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For now, Prof. Lino Dizon is an example of a promise fulfilled by the Nepomuceno Center even if the recipient is a resident of Tarlac. Holy Angel has published his translation from Kapampangan to English of Fr. Fernando Garcia’s diary, a Spaniard who wrote his diary in Kapampangan. His diary is about being taken hostage (kidnapped!) by the Philippine revolutionary soldiers, having been left behind by the last Spanish ship bringing Spaniards out of the Philippines. Fr. Garcia as a captive was "hauled across rivers and mountains in Luzon (doesn’t that sound like what the Abus do to their victims in Mindanao) by vengeful Filipinos who were being pursued by determined Americans! And history isn’t supposed to repeat itself!

Prof. Dizon titled his work An Epistle of a Friar-Prisoner, 1898-1900. Maps and illustrations enrich his well-produced book, a fitting first publication of the Juan D. Nepomuceno Center for Kapampangan Studies.

Reviewed by John N. Schumacher, he had this to say:

"This small book may be said to have two authors: Fr. Fernando Garcia, parish priest of Macabebe in 1898, who wrote the Kapampangan original, published by the University of Santo Tomas Press in 1900 as a pamphlet of 22 pages; and Prof. Lino Dizon, head of the Center for Tarlaqueño Studies at the Tarlac State University. Prof. Dizon has not only supplemented the Kapampangan original with an English translation, but written as well an informed and interesting context for its story."

Fr. Garcia’s "epistle," as Prof. Dizon perceptively categorizes it, was written to his flock shortly after his arrival in Manila... It is a small history of the painful journey of the friars taken prisoners in various parts of Luzon by the Revolutionary Army, and for 18 months forced to travel, a good part of it on foot and with many sufferings, to Sabangan (today part of Mountain Province), where with the coming of the Americans to Cervantes (in Mountain Province), they were able to escape and make their way to Vigan and Manila.

Unlike other such accounts, there is relatively little recrimination at the atrocities inflicted on the friar prisoners by some of the brutal barbarians who, as in all revolutions, managed to get positions of authority from which they abused their prisoners. Though he condemns some of the worst tortures, from which some friars died, he minimizes his own travails, concentrating rather on the charity shown him and others by numerous unknown Filipinos, weeping at the sight of the friars being so treated, and even risking their lives to give food or even a few centavos to relieve their plight.

Thus, the epistle is more of gratitude and concern for his people than a condemnation of what he had suffered. Later, Fr. Garcia would return to work in various parishes of Pampanga until shortly before his death in the monastery of San Agustin in 1924. He left behind a considerable number of books in Kapampangan, both published and unpublished.

Prof. Dizon has written a scholarly as well as interesting account of the whole episode of the friars’ imprisonment. Basing himself on Spanish, Filipino and American sources, he has provided us with a relatively brief but comprehensive survey of the friar-prisoners’ experiences, which transcend the limits of Fr. Garcia’s own story. It will be useful to all historians of the revolution, and is an incisive refutation of the textbook stereotype of "Filipinos’ hatred for the friars."

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Thank you and amen, Fr. John. I have interacted with Spanish friars from my alma mater, University of Santo Tomas and San Agustin College of which I belong to the Board, and found them determined and patient, underweight and simple unlike Jose Rizal’s Fr. Damaso and Fr. Salve. I have seen how homesick they are in spite of 35 years in this second country of theirs and unable to go home to Spain even when family members die because their duties and their vow of obedience keep them in the Philippines. Mabuhay sila!