Preserving church heritage

It is always a joy to listen to someone who knows what he is talking about and at the same time does not take himself too seriously. Listening to the lecture of Father Milan Ted T. Torralba was one such experience.

Father Torralba referred to himself as “just a priest” but his assignment at the Diocese of Tagbilaran is just one of his posts. He is a canon lawyer. He wrote a dissertation on church heritage. He is also the assistant secretary of the Apostolic Nunciature in the Philippines and the executive secretary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines Permanent Committee for the Cultural Heritage of the Church.

He was invited by the Heritage Conservation Society last Saturday to talk about the Agreement Between the Holy See and the Republic of the Philippines on the Cultural Heritage of the Catholic Church.   The Agreement was signed last 17 April 2007 and entered into full force on 29 May 2008 with the exchange of instruments of ratification between the two State Parties.

“How does the Church understand its own heritage?” Father Torralba started his lecture by describing what role heritage played in the Church. In the controversies surrounding renovations and repairs done in colonial churches, the side of the priest is rarely heard. News accounts, I admit, usually demonize the priest and the other people involved in those projects and accuse them of neglect, having bad taste and other wrongs. 

Father Torralba pointed out that churches are expressions of faith and they serve as privileged means of catechesis and evangelization. “God, if you save me, I’ll buy you a candle as tall as the electric post,” went a joke I heard when I was a kid. Listening to his talk made me realize that some of the controversial renovations and repairs (such as attaching a grotto to the façade or painting a retablo gold) could have been rooted in the desire to express faith and not out of a malicious desire to destroy or deface heritage.

He gave his theories on why Philippine church heritage is not well-preserved, among them, the end of the Spanish royal patronage when funding for building and maintaining churches was halted, the relative newness of the issue of cultural heritage (it is not a subject taught to Philippine seminarians), the emphasis on the social apostolate, the separation of Church and State becoming the norm, the “Disneyfication” of Filipinos, the mystification of tourism as end-all and be-all, and the misinterpretation of Vatican II. These are thoughtful observations and I agree with him when he said that education is an important solution to the problem.

In an article he wrote for a magazine, Father Torralba pointed out that about eighty percent of built heritage in the Philippines consists of church heritage. Given this number, I am hopeful that the Agreement will be instrumental in preserving Philippine cultural heritage. The National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines are in the process of finalizing the details on the implementation of the Agreement. These should include a harmonization of Canon Law and Philippine civil laws on cultural heritage and a procedure for resolving conflicts on church heritage. 

The room at the Army and Navy Club where the lecture was held was filled with heritage advocates and enthusiasts who had a lot of stories to tell about their sad experiences with the Catholic Church with regards heritage. One has resulted in litigation which remains pending with the Court of Appeals. 

As expected, a lot of questions were asked about what they could do to preserve church heritage, including how they could have a priest removed from their parish. Father Torralba was very candid in discussing the procedures under Canon Law for filing complaints and appeals against priests accused of not preserving church heritage. While the information is helpful, I hope less adversarial solutions will be used to resolve present and future conflicts.