Parian Parish was never Jesuit
As the fiesta of Barangay Parian, Cebu City nears (June 24), talks of it having hosted a Jesuit-run church is again making the rounds -- even among the supposedly in-the-know crowd.
When the Kaguikan sa Parian Foundation, Inc. was being formed in time for the Philippine Centennial in 1998, we, the trustees, were aware of the misconception.
As descendants of Cebu City's "Leading Families" before 1898 based on the list published by memoirist Concepcion Gantuangco Briones in her book Life in Old Parian, we had the moral duty to set things right, and we did; but this was before the Internet Age came upon all of us.
To iterate, the misconception that the old and long-gone Parian Parish was Jesuit was the unfortunate error of the legendary and otherwise excellent historian of the Jesuits of the Philippines, Fr. Horacio de la Costa, SJ.
We could only surmise that de la Costa's book, The Jesuits in the Philippines: 1581-1768, did not have all the facts in at the time of its publication by Harvard University Press in 1961. Nobody is infallible.
It is clear, however, in the treatment of later historians like Dr. Michael Cullinane, Dr. Resil Mojares, and Miss Fe Susan Go, that the Parian was only proselytized by the Jesuits from the mid-1590s to about 1600.
By the time Parian's church, the Iglesia de San Juan Bautista, was erected in 1614, it was the seculars of the Cebu Diocese that ran it.
The Parian Church - had it still existed - would have been 400 years old this October, and the secular order would have had the honors.
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