Religion: On the Luneta

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Bells & Whistles-No other church on earth has the taste for pomp of the Roman Catholic Church, or possesses such a world-wide organization geared to deck a city with yellow-&-white flags, provide a week-long demonstration by happy, enthusiastic masses. The Committees of the 33rd International Eucharistic Congress included even a Committee on Bells & Whistles, and last week when the Conte Rosso ploughed into Manila Bay all the bells in the city, all the craft in the Bay, including 15 "floating hotels" for Congress pilgrims, set up a prodigious din while 25,000 Filipinos cheered on the Luneta, the city's spacious waterfront park. Welcomed by Manila's Archbishop Michael J. O'Doherty, Mayor Juan Posadas, and the pious Vice President of the Commonwealth, Sergio Osmeña, Papal Legate Dougherty wept happily. Although many U. S. Catholics consider him a self- possessed, even arrogant man, his voice choked when he presented to Archbishop O'Doherty the Pope's gift to the Congress, a gold ciborium. For, as all the Philippines well knew, the arrival of the Cardinal was the homecoming of a churchman who had once labored there as missionary.

Obispo v. Obispo Maximo, Sixty years ago Dennis Dougherty ("Dinny" to his parents, Patrick and Bridget, Irish immigrants) was a schoolboy of grimy Girardville, Pa. who spent his vacations as a breaker boy in the coal mines. At 14 he passed the entrance examinations for St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Overbrook near Philadelphia. Told he was too young to enter, he spent two years in a Jesuit College in Montreal, returned to St. Charles, was admitted to the same class he would have joined in the first place. In 1885 Dennis Dougherty went to Rome's North American College where he took his doctorate, was ordained a priest. In 1903 Dr. Dougherty, who had become professor of dogmatic theology at St. Charles, was offered the bishopric of Nueva Segovia in the Philippines. A hasty search of maps in the seminary failed to show where this diocese was, but Father Dougherty said: "I will go." Nueva Segovia turned out to be north of Manila, with nearly 1,000,000 nominal Catholics, and Dr. Dougherty did not need to be told that his job would be difficult if not dangerous. The reason: Gregorio Aglipay.

Five years older than Bishop Dougherty, Aglipay was a shock-headed Filipino who had entered the Catholic Church because the priesthood seemed to offer material advancement, had organized a band of volunteers after the Spanish War, fought the U. S. under Rebel Aguinaldo. Battening on Philippine hatred of the Spanish, and of the landowning, predominantly Spanish clergy which the Vatican had sent to the Islands, Aglipay founded an Independent Philippine Church, with himself as Obispo Maximo or head bishop. When Bishop Dougherty arrived, Bishop Aglipay claimed to have won over most of the Philippines' 7,000,000 Catholics, was clamoring for custody of all the Catholic Church's Philippine property. This matter was partially solved when the U. S. paid the Vatican $7,200,000 for its lands, William Howard Taft, civil governor of the Islands, simultaneously suggesting that it might be wise for the Church to send some U. S. bishops to the Islands.

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