Sto. Niño Devotion

Fr. Leo Pabayo

WE recently had the celebration of one of the most popular devotion to Our Lord among our people, namely, the devotion to the Sto. Nino. Our thinking about this should start with an appreciation of the basic truth of our faith that God became human in the person of Our Lord Jesus Christ. From the Gospel we learn that his humanity began when he was conceived in the womb of the Blessed Mother. This conception already teaches us that God reveals in the newly conceived humanity of Christ how he greatly values the start of human life in the womb of every mother.

This beginning of that humanity of Christ tells us also how he already has begun the work of our salvation in the womb of the Blessed Mother as evident in the words St. Elizabeth, said to Mary in the Gospel on the Feast of the Visitation. In the Gospel according to Luke St. Elizabeth said to Mary “Whom am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me? The moment your greeting sounded in my ears, the baby stirred in my womb for joy.” The many images done by holy artists on the child Jesus do reveal, I believe, their own joy in realizing that the work of salvation began in the humanity of Christ very early in his human life.  The initial experience of the saving presence of the Christ child in Nazareth by other friends and relatives of Mary must have already been a saving influence on them.

There must have been a very profound insight or even mystical experience among the saints who meditated on the humanity of Jesus as a child that was akin to the experience of Elizabeth during her association with Mary only in the occasion of Mary’s visitation and stay with Elizabeth.

Something of that experience must have been imbibed  by the many of the simple faithful who celebrate the feast of the Christ child through the centuries like the one we are familiar with in the Philippines particularly Cebu. This must have some similarity to the devotion to this image that came to develop in Spain and later in Prague, Chezchoslovakia.  This was shared by the Augustinians with our people when they came with Magellan to our shores.

The devotion to the Christ child was widespread in Europe around the time that Magellan came to the Philippines. Among those who were recorded to have this this devotion were St. Francis of Assissi and San Antonio de Padua at earlier times and later with St. Teresa of Avila in the 16th century. Later in the 19th century, St. Therese of the Child Jesus adopted her name or was given her name because of her spirituality that focuses on the childhood or childlikeness of Jesus.

An appreciation of the history of this devotion of the saints ought to make us pause and think that there is more to this devotion that we ordinarily associate with the Sinulog. The development of this devotion was in fact praised by Pope Benedict XVI himself during the crowning ceremony of the image of the child Jesus of Prague.

According to Fr. Bernad, if I remember right, the devotion to the Sto. Niño celebrated with the Sinulog that he knew was associated from the Negritoes. Whether the start was this was in Cebu or the Panay provinces that Fr. Bernad was referring to I do not remember now. But the Negritoes were known to be the first inhabitants in the Philippines. I speculate that it could be that because of the hostility of many Bisayans and other lowland settlers in their first encounter with the Spaniards, including the Spanish missionaries that, the preaching of the Gospel first found ready acceptance among the simple and childlike peoples among the Negritoes in the mountains before it found its way among the Bisayans.

Among the other things that are revealed in the episodes in the life of Jesus as a child is stated in the Gospel when the Evangelists wrote that Jesus as a child was subject to his parents in Nazareth. This tells us how God wants every child to learn to be the kind of person that God wills him to be by learning obedience to his parents. What he has learned as a child he will carry on as these formed him to be like the God-Man that Jesus is in the Gospels.  This happened because he fully lived his life as a child from whence he started to learn the truth about being human without being affected by the prejudices and wrong ideas about what it means to be human as he was growing up with Mary with the help of Joseph. If we relate it to what some contemporary theologians have been saying about the growth in consciousness about himself, it was this innocence that gradually led to  his discovery of his being the only Begotten Son from all eternity sent by the Father for the salvation of the world.

Let me to just conclude this homily by saying that I believe that all those things that transpired in the life of Jesus as an infant and then as a boy and a young man growing up were revelations to us of how as humans and children of God, we ought to live our lives beginning from our childhood with the innocence of children. It seems to me that it is when we learn first to be a child like the way that Jesus was a child that we can grow up to be the kind of adult that Jesus was who never lost his child like quality by being obedient to God the Father.

(Fr. Leo Pabayo is a member of the Roman Catholic order Society of Jesus.)