Antonio J. Montalván II .
THE date was June 4, 1935. An American Jesuit missionary assigned in Cagayan was home in the US for a few months of rest after spending ten years in the Philippines. It was not just to be plain rest. It was, rather candidly, a begging trip as well. Bishop Santiago Hayes had entrusted this Jesuit with myriad tasks that required him to raise resources normally nearly zero balance back home in Cagayan. He was, in fact, the bishop’s point man in running two shoestring schools kept more or less alive by mission funds. His name was Joseph Lucas.
That evening at the Waldorf in New York City, a dinner was tendered for Fr. Lucas “before he returns to the Islands, for the benefit of all the missions,” the photo’s caption says, in the collection of the Archives of the Jesuit Philippine Province. One of only two archival photos of the Ateneo de Cagayan when it opened 1933 in a donated house on Calle Burgos, this was a class photo of the pioneer students numbering fifteen with Frs. Lucas, Vincent Kennally and George Kirchgessner. His toughest task was to open the Ateneo de Cagayan Bishop Hayes had founded. The caption captures the cost of that toil: “Founded with practically no resources whatever, it was the tremendous energy of Fr. Lucas that made this mission high school a success. It is now an important institution in the town of Cagayan.” The dinner’s honoree was a missionary who became stellar because of a mission school that early on had reached stature. The benefactors at Manhattan had known that.
In fact, Lucas had two other equally important tasks. Hayes had earlier founded in 1928 the Saint Augustine Parochial School that in 1933 he had entrusted also to Lucas as its apostolic administrator and school director. Sister Andrea Montejo RVM was the first principal of the school that later evolved into the Lourdes School for Girls in 1934. On top of that, Lucas had also assumed the post of Vice Superior of the Jesuit Missions in Mindanao after his colleague Hayes was made bishop only a month after opening the Ateneo in 1933.
What was the import of that begging trip? The previous century’s Spanish missionaries in the Philippines did not have the pecuniary indigence of the American Jesuits. Under colonial Spain, there was the Patronato Real, a royal fund of the Spanish state that bankrolled all mission provisions. But under the church-state separation of the United States, the church had to raise funds of its own.
The American Jesuits assigned to northern Mindanao in 1926 came from the New York-Maryland Province of the order to replace the previous Spanish Jesuits of the Aragon Province. Needing repair or building were parochial churches, barrio chapels and schools. The American Jesuits mainly relied on the Jesuit Seminary and Mission Bureau, then located at 51 East 83rd street in New York City. Pictures were constantly being sent in the mail of all sorts of mission work financed by alms from American Catholics. There was the photo of the wooden chapel built in Lapasan at the cost of 500 dollars. There was the photo of the church in El Salvador built only of corrugated iron with Fr. Joseph Reith SJ asking “for prayers and financial help.” Fr. John Pollock SJ opened Jasaan’s Monahan Memorial Dispensary for the poor in 1931, averting a dysentery epidemic. Fr. Edward O’Byrne SJ wrote on May 1941 asking for boy’s clothing and girls’ dresses for first communicants in Salay. That, in summary, was how the local church under the American Jesuits subsisted.
The Jesuit Seminary and Mission Bureau was Hayes’s partner in the founding of the two schools. Where property was not donated, Hayes considered stability – aiming for purchases. Thus, the Saint Augustine Parochial School at Calle Real (today the site of the Lourdes College Auditorium) was the Jose Agudo residence Hayes had bought. Mission funds were used to buy property and build edifices. That was the job of Joseph Lucas, the raison d’etre XU Ateneo’s nearly century-old Lucas Hall that survived World War II was memorialized after its beggar of a builder.
I am making a drawn-out predicate if only to stress an essential truth – Xavier University Ateneo de Cagayan stands respectably today on the shoulders of giants who were humble beggars. In 1953, Fr. William Masterson founded the College of Agriculture and acquired Manresa in the same mixed donation-purchase mode. In the early 1960s, he began construction of the five-storey Science Center and in 1970 the center for the Southeast Asia Rural Social Leadership Institute, both financed by Misereor, the German Catholic Bishops’ Organisation for Development and Cooperation. Masterson wrote that on the SEARSOLIN center’s dedication on November 21, 1970, “the people of Germany have contributed almost 4 million Deutsche Marks to the rural development work of XU the past 8 years.”
The Hayes, Lucas, Masterson begging echoed past their lifetimes. In 1983, massive edifices for the College of Engineering and the Center for Industrial Technology (now Faber Hall) designed as architectural doppelgangers flanking a central raintree patio by Manila architect Conrad Puno, were built by ASHA – the American Schools and Hospitals Abroad. University president Fr. Ernesto Javier SJ was himself the beggar. US Ambassador and Mrs. Michael Armacost graced the inaugural.
My attention was fixed on these archival notes of XU Ateneo’s meek beginnings after reading the minutes of meeting of engineering alumni in discussions on the planned sale of the Divisoria and Manresa campuses. Attended by past dean Antonio C. Sevillano Jr., present dean Dr. Hercules Cascon and several past presidents of the XU Engineering Alumni Association, the convenors raised a question that gnaws at conscience: “What would the reaction be of these funding agencies if they learn that buildings they funded are knocked down to give way to a business center?”
“And new buildings funded from the prudent financial management of previous administrators that had not even reached their economic life will be knocked down? Was Cebu’s University of San Carlos expansion to Talamban studied as a possible model?” Flabbergasted alumni cast by Ignatian discernment are staggering for answers on a question that has not even had any impact study with data, data and data. The engineers voted hands-down No. Will their voices be heard as prescribed by the Jesuit Superior General that this is not only for the Jesuits to decide?
(Antonio J. Montalván II is a social anthropologist known for being vocal against corruption in government, human rights abuses, and matters involving indigenous peoples.)
